SPN FIC - Legend (Part Ten: John and Dean)
I'd heard whispered bits of the story since I was a kid. Just after Halloween, back in '83, the demon Azazel had crept into the nursery of a baby boy, intending to drip blood into the child's mouth and turn him into demon spawn. But Mary Campbell was waiting for him. She had a gun a stranger had brought to her family ten years before: a gun that could kill anything. She used it to kill Azazel that night. Saved her child. Then she disappeared.
Legends are told in bits and pieces, spread by word of mouth over the years. This is the story of Mary Campbell's family: the husband to whom she told the truth of who she was. The son who grieved the loss of her so deeply that he spent half his life on the road alone, searching for her. And the son who found success, and love, and peace ... until things went a little bit sideways.
Part One: Dean and Jo
Part Two: Dean, Sam, and Jessica
Part Three: John and Deacon
Part Four: Missouri and Pamela
Part Five: Sam and Dean
Part Six: John, Mary, Dean and Sam
Part Seven: Dean and Pamela
Part Eight: Deanna and Samuel
Part Nine: Sam and Missouri
CHARACTERS: John, Dean, Sam, Missouri, Pamela
GENRE: Gen (AU)
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 2860 words
LEGEND
By Carol Davis
Ten: John and Dean
"He's checking the salt lines," Sam said. "Grandpa Samuel. I watched him. He's making sure all the salt lines are intact."
"Could be remembered behavior," his father told him after a moment of thought. "He might not be an active spirit, just a revenant."
"He looks like he's…agitated."
"He was always like that. Wound up too tight."
"This is - no. Not a normal state, even for somebody who's twitchy."
"Wouldn't call him that, exactly."
"He's preparing for something, Dad."
Dean's response was to gulp down the last mouthful of his after-dinner coffee, deposit the mug in the kitchen sink with a loud clunk, and turn toward the door. "Then we gotta lay in some more weapons. You two can do what you want, but I'm not sitting around any more with my thumb up my butt."
He was gone before anyone could object to that - or agree with it - and the front door thumped shut in his wake.
"He's right," John said. "Best to be prepared."
He already was; neither he nor Dean had gone anywhere unarmed for years, and they'd each come into the house with a gun, a couple of knives, some holy water and a pocketful of charms. But that was basic protection. Whatever it was that was making the spirit of Sam Campbell uncomfortable might call for something a little more specialized.
Or bigger.
Maybe a lot bigger.
He turned to the two women, Missouri first, then Pamela.
"We talked all last night," Pamela said. "We've got no idea what it is. There's a powerful sense that something has its eye on this house, but the rest of it's unclear. I can Ouija around if you like. Talk to the spirits. See if they know anything."
"Do that," John nodded.
She paused in the foyer long enough to pull on her coat, then went on outside to her car, leaving John, Sam and Missouri to linger in the living room. When Sam gestured toward the door, silently asking whether John intended to fetch weapons out of his truck, John shook his head and held up a finger: in a minute.
"I kind of hoped -" Sam began.
"So did I," John told him. "First time we've all been together for quite a while. Quiet family Thanksgiving would have been nice."
"It was never going to be that, Dad."
John reached out to his son and gripped his shoulder for a moment. It didn't do much to ease whatever regret and dismay Sam was feeling, but Sam did manage to conjure a half-hearted smile. They were home, after all, even though it was more Missouri's home than theirs these days. Still, most of the furnishings and décor were unchanged. Missouri had only shifted around a few things since the day she'd moved in.
"I suppose it'll make Dean happy," Sam sighed. "Having something to fight."
The three of them watched Dean come clattering back in, armed to the teeth. He'd chosen his weapons quickly and efficiently, something for every possible type of target, including a few items John hadn't even been aware his son owned. Without preamble, Dean began to unload it all onto the dining room table, shoving aside the dishes and silverware that hadn't yet been cleared off into the kitchen.
"You gonna do something?" he asked. "Or are you just gonna sit around and watch The Sound of Music?"
It was true: he was far more at ease now than he'd been half an hour ago.
"We got any idea of size, here?" That was directed at Missouri. "Big? Little? One? A whole herd of…whatever?"
Missouri shook her head.
"Well…tune into the psychic network or something. That's what she's gonna do," and he nodded over his shoulder toward the front door, indicating Pamela, who was still outside. "Kinda nice - have a chat with the spooks. Get the 911. Hell of a lot better than going in blind."
He was almost cheerful.
"You know what I do, Dean Winchester," Missouri said.
"Yeah, yeah. You pick up vibrations. Look," Dean told John, "if you're not gonna go arm up, I'll bring in some more of my stuff. Come on, Dad. You're back home for a couple hours and it's turning you into Ward Cleaver?"
"You telling me to get off my ass?" John asked him dryly. "That what you figure I'm doing, sitting on my ass?"
"Kinda looks like what you're doing."
John almost barked a response to that, then didn't. He let Dean go on with what he was doing: laying out his collection of weapons and ammunition, making a little show of all the fancy equipment he owned, some of it well-battered by use and some of it pristine and new. God only knew what all else he carried around in the trunk of that old car.
This wasn't what Mary had wanted, he thought. She'd made sure John understood what was out there - what her family had battled, going back at least a dozen generations - and what to do about some of it, but she'd never breathed a word about the boys following in her footsteps. She'd mentioned no timetable for teaching Dean (or Sam) how to hunt.
Here, in this house, it was easy to see Dean as the boy he'd been - a little preoccupied a lot of the time, true, but quick to laugh, interested in things other than weaponry and monsters and ways to fling himself into battle. He'd sat in this very room with Sam, playing for hours with a set of Legos, or Tonka trucks, or the toy train set he got for his sixth birthday. John remembered one winter a little later on when the boys had amused themselves for the entire run of Christmas vacation with a boxful of dominos and a deck of cards.
He could remember a boy who'd enjoyed curling up with a mug of cocoa and some cookies to watch an old movie.
Who'd enjoyed spending a summer afternoon washing and waxing his car out at the curb.
Who'd contributed gladly to making dinner for the three of them.
Now Dean was happy only if he had something to distract him from the fact that he'd spent half his life scouring the country for someone who might well be long dead; from a search that looked to have no end, because John could see no possibility of Dean settling down to anything approaching normal, even if he found the answers he wanted.
Dean's version of normal was gone, if it had ever really existed in the first place.
John's collection of weapons was spare compared to Dean's, though varied and functional. He was sorting through the lockbox in the bed of his truck when Pamela came up beside him, Ouija board tucked under her arm, and took a long look at what John had in there.
"Nice," she offered.
"Not what most women would say."
"Probably not."
"My son's looking for his mother," John said after a beat of silence. "Rufus Turner told him to go to you."
"Would it make a difference to you if I told you I don't know Rufus Turner?"
John gave her a long look. She was a tough one to figure out. She'd brayed out a laugh a couple of times during dinner, and had mentioned a fondness for Harleys and the Ramones and the occasional boilermaker, but that was nothing more than crumbs. He would have said it had to do with her being psychic - a wish to guard her own thoughts and feelings while she was being bombarded with impressions of other people. But he'd known Missouri Mosely for almost thirty years. Missouri didn't guard much of anything.
"I don't know," he said. "Should it?"
"I don't know where your wife is, John."
"Kind of figured you didn't."
"And right now you'd like to tell me to get the hell away from your house, because I don't belong here. I'm not part of your cozy little family, and if something's coming, you'd prefer to tackle it alongside people you're comfortable with, and not have to worry about an unknown quantity."
"That about covers it."
"Even though I might be able to give you something you need?"
"Such as?"
She waggled the Ouija board. "Like I said. I can chat up a few spirits. See what's floating around the grapevine. The dead love to talk."
"Seems like you do, too."
Pamela looked on past him, down the street. It was quiet down there when John glanced that way, no one visible, nothing moving except someone's dog, sniffing around the cars parked at the curb halfway down the block. "Here's the thing, John," she said. "I don't know Rufus Turner. I don't know you, or your sons. I met Missouri last night. I don't have a vested interest in any of you, or this situation. I could walk away right now and not worry about anything that's going to happen. I have a home to go back to, and a life that's got no connection to any of you. But something told me to come here, starting a few days ago. It told me to come here, now. So I did. Something, or someone, wants me here. Thinks I've got a part to play in all this. Maybe I'm just curious. Let's go with that, because I don't like being told what to do. I'll stick around because I'm curious."
"And if I tell you to get the hell out?"
"I'm thinking that would be a mistake."
"You got any clue why Rufus would send Dean to you?"
"Maybe he knew that if he told Dean to go home, Dean would tell him to go screw himself." She smiled, but there was no humor behind it. "So what's the verdict, John? Do I stay, and try to help you out, or do I hit the road?"
"You want to be here, if this goes south?"
"Like I said. I'm curious."
"Then you're also a damn fool."
"I've been called worse."
With John a couple of steps behind her, she carried the Ouija board through the house into the kitchen and set it up on the table, then settled into a chair facing the board, shook her shoulders loose and half-closed her eyes. Dean was still busy arranging his weapons in the dining room, making sure they were clean and loaded (though John had no doubt his son spent most of his waking hours cleaning, sharpening, and loading, and that everything was ready to be used) - but he kept an eye on Pamela, frowning, making it plain that he too would prefer it if she hadn't come here. Sam and Missouri watched from the living room, though the layout of the house gave them a less than complete view of what was happening in the kitchen.
John stood in the kitchen doorway, leaning against the doorframe, arms folded across his chest.
She asked the customary questions: Who is here with us? Can you tell me your name? What do you know about this house? After each one, there was a pause of a few seconds, then the board's planchette began to slide, carrying Pamela's hands with it.
Something like that could go on for a while, John figured, so he moved back into the living room and sat down on the couch with Sam. On the other side of the small room, Missouri sat nestled in the big easy chair, her head drooping a little, as if she were allowing herself to drift off into sleep.
John knew better.
"He's sorry," she murmured after a couple of minutes had gone by. She didn't have to specify that she meant the spirit of Samuel Campbell. "He's sorry he had a part in what happened to his little girl."
"He didn't," John said. "Not the way she told it."
"He wanted to be stronger. To fight that thing. He tried to break through, to tell her not to give in to it, but he couldn't."
It figured that Samuel would say that. Yes, he'd wanted to keep his daughter from making a deal with a demon; that made sense.
But the deal he hadn't wanted her to make had brought John back to life.
"He knows you tried, John."
That was new. "Tried what?" John asked.
"To take care of her. Be a good husband. Be what she needed."
"Well, thank him for the tip of the hat."
Out in the dining room - in between where John, Missouri and Sam were sitting, and where Pamela was still asking for information from a rectangle of fiberboard - Dean had begun to fidget, fussing with weapons he'd already checked. John had gone on enough hunts with him, and had spent far more than enough time with him otherwise, to know his son had no patience for waiting, particularly when the waiting was just more of the same "getting nowhere" Dean had gone through for the last sixteen years. Leaving Sam to listen to whatever Missouri had to convey, John got up from the couch and stepped into the dining room, where he took a long look at what Dean had laid out on the table.
Dean's hands were trembling. Not much, but enough to make the gun he laid down clatter against the surface of the table.
When John turned to look at him, Dean looked away.
No, John thought; this couldn't go on much longer.
The boy was thinner than the last time John had seen him. There were deep furrows around his eyes that John was almost certain hadn't come from too much time spent out in the sun. That Dean hadn't been sleeping well, or eating well, seemed like a pretty safe bet.
That Dean hadn't given even a single thought to finding someone to partner up with (in any sense at all) had been a safe bet for the last four or five years.
It made John's heart want to break.
"Looks good, son," he said quietly. "You've got us ready for anything they can throw at us."
"Do I?" Dean said.
There'd been a time when this boy would run full-tilt toward his father. Would fling out his arms and launch himself into the air, confident that John would catch him and lift him up and hold him close.
John still would have, although the lifting part of it might have been problematic.
"Yeah, you do," he said. "You're good at your job, son. Nobody's gonna deny that."
As he had when he was a teenager, Dean took half a step away from his father. He let his fingers drop down onto the well-worn handle of an old silver knife, the blade of it honed to the point where Dean could have split hairs with it. It was the same way he'd handled some of his toys when he was small - slowly, tentatively, as if he were figuring out exactly what to do with the thing before he picked it up.
"Nice," John observed.
"Got it out in Wyoming last winter."
"Bought, or a gift?"
Out in the kitchen, there was a lull in Pamela's questions to the Ouija board. Maybe she'd finished up, John thought. Or maybe she was listening to something he couldn't hear. When he turned back to his son, he caught a flicker of something in Dean's eyes in the instant before Dean turned away.
How many years has it been since I heard him laugh?
"I bought it," Dean said. "From an old Arapaho dude named Walter. Said he needed the money."
Why the hell… John wondered. They'd both been on the road for years now, each of them traveling separately because Dean claimed he was used to being alone. That it worked better for him to be his own boss. Well, the results of that were plainly visible. That's gonna change. Don't much care what his reasoning is. From now on, we go together.
He goes nowhere alone.
In the kitchen, Pamela said sharply, "That's not good enough."
"Dad," Sam murmured. "Dad."
John turned to find Sam looking at him anxiously. A couple of steps into the living room showed him that Missouri was still slumped in the big chair, head bowed, hands splayed open on her lap. The difference - and John could see it when he moved further into the room and crouched in front of her - was that tears were streaming down her cheeks.
"I'm sorry," she whispered. "I'm so sorry."
"Are you - are you speaking for Samuel?"
"I'm so sorry," she said again. "I didn't see. It wouldn't let me see."
That was all he and Sam could get out of her: repetition after repetition of that one thing. Frowning, John looked into the dining room at Dean and his collection of carefully maintained weapons (Jesus, they're like his pets, or his kids) and saw Pamela standing in the kitchen doorway. She wasn't crying; in fact, she seemed satisfied, confident about something.
"You find out?" John asked her.
She raised an eyebrow. Seemed almost amused.
"Did you find out what's coming?"
"Oh, yes," she told him. "It's me."
* * * * *
Legends are told in bits and pieces, spread by word of mouth over the years. This is the story of Mary Campbell's family: the husband to whom she told the truth of who she was. The son who grieved the loss of her so deeply that he spent half his life on the road alone, searching for her. And the son who found success, and love, and peace ... until things went a little bit sideways.
Part One: Dean and Jo
Part Two: Dean, Sam, and Jessica
Part Three: John and Deacon
Part Four: Missouri and Pamela
Part Five: Sam and Dean
Part Six: John, Mary, Dean and Sam
Part Seven: Dean and Pamela
Part Eight: Deanna and Samuel
Part Nine: Sam and Missouri
CHARACTERS: John, Dean, Sam, Missouri, Pamela
GENRE: Gen (AU)
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 2860 words
LEGEND
By Carol Davis
Ten: John and Dean
"He's checking the salt lines," Sam said. "Grandpa Samuel. I watched him. He's making sure all the salt lines are intact."
"Could be remembered behavior," his father told him after a moment of thought. "He might not be an active spirit, just a revenant."
"He looks like he's…agitated."
"He was always like that. Wound up too tight."
"This is - no. Not a normal state, even for somebody who's twitchy."
"Wouldn't call him that, exactly."
"He's preparing for something, Dad."
Dean's response was to gulp down the last mouthful of his after-dinner coffee, deposit the mug in the kitchen sink with a loud clunk, and turn toward the door. "Then we gotta lay in some more weapons. You two can do what you want, but I'm not sitting around any more with my thumb up my butt."
He was gone before anyone could object to that - or agree with it - and the front door thumped shut in his wake.
"He's right," John said. "Best to be prepared."
He already was; neither he nor Dean had gone anywhere unarmed for years, and they'd each come into the house with a gun, a couple of knives, some holy water and a pocketful of charms. But that was basic protection. Whatever it was that was making the spirit of Sam Campbell uncomfortable might call for something a little more specialized.
Or bigger.
Maybe a lot bigger.
He turned to the two women, Missouri first, then Pamela.
"We talked all last night," Pamela said. "We've got no idea what it is. There's a powerful sense that something has its eye on this house, but the rest of it's unclear. I can Ouija around if you like. Talk to the spirits. See if they know anything."
"Do that," John nodded.
She paused in the foyer long enough to pull on her coat, then went on outside to her car, leaving John, Sam and Missouri to linger in the living room. When Sam gestured toward the door, silently asking whether John intended to fetch weapons out of his truck, John shook his head and held up a finger: in a minute.
"I kind of hoped -" Sam began.
"So did I," John told him. "First time we've all been together for quite a while. Quiet family Thanksgiving would have been nice."
"It was never going to be that, Dad."
John reached out to his son and gripped his shoulder for a moment. It didn't do much to ease whatever regret and dismay Sam was feeling, but Sam did manage to conjure a half-hearted smile. They were home, after all, even though it was more Missouri's home than theirs these days. Still, most of the furnishings and décor were unchanged. Missouri had only shifted around a few things since the day she'd moved in.
"I suppose it'll make Dean happy," Sam sighed. "Having something to fight."
The three of them watched Dean come clattering back in, armed to the teeth. He'd chosen his weapons quickly and efficiently, something for every possible type of target, including a few items John hadn't even been aware his son owned. Without preamble, Dean began to unload it all onto the dining room table, shoving aside the dishes and silverware that hadn't yet been cleared off into the kitchen.
"You gonna do something?" he asked. "Or are you just gonna sit around and watch The Sound of Music?"
It was true: he was far more at ease now than he'd been half an hour ago.
"We got any idea of size, here?" That was directed at Missouri. "Big? Little? One? A whole herd of…whatever?"
Missouri shook her head.
"Well…tune into the psychic network or something. That's what she's gonna do," and he nodded over his shoulder toward the front door, indicating Pamela, who was still outside. "Kinda nice - have a chat with the spooks. Get the 911. Hell of a lot better than going in blind."
He was almost cheerful.
"You know what I do, Dean Winchester," Missouri said.
"Yeah, yeah. You pick up vibrations. Look," Dean told John, "if you're not gonna go arm up, I'll bring in some more of my stuff. Come on, Dad. You're back home for a couple hours and it's turning you into Ward Cleaver?"
"You telling me to get off my ass?" John asked him dryly. "That what you figure I'm doing, sitting on my ass?"
"Kinda looks like what you're doing."
John almost barked a response to that, then didn't. He let Dean go on with what he was doing: laying out his collection of weapons and ammunition, making a little show of all the fancy equipment he owned, some of it well-battered by use and some of it pristine and new. God only knew what all else he carried around in the trunk of that old car.
This wasn't what Mary had wanted, he thought. She'd made sure John understood what was out there - what her family had battled, going back at least a dozen generations - and what to do about some of it, but she'd never breathed a word about the boys following in her footsteps. She'd mentioned no timetable for teaching Dean (or Sam) how to hunt.
Here, in this house, it was easy to see Dean as the boy he'd been - a little preoccupied a lot of the time, true, but quick to laugh, interested in things other than weaponry and monsters and ways to fling himself into battle. He'd sat in this very room with Sam, playing for hours with a set of Legos, or Tonka trucks, or the toy train set he got for his sixth birthday. John remembered one winter a little later on when the boys had amused themselves for the entire run of Christmas vacation with a boxful of dominos and a deck of cards.
He could remember a boy who'd enjoyed curling up with a mug of cocoa and some cookies to watch an old movie.
Who'd enjoyed spending a summer afternoon washing and waxing his car out at the curb.
Who'd contributed gladly to making dinner for the three of them.
Now Dean was happy only if he had something to distract him from the fact that he'd spent half his life scouring the country for someone who might well be long dead; from a search that looked to have no end, because John could see no possibility of Dean settling down to anything approaching normal, even if he found the answers he wanted.
Dean's version of normal was gone, if it had ever really existed in the first place.
John's collection of weapons was spare compared to Dean's, though varied and functional. He was sorting through the lockbox in the bed of his truck when Pamela came up beside him, Ouija board tucked under her arm, and took a long look at what John had in there.
"Nice," she offered.
"Not what most women would say."
"Probably not."
"My son's looking for his mother," John said after a beat of silence. "Rufus Turner told him to go to you."
"Would it make a difference to you if I told you I don't know Rufus Turner?"
John gave her a long look. She was a tough one to figure out. She'd brayed out a laugh a couple of times during dinner, and had mentioned a fondness for Harleys and the Ramones and the occasional boilermaker, but that was nothing more than crumbs. He would have said it had to do with her being psychic - a wish to guard her own thoughts and feelings while she was being bombarded with impressions of other people. But he'd known Missouri Mosely for almost thirty years. Missouri didn't guard much of anything.
"I don't know," he said. "Should it?"
"I don't know where your wife is, John."
"Kind of figured you didn't."
"And right now you'd like to tell me to get the hell away from your house, because I don't belong here. I'm not part of your cozy little family, and if something's coming, you'd prefer to tackle it alongside people you're comfortable with, and not have to worry about an unknown quantity."
"That about covers it."
"Even though I might be able to give you something you need?"
"Such as?"
She waggled the Ouija board. "Like I said. I can chat up a few spirits. See what's floating around the grapevine. The dead love to talk."
"Seems like you do, too."
Pamela looked on past him, down the street. It was quiet down there when John glanced that way, no one visible, nothing moving except someone's dog, sniffing around the cars parked at the curb halfway down the block. "Here's the thing, John," she said. "I don't know Rufus Turner. I don't know you, or your sons. I met Missouri last night. I don't have a vested interest in any of you, or this situation. I could walk away right now and not worry about anything that's going to happen. I have a home to go back to, and a life that's got no connection to any of you. But something told me to come here, starting a few days ago. It told me to come here, now. So I did. Something, or someone, wants me here. Thinks I've got a part to play in all this. Maybe I'm just curious. Let's go with that, because I don't like being told what to do. I'll stick around because I'm curious."
"And if I tell you to get the hell out?"
"I'm thinking that would be a mistake."
"You got any clue why Rufus would send Dean to you?"
"Maybe he knew that if he told Dean to go home, Dean would tell him to go screw himself." She smiled, but there was no humor behind it. "So what's the verdict, John? Do I stay, and try to help you out, or do I hit the road?"
"You want to be here, if this goes south?"
"Like I said. I'm curious."
"Then you're also a damn fool."
"I've been called worse."
With John a couple of steps behind her, she carried the Ouija board through the house into the kitchen and set it up on the table, then settled into a chair facing the board, shook her shoulders loose and half-closed her eyes. Dean was still busy arranging his weapons in the dining room, making sure they were clean and loaded (though John had no doubt his son spent most of his waking hours cleaning, sharpening, and loading, and that everything was ready to be used) - but he kept an eye on Pamela, frowning, making it plain that he too would prefer it if she hadn't come here. Sam and Missouri watched from the living room, though the layout of the house gave them a less than complete view of what was happening in the kitchen.
John stood in the kitchen doorway, leaning against the doorframe, arms folded across his chest.
She asked the customary questions: Who is here with us? Can you tell me your name? What do you know about this house? After each one, there was a pause of a few seconds, then the board's planchette began to slide, carrying Pamela's hands with it.
Something like that could go on for a while, John figured, so he moved back into the living room and sat down on the couch with Sam. On the other side of the small room, Missouri sat nestled in the big easy chair, her head drooping a little, as if she were allowing herself to drift off into sleep.
John knew better.
"He's sorry," she murmured after a couple of minutes had gone by. She didn't have to specify that she meant the spirit of Samuel Campbell. "He's sorry he had a part in what happened to his little girl."
"He didn't," John said. "Not the way she told it."
"He wanted to be stronger. To fight that thing. He tried to break through, to tell her not to give in to it, but he couldn't."
It figured that Samuel would say that. Yes, he'd wanted to keep his daughter from making a deal with a demon; that made sense.
But the deal he hadn't wanted her to make had brought John back to life.
"He knows you tried, John."
That was new. "Tried what?" John asked.
"To take care of her. Be a good husband. Be what she needed."
"Well, thank him for the tip of the hat."
Out in the dining room - in between where John, Missouri and Sam were sitting, and where Pamela was still asking for information from a rectangle of fiberboard - Dean had begun to fidget, fussing with weapons he'd already checked. John had gone on enough hunts with him, and had spent far more than enough time with him otherwise, to know his son had no patience for waiting, particularly when the waiting was just more of the same "getting nowhere" Dean had gone through for the last sixteen years. Leaving Sam to listen to whatever Missouri had to convey, John got up from the couch and stepped into the dining room, where he took a long look at what Dean had laid out on the table.
Dean's hands were trembling. Not much, but enough to make the gun he laid down clatter against the surface of the table.
When John turned to look at him, Dean looked away.
No, John thought; this couldn't go on much longer.
The boy was thinner than the last time John had seen him. There were deep furrows around his eyes that John was almost certain hadn't come from too much time spent out in the sun. That Dean hadn't been sleeping well, or eating well, seemed like a pretty safe bet.
That Dean hadn't given even a single thought to finding someone to partner up with (in any sense at all) had been a safe bet for the last four or five years.
It made John's heart want to break.
"Looks good, son," he said quietly. "You've got us ready for anything they can throw at us."
"Do I?" Dean said.
There'd been a time when this boy would run full-tilt toward his father. Would fling out his arms and launch himself into the air, confident that John would catch him and lift him up and hold him close.
John still would have, although the lifting part of it might have been problematic.
"Yeah, you do," he said. "You're good at your job, son. Nobody's gonna deny that."
As he had when he was a teenager, Dean took half a step away from his father. He let his fingers drop down onto the well-worn handle of an old silver knife, the blade of it honed to the point where Dean could have split hairs with it. It was the same way he'd handled some of his toys when he was small - slowly, tentatively, as if he were figuring out exactly what to do with the thing before he picked it up.
"Nice," John observed.
"Got it out in Wyoming last winter."
"Bought, or a gift?"
Out in the kitchen, there was a lull in Pamela's questions to the Ouija board. Maybe she'd finished up, John thought. Or maybe she was listening to something he couldn't hear. When he turned back to his son, he caught a flicker of something in Dean's eyes in the instant before Dean turned away.
How many years has it been since I heard him laugh?
"I bought it," Dean said. "From an old Arapaho dude named Walter. Said he needed the money."
Why the hell… John wondered. They'd both been on the road for years now, each of them traveling separately because Dean claimed he was used to being alone. That it worked better for him to be his own boss. Well, the results of that were plainly visible. That's gonna change. Don't much care what his reasoning is. From now on, we go together.
He goes nowhere alone.
In the kitchen, Pamela said sharply, "That's not good enough."
"Dad," Sam murmured. "Dad."
John turned to find Sam looking at him anxiously. A couple of steps into the living room showed him that Missouri was still slumped in the big chair, head bowed, hands splayed open on her lap. The difference - and John could see it when he moved further into the room and crouched in front of her - was that tears were streaming down her cheeks.
"I'm sorry," she whispered. "I'm so sorry."
"Are you - are you speaking for Samuel?"
"I'm so sorry," she said again. "I didn't see. It wouldn't let me see."
That was all he and Sam could get out of her: repetition after repetition of that one thing. Frowning, John looked into the dining room at Dean and his collection of carefully maintained weapons (Jesus, they're like his pets, or his kids) and saw Pamela standing in the kitchen doorway. She wasn't crying; in fact, she seemed satisfied, confident about something.
"You find out?" John asked her.
She raised an eyebrow. Seemed almost amused.
"Did you find out what's coming?"
"Oh, yes," she told him. "It's me."
* * * * *