"Old Road," PG-13, John Winchester, x-over "Watchmen" movieverse, genfic
The final, polished version for linking to communities.
TITLE: "Old Road" (crossover with the Watchmen movieverse)
AUTHOR: Cathryn (catslash)
WORD COUNT: Approximately 2600.
RATING: PG-13; genfic
CHARACTERS: John Winchester, the Comedian
SUMMARY: Two of the defining moments of John Winchester's life come to him courtesy of the same man.
NOTES: This started as a commentfic response to a prompt issued by apiphile, but quickly took on a life of its own. Thanks to her for the initial idea, and to everyone on my flist who offered comments, suggestions, and canon fact-checks.
DISCLAIMER: Supernatural was created by Eric Kripke; Watchmen was created by Alan Moore; and the song I borrowed my title from, "The Times They Are A-Changing," was written by Bob Dylan. I take no credit and make no money from any of these works.
SPOILERS for the Watchmen movie and Supernatural's pilot episode.
The day after the text of Rorschach's journal is published, the newspaper responsible claims that it's been stolen. The absence of the journal is taken by the vast majority of people as proof that it never existed in the first place. The Examiner is pelted with Molotov cocktails, and a cheering crowd watches the blaze while all the local police officers find someplace more interesting to be. The whole thing is treated as a hiccup, and a week later only a tiny minority even seems to remember that anything happened at all. Most of this minority are conspiracy theorists, the kind who believe there was a second shooter in Dallas.
The rest are people who have learned, one way or another, that what sounds completely insane is usually what's true. Most of these people don't care. The dead are dead just the same, and what human beings do to each other isn't their territory. Their job is to deal with the things to which a nuclear holocaust would be a blip on the radar. The rest of the world will take care of itself.
**********
John Winchester lied about his age to enlist in 1970. He wasn't the only one. No one cared. Things in Vietnam were grimmer by the day, and they needed the warm bodies. The training was quick and sloppy, and John believed that it would be his natural aptitude for shooting, instead of the training, that would keep him alive.
He was partly right. The training didn't do jack shit. The shooting saved his life and others' a few times, sure, but it couldn't always be enough, and the day when it wasn't came sooner than he'd hoped.
He was surprised as hell when he found himself opening his eyes anyway, waking up alive and not dead. The explosion was still ringing in his ears, and the inescapable wet stink of the Vietnam jungle was mixed with acrid smoke.
He took another, slower breath and realized - the smoke didn't smell quite right. He blinked a couple times, clearing his vision, and saw the trail in the air, followed it with his eyes it back to the masked figure sitting next to him.
Of course. The Comedian. There'd been rumors that he was in the area.
Suddenly, the fact that John was alive made a whole lot more sense.
"You arright, kid?"
John's hearing was still shot, but he could read lips just fine - something they all had to learn out there - and he nodded, sitting up unsteadily.
The Comedian grinned. "'Course you are. Would you be if there weren't anyone to show off for? Fuck it, don't answer that."
He took a puff of his cigar and stood, smooth and quick despite the armor and weaponry, then held out a hand.
"C'mon, kid, up you go, I ain't got all day."
John grabbed the offered hand and hauled himself up, immediately discovering that the answer to the Comedian's question was no, he wasn't all right, at least not for the moment. His equilibrium had gone the way of his hearing; he overbalanced, couldn't correct for it, and stumbled. The Comedian caught him like he'd been waiting for it, which he probably had.
"Yeah, that's gonna happen for a while. It'll pass." And despite his claims to be in a hurry, he hung on to John, keeping him on his feet till his head stopped swimming. The brown eyes behind the mask were glittering with the dark amusement the Comedian always radiated, even just in photographs; John thought, dim beneath the vertigo, that they looked familiar.
"All right?" the Comedian asked after a moment or two. "You gonna fall on your ass if I let go?" He wasn't quite smirking, but it was there in his voice, and he might have had that edge that John recognized instinctively as something not to be messed with, but even at that age, John had his pride. He glared and stepped back, staying upright through sheer force of will.
The Comedian grinned again. It was different this time, a sudden and open expression that didn't make sense on his face.
"That's my boy."
Then he just looked at John, for a long moment, until John started to wonder if he was still unconscious and dreaming the whole thing. Then he decided he had to be, because the Comedian leaned in abruptly and kissed his forehead before taking a step back himself and pointing toward the base.
"Now go on, get the fuck outta here. Don't get killed. Remember, you don't gotta be a hero, that's my damn job."
John turned and went, concentrating so hard on each step that the pieces didn't start to fit together until much, much later.
**********
John's parents had never pretended there was a biological link between the three of them. They were blond and blue-eyed, after all; insisting he was theirs would have just created a mess, not mention insulting his intelligence once he was old enough to start figuring it out.
They did tell him for years that he was adopted. It wasn't until he was sixteen that they sat him down and told him about a rough patch in their marriage, Dad out of town and Mom lonely, and a year later a baby boy with hair growing in dark and eyes turning brown. Moving to Kansas, and telling everyone ther son was adopted. Everyone including him.
Later, John would admit that he'd enlisted partly out of anger over having been lied to. He wanted to get away from them for a while, and wouldn't they just be fucking sorry if he was killed without ever forgiving them? But Vietnam was a devastating lesson in what was important, and when he got home, he just hugged them and cried almost as much as they did.
He mentioned the meeting with the Comedian once. He'd had a lot of time to think about it - eyes the same brown as his behind the mask; the voice with the same rumble his own was acquiring as he hit adulthood; that's my boy - and he already knew the exact words he wanted to use when he asked. But when he began with I met the Comedian while I was there, his mother's face turned pale and still, and his father's didn't change at all. He looked into her eyes for a moment, then said only I thought he'd be taller. He never brought it up again.
*********
After Mary's funeral, John's neighbors quietly and matter-of-factly took Dean and Sammy home with them for the evening. He felt guilty for being so relieved, but the truth was he was too shattered to provide the level of attention a four-year-old and a baby needed on even the most normal of days. Apparently it was more obvious than he'd thought.
Tomorrow, he told himself as he pulled the hotel room's door closed, tomorrow he'd be up to it. By tomorrow he would somehow have found the strength for all of this.
He smelled smoke in the room, but thought nothing of it. He hadn't smelled anything else since Mary had been engulfed in flames. He saw the orange glow hovering in the darkness, though, a split second before he turned on the light, so he wasn't completely surprised to find the Comedian there, sitting at the room's lone, tiny table. He looked older than John remembered, far older than the intervening thirteen years could account for.
John had thought, less and less frequently as those years had passed, of trying to contact the man. He'd even considered it seriously early on - it wasn't as if the Comedian was hard to find, in the news as often as he was. But when he'd told Mary the whole story one night, she'd gently talked him out of it. Why, she had asked, would he want to chase down a man who had the resources to find John whenever and wherever he chose, but had only done so once, for a five-minute encounter in the middle of a war? You have a dad who loves you, John. Some men would turn their backs on a baby that wasn't theirs, but he didn't. Let that be enough.
As it had turned out, it was enough. More than. And when the Keene Act passed and the Comedian dropped out of public view, John almost stopped thinking about him altogether.
Almost, but not quite.
"Didn't know you were still active," he said now, blank and stupid. He'd been talking all day at the funeral, it seemed like, greeting people and accepting condolences, but his voice still sounded like he hadn't used it in months.
"You haven't been looking hard enough," the Comedian answered, and the timbre of his voice did indeed match the one John's own had matured into.
"I haven't been looking for you at all."
"Good." The Comedian stubbed his cigar out in an ashtray. "As it should be."
"Why are you here?" John asked, a little sharp, the closest he'd come to an expressive tone all day.
"Your wife died."
"Most people just show up at the funeral."
The corner of the Comedian's mouth quirked up a little. "Most people do most things a lot differently than I do." He stood up, moved toward John. "You're a fucking mess."
John's hands twitched a little. "My wife died."
"And you been in some kinda cloud ever since. I read the police report. Interesting stuff."
John could guess what the report had said. "I know what I saw."
"Says you changed your mind."
Sure he had, after one of the cops had made a not-ungentle comment about what could happen with the children of a man who insisted he'd seen his wife stuck to the ceiling just before a fire began. He hadn't had any choice. "I got the boys to think about."
"So that's it?" the Comedian asked. "You're just gonna pretend your eyes lied to you and wander around in a fog the rest of your life?"
John gave him a startled look. "You believe me?"
The Comedian ignored him. "You gotta snap outta this. Like you say, you got the boys to think about. You need to start thinking clearly, and fast."
"Really. And how do you suggest I do that?"
"Get rid of the fog." And the Comedian gave him a shove that sent him back against the door.
"What the fuck - ?" The Comedian shoved him again, and again, hands thumping John's shoulders with increasing force.
"What are you gonna do, boy, just let me push you around? Aren't you gonna fight back? What, you think you're gonna hurt me? Come on, I can take it, dammit, boy, focus, take a fucking shot at me, what are you, saving it for someone else? . . ."
The shock of it was starting to break up the static in John's mind, and anger was coming in close on its heels. He grabbed at the Comedian, trying to stop him, but the Comedian just shook him off.
"That the best you got? I'll tell you something, if you don't give it to me, someone else is gonna get it. You'll just fuckin' lose it one day, maybe one day when your kid's whining for Mommy a little too loud for your tas -"
That was when John hit him, a punch to the face that cut him off and made him stagger.
"I would never," John snarled, "never -"
The Comedian spit blood on the carpet, touched his newly split lip, and laughed. The fury that the crack about Dean had tapped into exploded and John lunged, swinging for all he was worth.
The next few minutes were a red blur. Some of the blows got through; some were blocked. All John would really remember later was that the Comedian didn't once try to hit back. Eventually, when John had exhausted himself and his hands had gone numb from impact, the Comedian grabbed hold of his wrists, and John stilled and began to cry.
The Comedian let go, let him sink to the floor and sob for his wife the way he hadn't had a chance to yet, the way he'd begun to think he would never be able to do. He leaned against the end of the bed and buried his face in his hands.
He expected to be alone when he looked up, and was surprised to see the Comedian still in the room. He was back at the table, smoking another cigar and looking off into the distance as if entirely unaware of John's presence. As John looked at him, though, he glanced over.
"You done?"
John nodded, once, resisting the urge to dry his eyes on his sleeve like a child and glad of the mask concealing the look of distaste he suspected he would find on the Comedian's face if he looked too closely.
"Good." The Comedian stood, producing a small card from a pocket John would never have guessed the costume to have. "Whatever killed your wife, that ain't my department. I got my hands full dealing with human bullshit. But you're right, you know what you saw." He walked over, dropped the card in front of John. "Call this guy, tell him I sent you, tell him what you saw. Especially the crazy shit. I'll see myself out."
He left without another word. John picked up the card in a trembling hand and looked at it for a long moment. Then he got up, slowly, and made his way over to the room's phone to dial the number he found there.
"Jim Murphy? The Comedian gave me this number. My name is John Winchester."
**********
A week after Rorshach's journal is published, John leaves his sons with Bobby and makes a trip to a cemetery. Personal business, Bobby, he says, no need to drag the boys out there. See you in a couple days.
The driving rain that night is mostly a coincidence. It helps, though. Whether people believe in the journal or not, Edward Blake's grave has become something of a tourist attraction; a cold nighttime November rain makes it more likely that John will have a little privacy for his visit.
John has spent a lot of time at gravesites in the past couple of years, always on business. Digging, salting, burning, watching the flames reduce the body to ash and knowing that a troublesome ghost somewhere has disappeared and won't be hurting anyone again. He doesn't know how to just pay a visit. He's never even been to Mary's grave, not since the burial. He feels a tug of guilt there. Not because he hasn't gone, but because he's been able to make this trip before he can even begin to think about making that one. He thinks, though, that she would understand. This hurts less.
John stands in silence, hands shoved into his jacket pockets, staring through the rain at the name engraved on the headstone. Edward Morgan Blake. He feels no real connection to it, but then he didn't really expect to. He just heard the name for the first time a week ago. He hasn't made the adjustment yet, to thinking about it as belonging to the man he met only twice, but who changed his life irrevocably both times.
After only a few minutes, John turns and walks away. That man was the Comedian. John doesn't know Edward Blake.
TITLE: "Old Road" (crossover with the Watchmen movieverse)
AUTHOR: Cathryn (catslash)
WORD COUNT: Approximately 2600.
RATING: PG-13; genfic
CHARACTERS: John Winchester, the Comedian
SUMMARY: Two of the defining moments of John Winchester's life come to him courtesy of the same man.
NOTES: This started as a commentfic response to a prompt issued by apiphile, but quickly took on a life of its own. Thanks to her for the initial idea, and to everyone on my flist who offered comments, suggestions, and canon fact-checks.
DISCLAIMER: Supernatural was created by Eric Kripke; Watchmen was created by Alan Moore; and the song I borrowed my title from, "The Times They Are A-Changing," was written by Bob Dylan. I take no credit and make no money from any of these works.
SPOILERS for the Watchmen movie and Supernatural's pilot episode.
The day after the text of Rorschach's journal is published, the newspaper responsible claims that it's been stolen. The absence of the journal is taken by the vast majority of people as proof that it never existed in the first place. The Examiner is pelted with Molotov cocktails, and a cheering crowd watches the blaze while all the local police officers find someplace more interesting to be. The whole thing is treated as a hiccup, and a week later only a tiny minority even seems to remember that anything happened at all. Most of this minority are conspiracy theorists, the kind who believe there was a second shooter in Dallas.
The rest are people who have learned, one way or another, that what sounds completely insane is usually what's true. Most of these people don't care. The dead are dead just the same, and what human beings do to each other isn't their territory. Their job is to deal with the things to which a nuclear holocaust would be a blip on the radar. The rest of the world will take care of itself.
**********
John Winchester lied about his age to enlist in 1970. He wasn't the only one. No one cared. Things in Vietnam were grimmer by the day, and they needed the warm bodies. The training was quick and sloppy, and John believed that it would be his natural aptitude for shooting, instead of the training, that would keep him alive.
He was partly right. The training didn't do jack shit. The shooting saved his life and others' a few times, sure, but it couldn't always be enough, and the day when it wasn't came sooner than he'd hoped.
He was surprised as hell when he found himself opening his eyes anyway, waking up alive and not dead. The explosion was still ringing in his ears, and the inescapable wet stink of the Vietnam jungle was mixed with acrid smoke.
He took another, slower breath and realized - the smoke didn't smell quite right. He blinked a couple times, clearing his vision, and saw the trail in the air, followed it with his eyes it back to the masked figure sitting next to him.
Of course. The Comedian. There'd been rumors that he was in the area.
Suddenly, the fact that John was alive made a whole lot more sense.
"You arright, kid?"
John's hearing was still shot, but he could read lips just fine - something they all had to learn out there - and he nodded, sitting up unsteadily.
The Comedian grinned. "'Course you are. Would you be if there weren't anyone to show off for? Fuck it, don't answer that."
He took a puff of his cigar and stood, smooth and quick despite the armor and weaponry, then held out a hand.
"C'mon, kid, up you go, I ain't got all day."
John grabbed the offered hand and hauled himself up, immediately discovering that the answer to the Comedian's question was no, he wasn't all right, at least not for the moment. His equilibrium had gone the way of his hearing; he overbalanced, couldn't correct for it, and stumbled. The Comedian caught him like he'd been waiting for it, which he probably had.
"Yeah, that's gonna happen for a while. It'll pass." And despite his claims to be in a hurry, he hung on to John, keeping him on his feet till his head stopped swimming. The brown eyes behind the mask were glittering with the dark amusement the Comedian always radiated, even just in photographs; John thought, dim beneath the vertigo, that they looked familiar.
"All right?" the Comedian asked after a moment or two. "You gonna fall on your ass if I let go?" He wasn't quite smirking, but it was there in his voice, and he might have had that edge that John recognized instinctively as something not to be messed with, but even at that age, John had his pride. He glared and stepped back, staying upright through sheer force of will.
The Comedian grinned again. It was different this time, a sudden and open expression that didn't make sense on his face.
"That's my boy."
Then he just looked at John, for a long moment, until John started to wonder if he was still unconscious and dreaming the whole thing. Then he decided he had to be, because the Comedian leaned in abruptly and kissed his forehead before taking a step back himself and pointing toward the base.
"Now go on, get the fuck outta here. Don't get killed. Remember, you don't gotta be a hero, that's my damn job."
John turned and went, concentrating so hard on each step that the pieces didn't start to fit together until much, much later.
**********
John's parents had never pretended there was a biological link between the three of them. They were blond and blue-eyed, after all; insisting he was theirs would have just created a mess, not mention insulting his intelligence once he was old enough to start figuring it out.
They did tell him for years that he was adopted. It wasn't until he was sixteen that they sat him down and told him about a rough patch in their marriage, Dad out of town and Mom lonely, and a year later a baby boy with hair growing in dark and eyes turning brown. Moving to Kansas, and telling everyone ther son was adopted. Everyone including him.
Later, John would admit that he'd enlisted partly out of anger over having been lied to. He wanted to get away from them for a while, and wouldn't they just be fucking sorry if he was killed without ever forgiving them? But Vietnam was a devastating lesson in what was important, and when he got home, he just hugged them and cried almost as much as they did.
He mentioned the meeting with the Comedian once. He'd had a lot of time to think about it - eyes the same brown as his behind the mask; the voice with the same rumble his own was acquiring as he hit adulthood; that's my boy - and he already knew the exact words he wanted to use when he asked. But when he began with I met the Comedian while I was there, his mother's face turned pale and still, and his father's didn't change at all. He looked into her eyes for a moment, then said only I thought he'd be taller. He never brought it up again.
*********
After Mary's funeral, John's neighbors quietly and matter-of-factly took Dean and Sammy home with them for the evening. He felt guilty for being so relieved, but the truth was he was too shattered to provide the level of attention a four-year-old and a baby needed on even the most normal of days. Apparently it was more obvious than he'd thought.
Tomorrow, he told himself as he pulled the hotel room's door closed, tomorrow he'd be up to it. By tomorrow he would somehow have found the strength for all of this.
He smelled smoke in the room, but thought nothing of it. He hadn't smelled anything else since Mary had been engulfed in flames. He saw the orange glow hovering in the darkness, though, a split second before he turned on the light, so he wasn't completely surprised to find the Comedian there, sitting at the room's lone, tiny table. He looked older than John remembered, far older than the intervening thirteen years could account for.
John had thought, less and less frequently as those years had passed, of trying to contact the man. He'd even considered it seriously early on - it wasn't as if the Comedian was hard to find, in the news as often as he was. But when he'd told Mary the whole story one night, she'd gently talked him out of it. Why, she had asked, would he want to chase down a man who had the resources to find John whenever and wherever he chose, but had only done so once, for a five-minute encounter in the middle of a war? You have a dad who loves you, John. Some men would turn their backs on a baby that wasn't theirs, but he didn't. Let that be enough.
As it had turned out, it was enough. More than. And when the Keene Act passed and the Comedian dropped out of public view, John almost stopped thinking about him altogether.
Almost, but not quite.
"Didn't know you were still active," he said now, blank and stupid. He'd been talking all day at the funeral, it seemed like, greeting people and accepting condolences, but his voice still sounded like he hadn't used it in months.
"You haven't been looking hard enough," the Comedian answered, and the timbre of his voice did indeed match the one John's own had matured into.
"I haven't been looking for you at all."
"Good." The Comedian stubbed his cigar out in an ashtray. "As it should be."
"Why are you here?" John asked, a little sharp, the closest he'd come to an expressive tone all day.
"Your wife died."
"Most people just show up at the funeral."
The corner of the Comedian's mouth quirked up a little. "Most people do most things a lot differently than I do." He stood up, moved toward John. "You're a fucking mess."
John's hands twitched a little. "My wife died."
"And you been in some kinda cloud ever since. I read the police report. Interesting stuff."
John could guess what the report had said. "I know what I saw."
"Says you changed your mind."
Sure he had, after one of the cops had made a not-ungentle comment about what could happen with the children of a man who insisted he'd seen his wife stuck to the ceiling just before a fire began. He hadn't had any choice. "I got the boys to think about."
"So that's it?" the Comedian asked. "You're just gonna pretend your eyes lied to you and wander around in a fog the rest of your life?"
John gave him a startled look. "You believe me?"
The Comedian ignored him. "You gotta snap outta this. Like you say, you got the boys to think about. You need to start thinking clearly, and fast."
"Really. And how do you suggest I do that?"
"Get rid of the fog." And the Comedian gave him a shove that sent him back against the door.
"What the fuck - ?" The Comedian shoved him again, and again, hands thumping John's shoulders with increasing force.
"What are you gonna do, boy, just let me push you around? Aren't you gonna fight back? What, you think you're gonna hurt me? Come on, I can take it, dammit, boy, focus, take a fucking shot at me, what are you, saving it for someone else? . . ."
The shock of it was starting to break up the static in John's mind, and anger was coming in close on its heels. He grabbed at the Comedian, trying to stop him, but the Comedian just shook him off.
"That the best you got? I'll tell you something, if you don't give it to me, someone else is gonna get it. You'll just fuckin' lose it one day, maybe one day when your kid's whining for Mommy a little too loud for your tas -"
That was when John hit him, a punch to the face that cut him off and made him stagger.
"I would never," John snarled, "never -"
The Comedian spit blood on the carpet, touched his newly split lip, and laughed. The fury that the crack about Dean had tapped into exploded and John lunged, swinging for all he was worth.
The next few minutes were a red blur. Some of the blows got through; some were blocked. All John would really remember later was that the Comedian didn't once try to hit back. Eventually, when John had exhausted himself and his hands had gone numb from impact, the Comedian grabbed hold of his wrists, and John stilled and began to cry.
The Comedian let go, let him sink to the floor and sob for his wife the way he hadn't had a chance to yet, the way he'd begun to think he would never be able to do. He leaned against the end of the bed and buried his face in his hands.
He expected to be alone when he looked up, and was surprised to see the Comedian still in the room. He was back at the table, smoking another cigar and looking off into the distance as if entirely unaware of John's presence. As John looked at him, though, he glanced over.
"You done?"
John nodded, once, resisting the urge to dry his eyes on his sleeve like a child and glad of the mask concealing the look of distaste he suspected he would find on the Comedian's face if he looked too closely.
"Good." The Comedian stood, producing a small card from a pocket John would never have guessed the costume to have. "Whatever killed your wife, that ain't my department. I got my hands full dealing with human bullshit. But you're right, you know what you saw." He walked over, dropped the card in front of John. "Call this guy, tell him I sent you, tell him what you saw. Especially the crazy shit. I'll see myself out."
He left without another word. John picked up the card in a trembling hand and looked at it for a long moment. Then he got up, slowly, and made his way over to the room's phone to dial the number he found there.
"Jim Murphy? The Comedian gave me this number. My name is John Winchester."
**********
A week after Rorshach's journal is published, John leaves his sons with Bobby and makes a trip to a cemetery. Personal business, Bobby, he says, no need to drag the boys out there. See you in a couple days.
The driving rain that night is mostly a coincidence. It helps, though. Whether people believe in the journal or not, Edward Blake's grave has become something of a tourist attraction; a cold nighttime November rain makes it more likely that John will have a little privacy for his visit.
John has spent a lot of time at gravesites in the past couple of years, always on business. Digging, salting, burning, watching the flames reduce the body to ash and knowing that a troublesome ghost somewhere has disappeared and won't be hurting anyone again. He doesn't know how to just pay a visit. He's never even been to Mary's grave, not since the burial. He feels a tug of guilt there. Not because he hasn't gone, but because he's been able to make this trip before he can even begin to think about making that one. He thinks, though, that she would understand. This hurts less.
John stands in silence, hands shoved into his jacket pockets, staring through the rain at the name engraved on the headstone. Edward Morgan Blake. He feels no real connection to it, but then he didn't really expect to. He just heard the name for the first time a week ago. He hasn't made the adjustment yet, to thinking about it as belonging to the man he met only twice, but who changed his life irrevocably both times.
After only a few minutes, John turns and walks away. That man was the Comedian. John doesn't know Edward Blake.