The Sixth Sin of Pastor Jim - 1/1
The Sixth Sin of Pastor Jim
Rating: R, Gen
Characters: Pastor Jim Murphy, John/Mary, Dean, Sammy
Word Count: 3,406
Disclaimer: The characters are sadly not mine. I’m just sticking pins into Winchesters for fun and angst. Sorry about the holes!
A/N: Door 6 in my SPN Advent Calendar
Coda to 1.21 Salvation.
This one’s for msscullyred - Happy Birthday! A Pastor Jim deathfic (oops, sorry, Red - it started out much perkier in my head, truly it did) with Winchesters on the side. Thanks to noirbabalon for volunteering to immolate herself on a last minute beta bonfire (and having the sense to tell me to go back to a non-chronological storyline.) The banner image is taken from Gustave Dore’s 1865 engraving “Destruction of Leviathan”
Setting: Vietnam, 1966-67; Lawrence, KS, 1977-83; Blue Earth, MN, 1986-2006
Summary: Jim Murphy tried to tell himself that envy, as sins go, was way down the list. That justification got a little harder as the years went on.
Everyone says they tell the truth, they lie. Men of God are not the exception. The past is an uncertain tapestry in which reality, belief, and emotions war with tattered threads of memory. You look back, a stranger to your own history, unable to pinpoint where it might have begun. Which meetings were fact and which were time’s consolation prize to the battle-weary soul.
~~~
Sanctuary. On a clear November morning in Blue Earth Jim Murphy reached out to another soul in need. Forgive me, Father. That wasn’t the end of his story, just another kind of beginning. Too much blood. Slick and sharp, the threads of his life falling heavy through his fingers once more …
~~~
Jim heard a roar, blinked through the dust, and saw Death stalking towards him. Wished he wasn’t crying with fear and joy, and almost bit his tongue through when he realised it wasn’t tears but blood raining down upon him. Was it wrong to pray it wasn’t his own, if only for a second? ‘God help me …’
‘You with me?’
Jim spent some time wondering what it meant when Death talked to you. He didn’t necessarily think it was a good sign. ‘Glory be,’ he sighed, hand going into spasms as it tried in vain to form a cross.
‘Padre?’ Hard hands were slapping at him, running over his body, easily ignoring his barely stifled groans, seemingly impervious to Jim’s pain and all that blood.
‘The sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes.’ He knew he wasn’t making sense to anyone other than himself. He wanted to reach out for salvation, and his religious training was getting in the way. Looking up into those green eyes blazing much too clear through the camouflage markings, he just wanted to say, “help me” but couldn’t focus his mind on the here and now. The dead bodies probably had something to do with that too. Jim decided he was losing it if all he could do in the middle of a war was meditate on religious allegory.
‘Come on, Padre. Get up, you dumb fuck! You stay here till Charlie comes down on us, you die, you hear me?’
‘Jim.’ There, finally he’d managed to get something sensible out.
‘What?’
‘Jim, ‘m not a dumb fuck. James Joseph Jeremiah Murphy, my mother didn’t hold with no swearing.’ Jim could feel the spirit of his Mama, fifteen years gone, nodding her head firmly beside him.
‘Okay, Jimbo. Up and at ‘em. We’ll argue about how dumb you are later.’
Jim felt himself pulled up into his rescuer’s arms, and tried to pretend he’d had the strength to do that on his own. He whacked a stupidly weak hand against the soldier’s chest before he could get another word out. ‘What?’
‘What the fuck is my name?’
He was quick, Jim gave him. ‘No fuck,’ Jim said reprovingly. ‘Just what?’
‘This isn’t one of your church formals, Padre. No time for introductions. And I sure as hell aren’t asking you for a dance.’
Despite that comment he was being slung over broad shoulders in a most undignified manner.
‘Saddle up, Jim-boy.’
Jim would have protested if he’d had any breath to spare. With the added weight of one chaplain, their flak jackets, packs and weapons it was a miracle the tall soldier could walk let alone lumber into a rough dogtrot. Jim tamped down the momentary peeve before it really had time to take hold.
‘Winchester, John Elijah. Looks like our mothers had the same goddamn favourite book.’ That huge laugh sounded strange in the middle of a war zone but Jim thought he’d be happy to warm himself on it for years to come if they got the chance.
‘Pleased to make your acquaintance,’ he found himself saying inanely while his head bobbed up and down against the stiffness of some newly stitched corporal’s stripes.
‘Charmed, I’m sure,’ his pack mule shot back as he upped his pace behind the other survivors. ‘But you’re still not my type.’
Jim stifled an inappropriate snicker. His rescuer wasn’t your average Marine, but when you got to know them, none of them were. None. ‘How many?’
‘Dead?’ Winchester knew he wasn’t worrying about the living just then. ‘Six.’
‘You’ll bring them all back?’
There was a long pause where the automatic “or die trying” didn’t come. ‘As many as we can,’ came the final honest answer.
‘Want a hand?’ It was a foolish thing to say when every thud of the man’s feet was jarring through him and opening up what felt like a sizeable gash in his back. Looked like some of the blood he was wearing was his own after all.
‘Good man,’ came the reply.
Jim couldn’t work out why the brusque compliment from a stranger meant so much. Oh, God it hurt. ‘Son of a …’ Hail Mary, full of grace …
~~~
And he was there … taking a deep breath and stepping forward to marry a stunned John to the blazing candle that was Mary, and watching John learn how to laugh again.
For once Jim couldn’t see the shadow of their first meeting hanging in John’s eyes.
And Jim thought about life and love, and wasn’t above wishing they could trade places. But that idea quickly got tucked away with all the others.
Deo volente …
~~~
Arms around him, and warmth. But that too was the blood.
‘Jim, you don’t snap out of it soon, I’m gonna have to leave you here to meet that God of yours a little sooner than planned, okay?’ The words were spat out bitterly but they did the trick.
‘John?’
And he’d thought Caleb would be the first. Trust John Winchester to be unpredictable, always had been …
~~~
Dragging himself off a canvas stretcher in the hospital tent when one of the boots came running yelling, ‘Winchester’s bringing back the dead!’
And he had.
Lashed onto a rough-cut bamboo travois and dragged back all on his own after the Captain refused to authorise a team until there was more of a lull in the fighting. That mutiny, like so many others after it, got him busted back to Private for a while, but it never lasted long in a war that was using up its heroes faster than any of the sides could breed them.
John Winchester never said a word as he gently laid the bloating bodies out in the dust before him, or through Jim’s quiet prayers that followed. He simply moved from soldier to soldier with Jim, easing him down with due care for all the bandages marching up his naked back, and helping him up again at the end of each rite.
John only broke his silence later when they were out of sight of the dead.
‘Would have picked you up on my way out, but you damn wallflowers always take too long getting ready for the next dance.’ It was undoubtedly the most unusual non-apology Jim had ever received.
Jim snorted derisively. ‘I was waiting right here, soldier. I thought you must have run out of gasoline for your Dad’s car.’
That almost got him a laugh. Jim made a note to try harder next time.
~~~
‘Come on, Padre. Stay with me …’
~~~
‘… me. Nyah! Told you, you couldn’t get me, Sammy!’
Jim quietly shut the church door behind him and tried not to flinch at the sound of breaking glass. When you had temporary care of two luminous heathens, you got used to them wreaking havoc in your usually peaceful church very quickly. Lord, give me strength.
‘Dean?’
All that got him was an initial mutinous look over a scattered patchwork of glass shards and bedraggled clumps of what had only moments before been Mrs Patrick’s prize poinsettias strewn between the front three sets of pews.
‘Sorry, Pastor Jim. It slipped.’ A smooth lie that slid out with such ease that Jim flinched for the life John was forced to lead with these innocents. The blindingly cheeky and carefully calculated grin that followed, Jim steadfastly ignored with the strength born of many years service in the Winchester army.
Dean stood dead centre in the aisle, carefully blocking all further access as he idly scuffed his sneakered feet through the ruins of the centrepiece of the church’s festive floral tribute.
‘That will require three Hail Marys and a mop,’ Jim said, serenely stepping over the mess and around Dean not to be deterred from his usual route down to his workroom. He pretended not to see Sammy’s guilt-ridden war-painted face peeking out from under the altar cloth with a homemade bow clutched in one stubby hand.
Jim hated poinsettias, and he had a feeling the overbearing head of his flower committee knew that. He decided to say a few salutatios himself just to be on the safe side before he solved one of life’s eternal mysteries - how to work his godchildren’s current obsession into the annual Blue Earth Christmas pageant.
‘Dean?’
‘Yes, Pastor Jim?’
‘From now on let Sammy be the cowboy, at least until his aim gets better.’
~~~
Cowboys! The whole darned lot of them. Just kids with guns. They were so deep in country that Jim doubted they’d ever find their way out of hell and his kids had guns, and the enemy’s did too. Jim wasn’t an old school hellfire and brimstone preacher. Forget an eye for an eye. He just wanted to get them all home safe.
He wasn’t sure any longer if John Winchester wanted the war to end, and he was just starting to realise exactly how hard it was to be anyone’s disciple, let alone a home-grown martyr who seemed to be sliding down the vengeance path as if it was made for him. He took a moment to pray silently for John Winchester as well as the souls of the enemy.
‘I don’t need a sky pilot questioning me about the ethics of war,’ John shouted, not doing a very good job of sitting still as Jim patiently bandaged yet another head wound.
Jim wasn’t sure if it was being in a battle-zone, or just being in close proximity to John Winchester that had forced him to become the company’s back-up field medic. It surely wasn’t ever going to be a skill he’d need back in civilisation. If he got out of this alive, he promised himself a nice, safe parish where the most exciting thing that happened would be an argument about the church flower arrangements on Sundays.
‘I’m yelling here,’ John said with more real irritation at losing his attention than he’d shown in the original argument.
‘I’m bandaging here,’ Jim replied. ‘What do you want to fight about now? Are we up to God again?’
‘I don’t do religion, Chaplain.’ John waggled his dog-tags as evidence to ward off the very notion.
‘No offence taken,’ Jim said pointedly. That just got him a quick hard look before a sudden and now all-too-rare grin lit those malleable eyes.
And that was it; they were back on the flipside of that odd fraternal behaviour pattern again. Which was weird because they both seemed to be the total opposite of what they’d heard about each other’s siblings. Although to be precise, Jim had told almost his entire life story, while typically, John had said as little as humanly possible in return.
‘… and the world knew him not.’
~~~
‘Hang on, Jim.’
Why am I so cold? ‘Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.’
‘Jim?’
Hurts, John. ‘… in nomine Patris …’
~~~
‘… and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.’
Fragile, squirming, fiercely tough fragments of humanity. The births of a new generation of Winchesters had shocked them all into a new awareness of the world’s dangers while somehow giving them hope for the future.
As Jim blessed Dean he knew he hadn’t been successful at rising above the supple strands of jealousy twisting their way through every part of him.
He forced himself to settle for the unexpected grace of the role of godfather, and tried not to look obviously terrified at the responsibility. John, who always could read him almost as well as Jim knew his Bible, quirked an eyebrow at his momentary blanching over the giggling bundle of non-stop movement that was Dean trying to get free to seize not only the day but the whole damn world.
By the time Sammy came around four long years later, John simply slapped Jim on the shoulder and said, ‘Suck it up, Goddaddy.’
Mary, who knew them too well not to feel all the undercurrents, somehow managed to hug them both, smiling kindly and a little wickedly at the whiskey glasses in two sets of shaking hands, before drifting off, a turbo-charged Madonna on a mission to rescue Sammy from being given another bath in the font by a determined Dean on tip-toes.
From then on, Jim spent quite a bit of his free time having few well-chosen words with his God about the appropriateness of divine payback.
~~~
‘Come on, Padre.’
‘Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.’ So much blood. All those boys, dead and gone. Forgive me, Father.
‘You with me? Jim?’
Cold, John.
~~~
More than cold, it was well below freezing when a stricken John turned up at 4 am that December morn after driving non-stop from Wisconsin only to dump both boys into his arms and leave them there with him for a week before returning to reclaim his sons.
During those seven days Sammy just looked confused and clung to Dean even more than usual, and Dean didn’t move more than a foot from Sammy the entire time.
Dean never said a word about what happened, and neither did John. Some things never changed. Winchesters always closed ranks against outsiders, no matter who they were.
~~~
Sometimes they let you in.
Sam always phoned, turning to him without question through the years. Jim would have bothered to feel guiltier except for the fact that he knew John Winchester much too well. Recognised that he and Bobby Singer, two opposites that strangely had almost as much in common with each other as they did with John, had been deliberately designed as refuges for each of the boys to turn to in time of need. Even his enemies never said John Winchester was stupid. The only thing John never calculated was his love and care for his sons.
So, Sam was always the one who called. Before too many years went past Jim knew he was fourth on Sam’s speed dial right behind Dean, John, and the number of the best library in whatever state the Winchesters were currently purging of evil.
John never phoned. He always just turned up at the end of a hunt, usually injured, with the boys securely nestled together in the back seat. Most of the time they weren’t bleeding, but that changed as they grew older.
Dean in some ways was the mirror image of his mother; in all others he was exactly his father’s son.
That changed late one night. Sam’s phone call was the first in which Jim couldn’t hear Dean’s voice interjecting helpful comments in the background.
Stanford? Oh, my boys.
Jim got two other calls that night. Dei Gratia.
~~~
‘For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men. It teaches us to say "No" to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age.’
Here he was outside An Hoa, not long into his tour of duty with the 3rd Battalion, Ninth Marines. Off on a routine patrol he could have skipped to stay back at the camp, but he’d never been the kind of man to let his men go anywhere without him. Crazy Irish they called him, the Navy chaplain toting an M16 he never took off his shoulder, and only a few years older than most of these baby soldiers. Moving through a bush row they’d veered off to check on something, and then a straggler caught a wire. Rusty tin full of death, didn’t take much if it got planted just right. His Marines kept saying fate was a bitch, today he thought they might have a point.
It wasn’t the time to be reciting Biblical quotations to yourself even if you were a man of God as well as a soldier. Not when his lambs were being slaughtered around him.
Help me, Lord.
And Death came walking.
~~~
Too late. Not enough time. He needed … Surely he’d been here? He remembered it so clearly. It had only just been seconds ago. Just …
‘John?’
Dear Lord, it hurt.
‘Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus.
Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.’
Too much pain. So many battles, and each time was like the first. Standing over the thing that had killed his mother, and reaching for his knife …
‘John?’
‘I’m here, Jim. I’ve got you.’
~~~
The last time he saw John Winchester, John hadn’t needed to talk, not after all their years fighting alongside each other. John just laid down a copy of all of his notes, and a plan, and one thing more for safekeeping.
Then he left. And Jim didn’t try to stop him.
A Winchester’s priest (regardless of title) never betrayed a sacred trust. A friend and a brother in all but name held back the words of protest, stayed strong, and let him walk away in silence.
And that wasn’t the first time.
~~~
Standing within the charred embrace of Sammy’s nursery when more than one world disintegrated into ash and tears and Jim and John found they’d both been keeping secrets.
When Jim cursed God and the visions that had not been warning enough to prevent a death that would set more than the remaining Winchesters onto a bitter and what he now knew was a pre-determined path.
And Jim looked at Dean and Sammy, seeing yet again the same unmistakable signs that had been in their father’s face those long years past, and wept because destiny was an almost unbearable burden, and they weren’t his to hold and protect. Being God’s point man would have to be enough.
In the end, understanding didn’t make the grief easier to bear, it just strengthened one for the future, and surely that was reason enough for hope.
~~~
So, maybe it really began here.
Today, when he reached out again, and hallowed ground was not protection enough.
He didn’t run out of fear. The research and weapons were always locked safely away, but some things he kept in plain sight; used as they were intended, letting the glamour of familiarity hide their truth.
So he ran, and laid down a false trail away from his trust in the hope that it wouldn’t be needed, that this too he could deal with. He knew better after all this time, but even he wasn’t immune to wanting to postpone a meeting with fate.
His weapon was chosen because of John, in recognition of a gift given and accepted with a day like this in mind. Its selection sent another kind of message on to those who’d carry this battle forward in his absence. Young Caleb would be first to come, then John, but it would be Bobby who’d know what to do with everything he’d kept in trust. Maybe between the three of them and their boys, it would be enough to tip the balance. That too he had to take on faith alone.
God had never said it would be easy. And it wasn’t. But as Jim Murphy came to rest in this his penultimate sanctuary, with a demon fading from his sight, he knew he wouldn’t change a minute of it, no matter where or how it had all begun. Not the mistakes, the sins, or the love that had brought him here.
Forgive me, Father.
And his God took another sinner home.
For further Christmas stories and graphics see my: SPN Advent Calendar
Rating: R, Gen
Characters: Pastor Jim Murphy, John/Mary, Dean, Sammy
Word Count: 3,406
Disclaimer: The characters are sadly not mine. I’m just sticking pins into Winchesters for fun and angst. Sorry about the holes!
A/N: Door 6 in my SPN Advent Calendar
Coda to 1.21 Salvation.
This one’s for msscullyred - Happy Birthday! A Pastor Jim deathfic (oops, sorry, Red - it started out much perkier in my head, truly it did) with Winchesters on the side. Thanks to noirbabalon for volunteering to immolate herself on a last minute beta bonfire (and having the sense to tell me to go back to a non-chronological storyline.) The banner image is taken from Gustave Dore’s 1865 engraving “Destruction of Leviathan”
Setting: Vietnam, 1966-67; Lawrence, KS, 1977-83; Blue Earth, MN, 1986-2006
Summary: Jim Murphy tried to tell himself that envy, as sins go, was way down the list. That justification got a little harder as the years went on.
Everyone says they tell the truth, they lie. Men of God are not the exception. The past is an uncertain tapestry in which reality, belief, and emotions war with tattered threads of memory. You look back, a stranger to your own history, unable to pinpoint where it might have begun. Which meetings were fact and which were time’s consolation prize to the battle-weary soul.
~~~
Sanctuary. On a clear November morning in Blue Earth Jim Murphy reached out to another soul in need. Forgive me, Father. That wasn’t the end of his story, just another kind of beginning. Too much blood. Slick and sharp, the threads of his life falling heavy through his fingers once more …
~~~
Jim heard a roar, blinked through the dust, and saw Death stalking towards him. Wished he wasn’t crying with fear and joy, and almost bit his tongue through when he realised it wasn’t tears but blood raining down upon him. Was it wrong to pray it wasn’t his own, if only for a second? ‘God help me …’
‘You with me?’
Jim spent some time wondering what it meant when Death talked to you. He didn’t necessarily think it was a good sign. ‘Glory be,’ he sighed, hand going into spasms as it tried in vain to form a cross.
‘Padre?’ Hard hands were slapping at him, running over his body, easily ignoring his barely stifled groans, seemingly impervious to Jim’s pain and all that blood.
‘The sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes.’ He knew he wasn’t making sense to anyone other than himself. He wanted to reach out for salvation, and his religious training was getting in the way. Looking up into those green eyes blazing much too clear through the camouflage markings, he just wanted to say, “help me” but couldn’t focus his mind on the here and now. The dead bodies probably had something to do with that too. Jim decided he was losing it if all he could do in the middle of a war was meditate on religious allegory.
‘Come on, Padre. Get up, you dumb fuck! You stay here till Charlie comes down on us, you die, you hear me?’
‘Jim.’ There, finally he’d managed to get something sensible out.
‘What?’
‘Jim, ‘m not a dumb fuck. James Joseph Jeremiah Murphy, my mother didn’t hold with no swearing.’ Jim could feel the spirit of his Mama, fifteen years gone, nodding her head firmly beside him.
‘Okay, Jimbo. Up and at ‘em. We’ll argue about how dumb you are later.’
Jim felt himself pulled up into his rescuer’s arms, and tried to pretend he’d had the strength to do that on his own. He whacked a stupidly weak hand against the soldier’s chest before he could get another word out. ‘What?’
‘What the fuck is my name?’
He was quick, Jim gave him. ‘No fuck,’ Jim said reprovingly. ‘Just what?’
‘This isn’t one of your church formals, Padre. No time for introductions. And I sure as hell aren’t asking you for a dance.’
Despite that comment he was being slung over broad shoulders in a most undignified manner.
‘Saddle up, Jim-boy.’
Jim would have protested if he’d had any breath to spare. With the added weight of one chaplain, their flak jackets, packs and weapons it was a miracle the tall soldier could walk let alone lumber into a rough dogtrot. Jim tamped down the momentary peeve before it really had time to take hold.
‘Winchester, John Elijah. Looks like our mothers had the same goddamn favourite book.’ That huge laugh sounded strange in the middle of a war zone but Jim thought he’d be happy to warm himself on it for years to come if they got the chance.
‘Pleased to make your acquaintance,’ he found himself saying inanely while his head bobbed up and down against the stiffness of some newly stitched corporal’s stripes.
‘Charmed, I’m sure,’ his pack mule shot back as he upped his pace behind the other survivors. ‘But you’re still not my type.’
Jim stifled an inappropriate snicker. His rescuer wasn’t your average Marine, but when you got to know them, none of them were. None. ‘How many?’
‘Dead?’ Winchester knew he wasn’t worrying about the living just then. ‘Six.’
‘You’ll bring them all back?’
There was a long pause where the automatic “or die trying” didn’t come. ‘As many as we can,’ came the final honest answer.
‘Want a hand?’ It was a foolish thing to say when every thud of the man’s feet was jarring through him and opening up what felt like a sizeable gash in his back. Looked like some of the blood he was wearing was his own after all.
‘Good man,’ came the reply.
Jim couldn’t work out why the brusque compliment from a stranger meant so much. Oh, God it hurt. ‘Son of a …’ Hail Mary, full of grace …
~~~
And he was there … taking a deep breath and stepping forward to marry a stunned John to the blazing candle that was Mary, and watching John learn how to laugh again.
For once Jim couldn’t see the shadow of their first meeting hanging in John’s eyes.
And Jim thought about life and love, and wasn’t above wishing they could trade places. But that idea quickly got tucked away with all the others.
Deo volente …
~~~
Arms around him, and warmth. But that too was the blood.
‘Jim, you don’t snap out of it soon, I’m gonna have to leave you here to meet that God of yours a little sooner than planned, okay?’ The words were spat out bitterly but they did the trick.
‘John?’
And he’d thought Caleb would be the first. Trust John Winchester to be unpredictable, always had been …
~~~
Dragging himself off a canvas stretcher in the hospital tent when one of the boots came running yelling, ‘Winchester’s bringing back the dead!’
And he had.
Lashed onto a rough-cut bamboo travois and dragged back all on his own after the Captain refused to authorise a team until there was more of a lull in the fighting. That mutiny, like so many others after it, got him busted back to Private for a while, but it never lasted long in a war that was using up its heroes faster than any of the sides could breed them.
John Winchester never said a word as he gently laid the bloating bodies out in the dust before him, or through Jim’s quiet prayers that followed. He simply moved from soldier to soldier with Jim, easing him down with due care for all the bandages marching up his naked back, and helping him up again at the end of each rite.
John only broke his silence later when they were out of sight of the dead.
‘Would have picked you up on my way out, but you damn wallflowers always take too long getting ready for the next dance.’ It was undoubtedly the most unusual non-apology Jim had ever received.
Jim snorted derisively. ‘I was waiting right here, soldier. I thought you must have run out of gasoline for your Dad’s car.’
That almost got him a laugh. Jim made a note to try harder next time.
~~~
‘Come on, Padre. Stay with me …’
~~~
‘… me. Nyah! Told you, you couldn’t get me, Sammy!’
Jim quietly shut the church door behind him and tried not to flinch at the sound of breaking glass. When you had temporary care of two luminous heathens, you got used to them wreaking havoc in your usually peaceful church very quickly. Lord, give me strength.
‘Dean?’
All that got him was an initial mutinous look over a scattered patchwork of glass shards and bedraggled clumps of what had only moments before been Mrs Patrick’s prize poinsettias strewn between the front three sets of pews.
‘Sorry, Pastor Jim. It slipped.’ A smooth lie that slid out with such ease that Jim flinched for the life John was forced to lead with these innocents. The blindingly cheeky and carefully calculated grin that followed, Jim steadfastly ignored with the strength born of many years service in the Winchester army.
Dean stood dead centre in the aisle, carefully blocking all further access as he idly scuffed his sneakered feet through the ruins of the centrepiece of the church’s festive floral tribute.
‘That will require three Hail Marys and a mop,’ Jim said, serenely stepping over the mess and around Dean not to be deterred from his usual route down to his workroom. He pretended not to see Sammy’s guilt-ridden war-painted face peeking out from under the altar cloth with a homemade bow clutched in one stubby hand.
Jim hated poinsettias, and he had a feeling the overbearing head of his flower committee knew that. He decided to say a few salutatios himself just to be on the safe side before he solved one of life’s eternal mysteries - how to work his godchildren’s current obsession into the annual Blue Earth Christmas pageant.
‘Dean?’
‘Yes, Pastor Jim?’
‘From now on let Sammy be the cowboy, at least until his aim gets better.’
~~~
Cowboys! The whole darned lot of them. Just kids with guns. They were so deep in country that Jim doubted they’d ever find their way out of hell and his kids had guns, and the enemy’s did too. Jim wasn’t an old school hellfire and brimstone preacher. Forget an eye for an eye. He just wanted to get them all home safe.
He wasn’t sure any longer if John Winchester wanted the war to end, and he was just starting to realise exactly how hard it was to be anyone’s disciple, let alone a home-grown martyr who seemed to be sliding down the vengeance path as if it was made for him. He took a moment to pray silently for John Winchester as well as the souls of the enemy.
‘I don’t need a sky pilot questioning me about the ethics of war,’ John shouted, not doing a very good job of sitting still as Jim patiently bandaged yet another head wound.
Jim wasn’t sure if it was being in a battle-zone, or just being in close proximity to John Winchester that had forced him to become the company’s back-up field medic. It surely wasn’t ever going to be a skill he’d need back in civilisation. If he got out of this alive, he promised himself a nice, safe parish where the most exciting thing that happened would be an argument about the church flower arrangements on Sundays.
‘I’m yelling here,’ John said with more real irritation at losing his attention than he’d shown in the original argument.
‘I’m bandaging here,’ Jim replied. ‘What do you want to fight about now? Are we up to God again?’
‘I don’t do religion, Chaplain.’ John waggled his dog-tags as evidence to ward off the very notion.
‘No offence taken,’ Jim said pointedly. That just got him a quick hard look before a sudden and now all-too-rare grin lit those malleable eyes.
And that was it; they were back on the flipside of that odd fraternal behaviour pattern again. Which was weird because they both seemed to be the total opposite of what they’d heard about each other’s siblings. Although to be precise, Jim had told almost his entire life story, while typically, John had said as little as humanly possible in return.
‘… and the world knew him not.’
~~~
‘Hang on, Jim.’
Why am I so cold? ‘Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.’
‘Jim?’
Hurts, John. ‘… in nomine Patris …’
~~~
‘… and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.’
Fragile, squirming, fiercely tough fragments of humanity. The births of a new generation of Winchesters had shocked them all into a new awareness of the world’s dangers while somehow giving them hope for the future.
As Jim blessed Dean he knew he hadn’t been successful at rising above the supple strands of jealousy twisting their way through every part of him.
He forced himself to settle for the unexpected grace of the role of godfather, and tried not to look obviously terrified at the responsibility. John, who always could read him almost as well as Jim knew his Bible, quirked an eyebrow at his momentary blanching over the giggling bundle of non-stop movement that was Dean trying to get free to seize not only the day but the whole damn world.
By the time Sammy came around four long years later, John simply slapped Jim on the shoulder and said, ‘Suck it up, Goddaddy.’
Mary, who knew them too well not to feel all the undercurrents, somehow managed to hug them both, smiling kindly and a little wickedly at the whiskey glasses in two sets of shaking hands, before drifting off, a turbo-charged Madonna on a mission to rescue Sammy from being given another bath in the font by a determined Dean on tip-toes.
From then on, Jim spent quite a bit of his free time having few well-chosen words with his God about the appropriateness of divine payback.
~~~
‘Come on, Padre.’
‘Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.’ So much blood. All those boys, dead and gone. Forgive me, Father.
‘You with me? Jim?’
Cold, John.
~~~
More than cold, it was well below freezing when a stricken John turned up at 4 am that December morn after driving non-stop from Wisconsin only to dump both boys into his arms and leave them there with him for a week before returning to reclaim his sons.
During those seven days Sammy just looked confused and clung to Dean even more than usual, and Dean didn’t move more than a foot from Sammy the entire time.
Dean never said a word about what happened, and neither did John. Some things never changed. Winchesters always closed ranks against outsiders, no matter who they were.
~~~
Sometimes they let you in.
Sam always phoned, turning to him without question through the years. Jim would have bothered to feel guiltier except for the fact that he knew John Winchester much too well. Recognised that he and Bobby Singer, two opposites that strangely had almost as much in common with each other as they did with John, had been deliberately designed as refuges for each of the boys to turn to in time of need. Even his enemies never said John Winchester was stupid. The only thing John never calculated was his love and care for his sons.
So, Sam was always the one who called. Before too many years went past Jim knew he was fourth on Sam’s speed dial right behind Dean, John, and the number of the best library in whatever state the Winchesters were currently purging of evil.
John never phoned. He always just turned up at the end of a hunt, usually injured, with the boys securely nestled together in the back seat. Most of the time they weren’t bleeding, but that changed as they grew older.
Dean in some ways was the mirror image of his mother; in all others he was exactly his father’s son.
That changed late one night. Sam’s phone call was the first in which Jim couldn’t hear Dean’s voice interjecting helpful comments in the background.
Stanford? Oh, my boys.
Jim got two other calls that night. Dei Gratia.
~~~
‘For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men. It teaches us to say "No" to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age.’
Here he was outside An Hoa, not long into his tour of duty with the 3rd Battalion, Ninth Marines. Off on a routine patrol he could have skipped to stay back at the camp, but he’d never been the kind of man to let his men go anywhere without him. Crazy Irish they called him, the Navy chaplain toting an M16 he never took off his shoulder, and only a few years older than most of these baby soldiers. Moving through a bush row they’d veered off to check on something, and then a straggler caught a wire. Rusty tin full of death, didn’t take much if it got planted just right. His Marines kept saying fate was a bitch, today he thought they might have a point.
It wasn’t the time to be reciting Biblical quotations to yourself even if you were a man of God as well as a soldier. Not when his lambs were being slaughtered around him.
Help me, Lord.
And Death came walking.
~~~
Too late. Not enough time. He needed … Surely he’d been here? He remembered it so clearly. It had only just been seconds ago. Just …
‘John?’
Dear Lord, it hurt.
‘Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus.
Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.’
Too much pain. So many battles, and each time was like the first. Standing over the thing that had killed his mother, and reaching for his knife …
‘John?’
‘I’m here, Jim. I’ve got you.’
~~~
The last time he saw John Winchester, John hadn’t needed to talk, not after all their years fighting alongside each other. John just laid down a copy of all of his notes, and a plan, and one thing more for safekeeping.
Then he left. And Jim didn’t try to stop him.
A Winchester’s priest (regardless of title) never betrayed a sacred trust. A friend and a brother in all but name held back the words of protest, stayed strong, and let him walk away in silence.
And that wasn’t the first time.
~~~
Standing within the charred embrace of Sammy’s nursery when more than one world disintegrated into ash and tears and Jim and John found they’d both been keeping secrets.
When Jim cursed God and the visions that had not been warning enough to prevent a death that would set more than the remaining Winchesters onto a bitter and what he now knew was a pre-determined path.
And Jim looked at Dean and Sammy, seeing yet again the same unmistakable signs that had been in their father’s face those long years past, and wept because destiny was an almost unbearable burden, and they weren’t his to hold and protect. Being God’s point man would have to be enough.
In the end, understanding didn’t make the grief easier to bear, it just strengthened one for the future, and surely that was reason enough for hope.
~~~
So, maybe it really began here.
Today, when he reached out again, and hallowed ground was not protection enough.
He didn’t run out of fear. The research and weapons were always locked safely away, but some things he kept in plain sight; used as they were intended, letting the glamour of familiarity hide their truth.
So he ran, and laid down a false trail away from his trust in the hope that it wouldn’t be needed, that this too he could deal with. He knew better after all this time, but even he wasn’t immune to wanting to postpone a meeting with fate.
His weapon was chosen because of John, in recognition of a gift given and accepted with a day like this in mind. Its selection sent another kind of message on to those who’d carry this battle forward in his absence. Young Caleb would be first to come, then John, but it would be Bobby who’d know what to do with everything he’d kept in trust. Maybe between the three of them and their boys, it would be enough to tip the balance. That too he had to take on faith alone.
God had never said it would be easy. And it wasn’t. But as Jim Murphy came to rest in this his penultimate sanctuary, with a demon fading from his sight, he knew he wouldn’t change a minute of it, no matter where or how it had all begun. Not the mistakes, the sins, or the love that had brought him here.
Forgive me, Father.
And his God took another sinner home.
For further Christmas stories and graphics see my: SPN Advent Calendar