SPN: "Misericordia"

[tolakasa]

Category: Supernatural
Title: Misericordia
Word Count: 4300
Rating: PG-13 (language)

Summary: Post-finale. Three generations of Winchester madness stop here.

Note: Okay, I should have never said never about post-10.03 fic. Mea culpa. Fucking traitorous plotbunnies.

And before you get riled, this is me doing what I do: Taking something I noticed in an ep and beating the shit out of it with the "what if" stick until a story results. If you have read any of my stuff, you know how that usually goes. Prepare yourself accordingly.

At the very least, don't tell me you're burning me in effigy. Manners, people.



misericordia: Latin; noun: mercy, compassion, sympathy, humanity

Two hours ago, they had taken his father's body away.

The hardest part was over.

He stood in the doorway to his childhood bedroom, and his chest started to tighten and he couldn't breathe. On the wall immediately across from him, neatly framed over the desk, was his first bachelor's diploma, the one with "Robert Dean Winchester" on it. He'd brought it home and let Sam give it the fancy treatment because he'd already planned to get one re-issued with his new name for himself. The last picture of him and Mom together was on the wall above it.

Bobby jerked the door closed and leaned over, hands on his knees, gasping, trying desperately to find some oxygen.

God, he still couldn't do it. Walking in there was like going back into a prison cell.

If Sam hadn't been so far gone, if he hadn't been fighting for every breath and every scrap of consciousness, he would have realized that the nights his son wasn't on the sofa, to be within reach, he was sleeping on an air mattress under the dining room table.

How was he going to get that room cleared out? All those years of being Dean Winchester the Second just hung in the air in there like toxic smoke, threatening to choke him.

Too bad he wasn't a Winchester anymore. A Winchester, particularly one who went by "Dean," would have no compunction about just torching the place and walking away.

No, he was somebody different now. But he was still Sam Winchester's son-he couldn't escape that-and it was his responsibility to clean this place out so it could be sold, since he was never going to live here again.

May the next owners be as happy as Sam thought we were.

The car, at least, would bring in a nice chunk of money; Sam had always taken ridiculously good care of it, considering that Bobby didn't remember him ever actually driving it, even before he failed the eye exam and lost his license. Hundred-year-old classic in that condition? Nobody would care if it was street-legal. Some collector or museum would snap it up in an instant.

The house was another matter. The most recent furniture was twenty years old, not worth a lot. The neighborhood wasn't what it had been, and Sam's deteriorating health hadn't allowed him to keep up with maintenance these last years. It'd sell eventually, at a loss-but it'd be something. There weren't a lot of debts that needed to be paid, just the final utility bills and taxes, any funeral charges not covered by the preplanning, maybe a couple of little bills for bringing Sam home to die instead of leaving him in the hospital. All told, everything might net enough for him and Kase to have a very nice down payment on a house of their own, possibly one of those quiet neighborhoods near the university, where he could walk to work on nice days.

Maybe it didn't precisely qualify as blood money, but frankly, Bobby figured he'd earned it, catering to his father's whims for all those years-years of spinning a careful web of lies so that Sam could continue in his comfortable delusion that his son was more like his brother than him.

Sam had been emphatic about Bobby getting a degree, but he didn't know about the master's, the doctorate, the second bachelor's. Didn't know that when Bobby told him he was researching, he meant he was working on his thesis or a journal article, not looking up how to kill something.

It wasn't hard, constructing the illusion, but it was a lot of work. He maintained a separate phone, one Kase didn't answer if the caller ID said it was Sam. He kept his calls home deliberately irregular. He offered his students extra credit to drop cheap postcards in mailboxes in exotic locations like Omaha and Tulsa. The only address Sam had on him was a post office box in Lebanon; the owner forwarded mail to Bobby for an extra fee. He'd even turned down an insanely great job offer from the University of Kansas just because it was in Lawrence, otherwise known as Winchester Ground Zero. And he never stayed more than a couple of hours when he did have to come back. Everything involving his real life, from driver's license to marriage certificate to the textbook coming out next spring, was in the name of Robert Dean Brennan. Even if Sam had gotten nosy, he would never have found anything, because it would just never occur to him that his son might not want the Winchester legacy.

Kase helped, too. All he had to do was give Kase a summary of the basic lore, maybe throw in one of Sam's stories about hunting with Uncle Dean, and he'd have a convincingly dramatic hunt story in an hour. There were perks to marrying a writer.

He might keep the tattoo, though. He'd never wanted the damn thing, Sam had forced it on him by refusing to let him get his driver's license until he had it, but Kase liked it.

If he gets a matching one, though, I'm filing for divorce.

He straightened. Checked his breathing. Maybe if he waited until everything else was done, he could handle his room.

The spare room was mostly empty now; Sam had been stashing casebooks, the leftover lore library, and old weapons there, and once he was done with grading, Bobby had passed the time when Sam didn't need him packing all that up and calling one of Sam's remaining contacts, one of the ones who had "inherited" the bunker, to arrange for pickup. Sam's bedroom was fairly empty, but he was going to have to go through the closets, sort the clothes for donations, and make sure nothing important had gotten stuck in a back corner or drawer. The bathroom and kitchen were both a mess, one piled high with pill bottles and other assorted medical supplies, one with pizza boxes. The dining room was actually pretty clear, if you didn't look under the table.

He went back into the living room. They hadn't been able to fit some of the equipment Sam needed into the bedroom, so this had become an awkward sickroom. The company would be here for the med equipment tomorrow morning. There would be no delay on the arrangements; Sam's illness and admission to hospice were fully documented, there was nothing for anyone to investigate, and Sam had preplanned his cremation with a funeral home years ago. There was still the option for a service, but Bobby didn't know anybody who'd come to one. Hunters didn't do funerals, all the family he knew of was dead, Sam didn't know half his neighbors, and the other half thought Bobby was his long-dead Uncle Dean, thanks to the way Sam had tangled up their stories these last years. Sam didn't even have any local friends; he'd never made friends at work, and he hadn't been able to work since his seventh herniated disk anyway.

If Bobby got his ass in gear, if he worked really hard, he could have this place empty by the time the ashes came back. A week, maybe.

He shuddered. A week of sleeping alone in this house, trying not to fall back into the habits it had taken years and three therapists and marriage to get past. Maybe Kase is right. Maybe I should get a hotel room. A hotel wouldn't have demon-traps in odd corners or salt at every threshold. It would give him a little bit of sanctuary.

Jesus. It's going to take me a week just to vacuum up all the fucking salt, and that's assuming the vacuum is still working.

If he got a room, though- Spending the money didn't bother him, but he didn't sleep well away from Kase, so why waste perfectly good insomnia driving back and forth when he could just get out of bed and work through the night-in his pajamas, if he wanted?

He was, however, very happy the house didn't have a basement. God only knew what kind of shit Sam would have kept there. Bodies, maybe.

He looked up at the big picture over the fireplace, the one he really hated, Sam and three dead strangers looming over the place like they lived here, too. Sometimes, when he was younger, they'd seemed more welcome here than he did. Especially Uncle Dean. Not a real ghost-Sam had seen to that, of course, he would have done nothing less-but his presence was as thick in the house as anyone living.

Did Bobby have a single picture of anybody in Mom's family? Had he ever even seen one? Of course not.

"You're lucky it was the end of the semester," he said to the picture. His lectures had been done, and his students submitted their papers electronically, so he'd spent several nights here finishing grading, with Sam none the wiser.

Lucky that Kase had answered the phone, too. Bobby didn't answer unknown numbers, because Sam kept telling other hunters to call him for help, and it hadn't been Sam who called him this time. It had been a doctor at the hospital after the mailman found Sam collapsed in the kitchen. Bobby had just made his obligatory sort-of-weekly call home the night before. If Kase hadn't answered, that voice mail might have lingered for a couple of weeks before Bobby ever noticed it.

Three weeks. Twenty-three solid days of pretending, more than he'd had to do in years, answering to a name that was no longer his. Five in the hospital, eighteen here. Because he still couldn't say no. Because it was a son's duty to see his father taken care of, no matter how conflicted he personally felt about the man.

Because the frightened, heartbroken little kid inside him still hoped for an acceptance that never came.

He collapsed onto the sofa and for the fourth time in twenty minutes refrained from pulling out his phone to call Kase. I want to go home. I want to sit on my sofa and snuggle up with Kase and Tinkerbell and sleep in my bed and...forget. I just want to forget everything that ever happened in this house.

Was that the best way to think about one's father?

As his first therapist said, If he wanted you to think well of him, he should have done things differently.

Not abuse. Not the way most people would think. Bobby hadn't been starved or hit, seldom even got yelled at. In his own way, Sam loved him.

It was just.... Sam had no clue how to relate to a normal kid in a normal world, let alone how to raise one. He'd said it himself, more times than Bobby could count: John raised him to be a soldier. The whole point of that kind of training was that in times of crisis, soldiers didn't have to think, the training took over automatically.

Crises like, say, Mom walking out the door.

Neither one of them had realized exactly how much slack Mom was picking up until she was gone.

Bobby still wasn't entirely convinced he wouldn't find her corpse buried in the backyard. It would certainly explain why Sam kept wearing his wedding band; that was something widowers did. And why she hadn't said good-bye.

Oh, he knew the official story. He knew it very well. After weeks of fighting-itself unusual, because Bobby didn't remember any other fights like that in his entire childhood-she'd gotten fed up with Sam's habit of living in the past and left. She hadn't taken him with her because she knew Sam didn't care about her, but would come after her if she took their child.

She just vanished.

And Sam never even told him she was gone. The morning after she left had been breakfast and school as usual, the only unusual part the quiet. Every remnant of her but a handful of pictures was gone by the time he came home from school.

Somehow, in that grief-twisted brain of his, Sam thought this led to better father-son bonding, instead of making his son terrified that if he so much as breathed a contrary word, he'd vanish, too.

All parents had dreams for their children. Sam's dream was that his son-the son he'd named for his adoptive father and his brother, the son he called by his beloved brother's name-would become a hunter. Not in the way he'd been, skirting the edges of law and civilization and constant death, but something more respectable. Sam had dreams of revitalizing the Men of Letters network, of his son finally combining the dual Winchester and Campbell legacies into one. He'd just gotten too twisted up by his own grief for Uncle Dean to keep hunting solo and do it himself.

One thing had always been clear, though, even when Bobby was little enough that he still got bedtime stories: Sam missed the life. By the time Mom left, Bobby was well aware that only a reluctance to raise a child on the road, the same way he'd been raised, kept Sam from going back. If the wear and tear of Sam's misspent youth hadn't started catching up with him before he was even comfortably settled into his sixties, Bobby wouldn't have been able to lie about going on the road. Sam would have insisted on going with him, if only for a quick tour of the old haunts.

Parents all had dreams, but most parents learned to let it go if their child wanted something different.

His second therapist had suggested it was unfair to blame Sam. Clearly Bobby had wanted something of the legacy, since he'd kept the first and middle names Sam had given him-no matter that all the stories about Uncle Dean and Bobby Singer had created the cultural mythology of his childhood, like religion and TV shows and movies did for normal people. Surely it would have made more sense to change all the names and then lose Sam's phone number, if he wanted to really reject it.

His second therapist hadn't lasted very long.

Even now, he didn't want to burn it all down. All he'd ever wanted was the chance to be who he actually was-a kid who read his dad's books of monster lore because he was drawn to all the different languages, a student who fell in love with linguistics, a teacher and researcher who wanted to share that passion with his peers and the next generation-instead of a substitute for his dead uncle.

He didn't want to be alone.

It was easy to cut ties when you had a backup support system. Hell, Sam's own life was the perfect example of that; there was a reason Sam had been the one that rebelled. Without Uncle Dean? Sam and John might have killed each other, but would Sam have ever left?

Until he had Kase, Bobby didn't have anybody but Sam.

Whether it was a genetic Winchester weakness, this inability to face the world without family, something he'd absorbed from all the years of "your Uncle Dean and I" stories, or something from his mother, Bobby just wasn't that strong. He could cut the amount of contact, and he did, but he couldn't turn his back on his father entirely.

But he had yet to conquer that childhood terror of being vanished, that ten-year-old's fear that even the mildest contradiction would land him in a hole in the backyard. Spinning a lie, no matter how elaborate, was better than dying. By anyone's standards.

He came close to telling the truth, once. Just once.

Sam had been proud when he found out Bobby was acing his courses his freshman year. His classes included three different languages with three different writing systems, and Sam had been suitably impressed. Best five minutes of their entire relationship.

Then Bobby tested the waters by telling Sam that he planned to major in linguistics and Middle Eastern languages, tried to tell him that all his interest in the hunting library had been in the languages, and that he wanted to go for his master's.

All the times Sam had talked about John, about the fights they'd had, about the way he'd gotten kicked out over wanting to go to college, and the man hadn't even realized how very close he came to doing the exact same thing. He was so convinced that Bobby wanted to be a hunter that they wound up yelling at each other over what the most practical major was. If Bobby hadn't been on full scholarship, if Sam had held financial control over his education....

Which was why Sam Winchester died without ever learning that his son started going by "Bobby" in college, legally changed his surname after graduation, and married at twenty-seven.

The worst part of it all was that it wasn't even intentional. Sam had reacted solely by reflex, doing the exact same shit his father had once done. For whatever reason-grief, maybe, or some emotional damage from all those years of hunting and Hell-he'd never been able to follow the example of the man who had actually raised him, only the man who'd sired him. Bobby didn't know why the hell Sam had never been able to make that leap, or realize that his own childhood trauma was fucking up his relationship with his son.

And he didn't know why he'd kept hoping, right until the end, that somehow, Sam would finally get it.

God, I need a drink.

Except there wasn't any booze in the house. Liver damage was one of Sam's oldest diagnoses-drinking was epidemic among hunters-though it had been his heart that finally took him out. His health had forced him to give up alcohol years ago, and no temptation had been allowed in the house after that.

He could go get some. He needed to get something to eat, anyway; there hadn't been much in the house when he got here, because Sam had reached the point where he didn't have any appetite. Bobby hadn't dared leave long enough for a real grocery run, so he'd been living off delivery and what was in the freezer, and he was very tired of pizza and sandwiches and packaged dinners. He'd kill for his mother-in-law's lasagna right now, even with the damn mushrooms and spinach.

Sam didn't need him anymore. There was no reason he couldn't go out.

"I," he announced to that goddamned picture, which was going to burn even if the house didn't, "am going to go look up what the nearest decent steak place is and get something to eat, and then I am going to stop by the nearest liquor store, and I am going to bring as much of it as I can carry into your house and this time, you can't stop me." He pushed himself to his feet. "And yes, I apparently have the emotional maturity of a twelve-year-old. By the way, I'm also gay and married and not a hunter. I have a doctorate and fucking tenure! Youngest ever at my school! In history, not just my department! Do you know how many languages I can read? That I can speak? Including the dead ones? You could have been proud of that, not whether I can fucking shoot a ghost!"

The picture, of course, said nothing, but damn if he didn't feel better.

"And my name's not Dean Winchester anymore!" That came out as a shout.

It was followed promptly by the doorbell. Shit. That was just what he needed, a noise complaint. A couple of the neighbors already thought he was nuts.

He wasn't expecting who he found on the other side of the door. There was a blue car in the driveway behind his, and it looked just like-

"Kase?" he yelped, staring in shock at his husband. "What-"

That got him the smile he loved so much. "I had a couple of weeks' leave coming. I figured we could finish this together."

"But-" He'd told Kase to stay home. The cat was temperamental, it was a long-ass drive, Kase had his own job to worry about-

"Elaine's checking on Tinkerbell. She'll make sure she's properly spoiled till we get back. And Mom made you lasagna. Just the way you like it, no mushrooms, no veggies."

"She did?" Susan only made lasagna for the big holidays, it was too time-consuming, and she never altered the recipe.

The kindness was the final blow to his composure. He threw his arms around his husband and started crying. Let the lady across the street glare.

"Looks like I got here just in time," Kase murmured, sliding his arms around him. "It's okay, cariad, I'm here. I've got you."

"It's not for him," Bobby said into Kase's shoulder. Kase's shoulders were very understanding when he babbled at them. "It's not."

"It doesn't have to be," Kase said softly, and dammit, that just made him cry harder. Kase murmured something in what sounded like Quenya, the little literary show-off, and stroked his hair and just let him cry.

Finally he got himself back under control. "Feel better?" Kase asked.

"Could use a drink."

Kase snorted. "Your liver is going to eat your pancreas one of these days. Come on, let's get inside before the lady across the street decides to call the cops on me for consoling while black."

"Huh?"

"Move, amado, and close the damn door."

"Oh. Right. Sorry. It- I'm not all here." He let Kase into the house, made a rude gesture at the lady across the street, who was still staring at them, and slammed the door shut. "How did you even get down here this fast? It's only been-"

"I was already on my way when you texted." He took in Bobby's expression. "You didn't really think I was going to leave you here alone with your dad dying, did you? The way you've been going downhill? Your call the other night scared the shit out of me."

Oh, right. That had been the one where he was in the backyard, in the pouring rain, kicking an innocent maple and ranting in frustration in every language he knew that wasn't English, so that he wouldn't scandalize any neighbors who might try to poke their noses into it. Sam had found the breath and awareness to tease about the possibility of grandchildren. You have a grandkitten was not the answer he wanted. "I told-"

"I know, I know, you didn't want him to meet me. I was going to go buy some scrubs and be a fake nurse if I had to. I wanted to be here for you. And I know what kind of mess cleaning out a house is, cher, or don't you remember what happened when my granddad went?"

"It's my mess, Kase, not yours. I can do this by myself."

"Yeah, well, I don't want you to."

The tears almost broke free again, and to force them back, he gave his husband a kiss. "I love you."

"How's the tree?"

That made him laugh. "I think it came out better than I did. My toes are turning purple."

Kase rolled his eyes, but followed him to the living room. He stopped there, taking in all the medical equipment. "Was he not as sick as they initially thought? Is that why it took so long?"

If Sam had been less sick, things would have gone ten times worse. Sam would have been able to ask more questions, would have wanted details. "No, he just kept fighting it. The hospice nurse told me that sometimes, if you give them permission- Sometimes people feel like they have to hold on. I guess he was like that. He woke up a little, I told him it was okay, and he just...held my hand and went. Peacefully."

"And you were actually able to do that for him," Kase said gently, and pulled Bobby close. "I am so proud of you."

"I couldn't tell him. Every time I tried, I choked."

"That doesn't matter now."

"But-"

"Bobby." Kase took his face in his hands. "Listen to me. You always do things the hard way, and you make the freshmen live in terror, and you can be harsh and even mean if you think it's necessary, but you are never, ever cruel. And it would have been cruel to force that confrontation now, the shape he was in. You wouldn't do that to somebody you actually hated, and whatever else, you didn't hate the man."

"No," Bobby admitted. His eyes stung again. He hadn't expected to cry this much. He shouldn't be crying this much. "But God, Kase, sometimes I wanted to."

"Sh." Kase kissed him, long and lingering. "Come on," he said finally, "we have work to do."