SPN Fic: To Everything A Season (10/14) (Gen, R, FutureFic)

[dodger_winslow]

Here's the next part. Just fair warning so you don't get mad at me: This one doesn't actually end at a bona fide chapter mark ... it more leaves your right smack in the middle of a scene. It does so because where the chapter mark is SUPPOSED to be is now 30K characters past what LJ will allow me to post in one shot. So I'll try not to be too long posting the next piece, but fair warning that this is a bit like a season ender cliffhanger where a semi charges into an Impala ... only you won't have to wait three months for the resolution. :D

(And yes, that's now a 14 *hangs head in shame*)

Title: To Everything A Season (Part 10/14)
Author:
dodger_winslow
Challenge: Firsts Chart: First Memory
Genre: Gen (some het, not graphic), FutureFic
Word Count: 110,000 (total)
Pairings/Characters: John/OFC, Dean/OFC, Sam/OFC (hey, did I mention it was Future Fic?)
Rating: R
Warnings: Language, sexual situations (not graphic)
Spoilers: Oh yeah. Everything S1
Disclaimer: I don't own the boys, I'm just stalking them for a while.
Timeline Note: Set seven years after the events of Devil's Trap. John, Dean and Sam all survived the crash to hunt down and destroy the Demon. For Sam, life goes on. For Dean, life stalls. For John, life has no more meaning, and he begins to self destruct.

Summary: A little piece of good advice: Never hunt a wendigo when you're drunk.

Part 10

John shifted slightly on the bed. Julie touched his face, soothing him, talking to him, reminding him that she loved him, that she was waiting for him, that she needed him.

He settled again. Sank back into the still he’d been for hours.

The still of a man lost.

The still of a man gone.

She wondered if this was how it happened the day Sammy was born. If he’d driven out of the hospital parking lot and then just turned himself off. If he’d known where he was going while he went there, or if he just drove like a man in a waking dream. If he drove the entire time he was gone, or just long enough to get somewhere and become this.

Someone gone.

Someone off.

Someone no longer.

They still didn’t know exactly what happened that day - where he went, how he found his way back - and likely never would. Danny said to just consider themselves lucky he came back at all. Lucky that some remnant of his life with them was strong enough to survive the break, to be there when he came up for air, to show him the way home - back to her, back to them - before the memories caught up and tried to drag him under again.

He didn’t know where he was when Danny found him crouched beside his car in the parking lot, barely lucid, frantic with pain and memory, completely unaware he was ever even gone, breaking again, breaking even as Danny found him, breaking as he remembered Dean, remembered failing Dean, remembered losing Dean ….

But he was there. He came back, and that’s what mattered.

It was all that really mattered.

For Julie, the memory of holding her hours-old baby in her arms, listening to Danny tell her John was gone and they couldn’t find him was as sharp today as it had been the day it happened. The memory of Danny sitting down on the bed beside her to say he didn’t think John was ever coming back; of Danny taking Sammy and handing her off to one of his nurses so he could put his arms around her, so he could hold her together, keep her from falling apart when he said he didn’t think John even existed any more the way they knew him, that whatever broke John in the Ochoco two years earlier had broken him again, that their life with the John they knew was over … those memories were equally sharp. Equally clear.

More clearly than the excitement in John’s eyes when she told him she was pregnant; Julie remembered the flash of memory on his features as he watched Sammy’s head crown, remembered the escalation of pressure from his hand in hers that he stopped almost before it started, but not quite. More clearly than the pride in his laugh as he told Danny being a surgeon wasn’t all that hard while he cut his daughter’s umbilical cord; she remembered the way he flinched when Danny put Sammy in her arms, then tried so hard to look like he hadn’t.

More clearly than the way John was looking at her when he got down on one knee to propose, right in the middle of the café during lunch hour, choosing the busiest day, the busiest time, her father watching from behind the register, nodding his approval, her brother there for the only Chamber of Commerce meeting he’d ever actually attended, trying to look surprised and failing only because she saw him too clearly to ever buy his clever illusions of pretense; she remembered the way Danny was looking at her when he told her their greatest fear had come true, trying so hard not to buckle under the weight of that himself, under the weight of his own loss, under the weight of her loss, under the weight having to be the one to tell her John was lost.

More clearly than she remembered holding Danny as a child, holding him as he sobbed in a hospital waiting room, broken to the life of a motherless son before he’d learned how to ride a bike; she remembered Danny holding her as a new mother, holding her as she cried for a husband inexplicably vanished, the happiest day of her life becoming the worst when something she’d always known could happen finally did. She remembered Danny being the strong one this time, the loss being equal for him, but the blow being more crushing for her; even as she remembered doing the same for him when they were children, her mother’s loss an equal pain to her, but more crushing for him, more devastating, more destructive.

More comprehensive to everything he held dear and sacred and irreplaceable.

Julie had always been part of the town, part of their world; but Danny never was. He lived inside himself after their mother died, never letting even their father see who he really was again, grieving so hard he never recovered, never came back from wherever he’d gone to hide from the pain.

Her father moved them here to give Danny a place to start again. Someplace new where it was small and quiet and where every brick and tree and car didn’t remind them of what they’d lost. Remind Danny of what had been taken away.

He was so bitter for so long. So bitter still - something those who looked at him never saw for what it was. Because his anger - his pain - manifested itself as a passion for healing, for saving, for overcoming, for winning; Danny was seen as a man he wasn’t and had never been. And he fostered that misperception: played to it, fed it, let it grow in around him until the truth of who he was became virtually invisible to anyone who didn’t know exactly where to look, and exactly what to see while they were looking.

But while others mistook him as they found him, Julie watched Danny as he truly was. She watched him grow more isolated within himself as his place in the community became more revered, as the town looked to him to be what he appeared and nothing darker, as those who presumed to consider themselves his friends sought an emotional intimacy he fended off by appearing as they saw him, never showing them who he really was, never risking a connection made, letting them know only the man they thought they knew, never letting them see the one they never knew they never saw.

Danny learned the game early and, like everything he did, he played the game well.

He was the town’s favored son by the time he was ten. The kid next door who always opened doors and never failed to say thank you. The one who scooped driveways after a heavy snowfall without ever ringing a doorbell to ask if he could, or to request payment for things he wasn’t asked to do. The flirt who never dated in high school, but who didn’t drew speculation about why so much as comments about what a shame it was. The football star, the baseball star, the academic wonder.

Everyone’s friend, everyone’s confidante. The one who never told secrets, but who always listened, who always cared, who never judged.

He was the college boy who left to become a doctor, then came back home to practice. The man who made things happen with his own money by finding needs and addressing them without asking permission first, or soliciting help from others before committing his own time, his own sweat, energizing the town to its own better interests simply by starting something others would continue once he showed them what to do. The doctor who attracted investors to build a research hospital almost two hours from the nearest major city, then adjusted the mission of it to include a local trauma center predicated on the hub of his own expertise, and to include other services more relevant to the town and the local area, not to mention the mass of tourists who came and saw and conquered themselves into a state of medical need in the Ochoco year after year after year.

The hospital administrator, slash chief of surgery, slash chief of emergency medicine who was always on-call when someone was in need or in pain, when someone was dying or trying to live or just looking for a bandaid and an ear to tell their troubles. The surgeon who spoke personally to the family of every patient lost in his hospital, who never said sorry, there’s the waiting room; but rather explained what happened in as much or as little detail as they needed, sitting with them as they took the first shot - the hardest shot - of the worst day they would ever know and staying until they were ready for him to go.

He was the neighbor who still scooped driveways after a heavy snowfall without ever ringing a doorbell; the cut-up who tortured children with the sharp stick of his wit, driving them to know more just so they could keep up with his questions, so they could stay with him when he took them interesting places in their own minds just to show them what they didn’t know they could do; the notoriously meeting-intolerant civic leader who helmed the Chamber of Commerce in abstentia because the weight of his name wielded properly in this town could get anything done that could be done, and a few things that couldn’t.

In popular perception, there wasn’t a soul in town who didn’t know Danny. But in truth, there wasn’t a soul in town who actually did.

Not until John came to town. When John showed up in Danny’s ER, cursing the staff in text-book perfect Latin and breaking bones while he bled out to an eventual cardiac event, no one but Julie had truly seen her brother in more than thirty years.

But John saw him. John understood him. And John needed him.

Almost as much as Danny needed John.

Julie realized suddenly that she was crying. She reached up, wiped the tears away. The baby inside her kicked, protested. Lifting her husband’s lax hand off the bed, she placed it on her belly. The baby settled. His name was Danny. John chose the name, but he insisted they tell Danny it was her idea.

She put a hand on John’s face again, ran her fingers across his skin, stroked his beard, touched his lips.

He didn’t move. Didn’t respond.

The baby kicked. John shifted. Julie held her breath for several moments. Nothing more happened. He didn’t move again. His level of awareness didn’t change, his hand didn’t lose the dead weight of itself against her belly.

The baby kicked again. This time, he didn’t respond at all.

Dean’s wife was pregnant, too. Dean’s Mary. Sam told them about her last night, told them what a good match she was for Dean, how strong, how fearless, how much she wouldn’t take the kind of crap Dean was prone to pass out like candy if you let him.

He’d laughed when he said that. Laughed that a brother he’d previously considered untamable turned out to be so easily domesticated by a woman who could match him wit for wit, keep up with him stride for stride. He told them how excited Dean was at the prospect of becoming a father; how much he was anticipating the birth of his first child and how much of a pain-in-the-ass he was being, trying to protect that child and the woman bearing it from such threatening things as inconvenient breezes and the irritations of junk mail and too much bass in the car stereo when it played.

That was what Julie knew about Mary when she watched the other woman struggle out of a car parked down the street as Dean charged at John, tearing his father out of a memory of one son to break him with the memory of another.

Julie wondered if Dean’s child had a name. She wondered if Dean knew what it was like to lose the one person who meant the most to you in the world.

All she knew of Dean was what Sam told them, and what Danny said in his defense; but she felt she’d known Sam for most of her life. Certainly far longer than a mere twenty four hours, give or take a few.

Sam was such a gentle man, so much like John in so many ways it was easy to recognize him in the café, easy to see in him a child she never knew existed until he showed up. He tried so hard to do the right thing - for his father, for her, for his brother - that she wasn’t sure he’d even considered what he needed until after his wife showed up to remind him he mattered, too.

She wondered if Dean was a gentle man. If Dean ever tried that hard to do the right thing for his father, for his brother.

She wondered if Dean’s wife loved him the way Meredith loved Sam.

When they were talking in the café, Sam told John his marriage wasn’t about love so much as it was about family … something that bothered John so deeply he’d repeated it to her in the dark that night, asking, "How does a good kid like that get so screwed up? How can he possibly think marriage is about anything but love? but need? but being there, one for the other?"

He’d also told John he didn’t need his wife. That she was the mother of his children, but not the one he looked to when he needed something for himself.

Sam was wrong. Julie saw it the moment Meredith showed up at the door. He needed his wife, he just didn’t know it.

But Meredith did. She saw every need Sam had, and she filled them without ever requiring him to ask. All she wanted was to be there for him. And when he let her, she was. Unfailingly. Unreservedly. Unapologetically.

John had taken quite a shine to her for that reason and that reason alone. He’d put his every effort into charming her, putting her at ease, trying to tease her into relaxing from the relatively high-strung poise she maintained as if her body lacked the capacity to slouch, to slum, to enjoy itself in jeans and a tee-shirt rather than maintaining the elegant polish of her perfectly pressed blouse and impeccably tailored skirt.

Julie had seen women of Meredith’s type actively set John’s teeth to edge as they passed through the café on day trips, agitating him with their judgmental aires, irritating him to a verifiable state of grumpy in how much undue attention they paid to matters of such stunningly inconsequential detail to his way of thinking; things like letter-perfect makeup, or expensive shoes, or whether the fork was set on the proper side of the plate.

That their elegant silk blouses put them to a panic at the mere whiff of the lush, vibrant marinara sauce John liked to recommend to anyone ill-advised enough to wear white in the presence of a man possessing such a well-developed talent for mischief and mayhem was their greatest weakness in his eyes. It was all the reason he needed to beg off his duties in the café, leaving them and their fucked-up priorities to a wife he considered more amenable to such things merely because he never took the time to think about whether she tolerated them more easily or just with less commentary.

But John made an exception for Meredith. He met her - knowing what Sam said about her and having that impression re-enforced by the way she dressed, the way she held herself, the precise perfection of every single detail of her appearance - and saw who she was in spite of it. Without having any idea how clearly Meredith’s priorities showed in her response to seeing a man she thought dead alive - unexpectedly, jarringly, heart-stoppingly alive -John still saw in her exactly what Julie saw. Without benefit of witnessing a response that considered only what Sam might need in this situation so blind in the coming and so personal to her in the arriving, John still saw a woman who deserved Sam if for no other reason than how much she obviously loved him.

And how clearly she saw him in ways no one else did.

Meredith saw Sam the way he was, not the way he wanted to be seen. She saw a man so hidden from everyone but himself that no one ever really knew who he was. No one but the one person who didn’t want anything from him except who he was.

Julie recognized that clarity of vision in Meredith because she witnessed it daily in the way John saw Danny.

In the way John never failed to recognize the reality of Danny even when the things he did and said were at their most misdirective. In how John could witness Danny being polite and see him seething at a narrow-minded diatribe; in how he could witness Danny offering the solace of a quiet passing to a grieving parent and see the reality of shrieks and pain and blood the ilk of which invariably put Danny back to cursing God as a vindictive, capricious, fucked up, sadistic, mother fucker of a son of a bitch in the privacy of his own home; in how he could witness Danny teasing Sammy to a frustrated distraction and see a childless father mourning what he could never have.

Sammy jumping in the middle of Danny at six in the morning after he’d fallen asleep at their place rather than going home, Sammy grabbing Danny’s hand and dragging him to see the hippopotami at the Portland zoo, Sammy insisting that Danny dance with her at Alice’s wedding reception, the first dance, not the second or the third - these were the kinds of things John did because of what he saw. Times he re-directed his child to his brother-in-law, times he shared being a father because he had it to share, and he could see Danny needed it in ways he wouldn’t ever speak about to anyone.

Not to her. Not to John. Not even to his wife.

They’d spent every Christmas eve since Sammy was born at Danny’s, failing to actually start home until it was really too late to do anything but stay overnight and wake to stockings and Santa gifts on Danny’s hearth rather than their own, spending the day decimating wrapping paper in Danny’s living room rather than their own. Julie had morning sickness and John had one of his headcrackers on Sammy’s fist day of pre-school, leaving only Danny to take her in, to convince her to stay while she was hanging on to him for dear life, crying into his shoulder the way a daughter cries on her father when she’s scared even though a moment before, she was excited and impatient with the rule about holding hands while crossing the street.

Only she hadn’t had morning sickness that day, and John didn’t have a headcracker.

They were naming their son Danny, and John had already bought him a doctor’s kit with a plastic stethoscope for when he got old enough to use it. Just last week, Sammy took her Uncle Danny to show-and-tell day at John’s suggestion, and Danny would never know he was the second man asked.

Those things and a hundred more were always her ideas in the telling, but they were always John’s mercies in the doing. Always things he saw and acted on, never even considering what it might have been like to be with his daughter on her first day of pre-school, or to teach her how to ride a bike before her feet could reach the pedals, or to have his son aspire to be his daddy one day instead of an uncle with a real stethoscope who saved lives for a living instead of just saving men no one else ever even saw.

And how John saw Denny was how Meredith saw Sam.

Because in so many ways, Sam was Danny. She’d seen it a hundred times in only knowing him a day.

She saw it in the way he interacted with John in the café: in how capable he was of being seen the way he wanted to be seen rather than how he had to be feeling as a son speaking to a father who didn’t even know who he was. She saw it in the way he accepted her without judging her against the memory of his mother, or judging his father for finding happiness in a wife and a child he didn’t know. She saw it in the way he delighted in Sammy rather than resenting her for taking his place, in how he offered to walk away and never come back if that’s what the stranger who loved his father asked him to do.

And most tellingly, she saw it in the way he talked about his brother, lived for his brother, considered his brother with every action taken before bothering to consider himself. It was how Danny treated her, how Danny constructed his life around what was best for her, considering every choice he made in the context of how it affected her even to the extent of putting his wife second, and himself behind them both.

That was who Danny was: Her brother before himself. She was everything to him, and she knew it. It was his way of being for her what she’d been for him when they were growing up.

And she’d seen that in Sam the first time he said Dean’s name. She saw it when he dealt with Dean over the phone, and again when he broke down at the prospect of Dean needing him and him not being there.

Dean was to Sam what she was to Danny. She saw that before she ever met Dean; before he showed up in the middle of the street, charging at John like a man driven beyond his capacity to control his own actions only to freeze up three steps short of him, a child suddenly, so vulnerable John could have broken him with a single word, with a single expression.

John shifted. Groaned. His hand moved in hers, tried to pull away. He twisted in the bedcovers, his legs restless, his shoulders rolling to one side before they settled back to flat. He groaned again, louder, like he was in pain. His eyes fluttered, but they didn’t open before he fell back to still.

It was happening. He was coming back.

"John?" she whispered, leaning closer to him, holding his hand with one hand while stroking his face with the other. Though still pallid nearly to the point of grey, his skin was warmer than it had been since he collapsed. When her fingers got close to his eye, he moved, adjusted defensively. It was one of the things Danny told her to look for: indications his body was reconnecting to his senses, that his mind was beginning to register input and assign it meaning. The blink response. The flinch reaction.

Julie held tighter to his hand, willing him to wake up, willing him to come back to her the same man he’d been when he woke up this morning, kissing her a slow, lazy good morning before he leaned over to sing about the halls of Montezuma and the shores of Tripoli to her belly as he had every morning since the sonogram told them the baby was going to be a boy.

The increase in the pressure of her grip got a response. John tried to pull his hand away again, protesting contact without context. He said something she couldn’t understand. It was just a mumbling of sounds on his lips; but it was the first real indication he’d made to prove he was still inside his body, that he still existed in any form at all; and it felt profound, accomplished, jubilant.

Terrifying.

He was coming back, waking up. But who he was now could be someone she didn’t even know. Someone so different from the man she married as to be completely unrecognizable. Someone she would look at and see a stranger looking back.

Danny warned her how this could play. He tried to be gentle, to be compassionate; but he didn’t step away from what they all saw as John collapsed, and the odds of it being an indicator of what they could expect when he woke again.

The memory of her husband breaking apart was acid in her every awareness. His knees giving out, his eyes rolling back in his head, his body going slack in the grip of two sons who were already bearing the entirety of his weight in their hands.

The sound of his voice when he called for Dean, and then Sam, and then Dean again had hit her so hard she’d almost collapsed herself; would have if not for Danny on one side and Meredith on the other. But it was nothing compared to the sound he made just before they lost him. A gutteral sound, an inhuman sound; the sound of a man breaking at such an essential level that anyone who heard it knew he was gone, over, lost, done.

Broken.

"Mary," he whispered.

She thought she was ready for this. As prepared as anyone could ever be for the ghosts of the past to rise up, turning from the intangible specters of her husband’s night terrors into the tangible flesh and blood of his half-forgotten sons.

As prepared as anyone could ever be for two strangers to show up on her doorstep, bringing with them everything her husband left behind when he broke to the fracture of the man he’d once been. Bringing with them everything that shattered her husband into so many pieces the first time he broke that no one could possibly find them all, collect them all, put them all back together again.

Bringing with them everything that could take what she and Danny had found - what they had collected, had put back together again - and shatter it all over again; powdering it to dust this time, destroying even the shards of her husband so completely that even the haunted man she and Danny managed to re-construct from the fractured remains of the gentle, funny, kind, loving man John should have been couldn’t exist any longer.

She thought she was ready for that - if not for the reality of it, at least for the possibility of it - but she was wrong. Sitting here, his child restless in her belly, his hand coming alive in hers now rather than existing as dead weight; Julie realized the only thing she wanted was for it to all be back the way it had been.

She wanted John to be the man who had to take his wedding ring off before he could do more than kiss her at the front door. She wanted him to be the man who had to step away from her the first time he tried to make love to her, and who responded to that failure by trying again once he caught his breath, by refusing to let an embarrassment own him, by refusing to let it scare him off, or turn him aside, or change what he wanted once he let himself admit what it was, let himself see she wanted it, too.

She wanted him to be the man who found her father two hours dead and gave him CPR for twenty minutes anyway, thinking he could make a difference, wanting so much to make a difference for her, for Danny, that he wouldn’t stop until Danny showed up, wondering what was keeping his three-legged-race partner from the fourth of July picnic, only to find his father dead and his best friend grey with the effort of trying to save someone already stone cold and growing colder by the minute.

She wanted him to be the man who wouldn’t stop even when Danny called the time of death and told John to stop, told him he had to stop, that it was over and it was okay, that he’d done everything any man could have done. She wanted him to be the man who wouldn’t stop even then until he heard Danny starting to break apart, who wouldn’t give up on saving a father already gone until he realized saving Danny had to take priority; so then he did stop - he made himself stop - and the two of them sat together on the floor of a café closed for the holiday, crying for a man both of them loved even if that man never really knew who either one of them was.

She wanted that man back, wanted him back more than she’d ever wanted anything in her life. And if that meant getting him back wounded, half broken, haunted by what he needed to remember and couldn’t, bereft of children he needed and who needed him, then that’s the way she wanted him.

It was something she wanted to live with now, something she wished she’d never tried to fix by approaching a familiar stranger in the café and offering to share the man she loved and the father of her children with sons he didn’t even really remember he had.

Sons who thought him dead, or were willing to pretend they did.

Sons who would have walked away and never come back if she’d only asked.

She wished so much that she’d asked.

Knowing what he would look like when he broke again; knowing how it would sound when she lost him to a memory he couldn’t live with remembering; knowing how it would be to see what Danny saw that day in the hospital when John snapped right before his eyes and walked away like he didn’t know who he was or where he belonged or why he was alive or how anyone could possibly need him to be alive …

Knowing how that would feel now, and how frightened she would be that the man she loved was gone and wasn’t ever coming back, she would have held her silence in the café and let Sam walk away. God help her, she would have told him to walk away the same way Sam would have walked away, to protect Dean’s father the same way Sam was trying to protect Dean.

It wasn’t her right, wasn’t her choice; but she would have done it and considered it rightly done, if she’d only known then what she knew now.

That remembering Dean would break him.

"Mary," John said again, more clearly, more aware. It was her every insecurity put to a single word. He was holding on to her hand now rather than trying to pull away. Holding on to her, holding on to Mary.

"It’s all right, John," she whispered, returning the pressure of his grip, crying as she touched his face, ran her fingers along his skin. "I’m here, John. I’m right here."

His eyes fluttered again. He groaned, deep and low in his chest, a coarse rattle of pure sound that spoke of pain in a way words couldn’t. His lips parted as he drew a deep, gasping breath; coughed; drew another.

Motion began seeping into his extremities, crawling from his center mass out, infecting him with escalating indications of life, of protest, of pain. His legs, his arms began to twist like a man trying to find himself in a void of nothing, small movements of simple, essential body identity establishing itself in relationship to his surroundings. His neck stretched, his back arched, his head shifted slightly to the left, then slightly to the right, then settled back into the depression in his pillow.

He was coming around.

Danny told her it would take hours, even after he began showing the first signs of awareness. That he’d rise slowly through a dozen different layers of awareness like he had when he first began waking in the hospital after more than two weeks in a coma.

But it wasn’t going to take hours. It was going to take minutes, if even that.

He was coming back to her now - right now - rising through those layers of awareness like someone cut him free from an anchor in the bottom of an ocean. He was coming home, his body waking up, his mind reconnecting, his world becoming real again.

Julie held tighter to his hand, repeating his name, reminding him how much she loved him, touching his face, calling him back to her so he could find his way through the darkness to where she was waiting.

Waiting in an agony of terror, knowing when he woke, when the man she loved opened his eyes and looked her, he might not even know her name.

*

He woke slowly, not sure what was going on, not sure where he was or what his name was or why he felt like he’d been beaten with a baseball bat and then run over by a semi.

Several times.

His thoughts milled around in his head, trying to find a place to land, a place to take up residence, sink roots, start making sense of the senselessness. He could hear someone talking to him, but he wasn’t sure who it was - who she was - or why she was calling him John and running her hands along the sides of his face like she gave a shit whether he lived or died.

No one gave a shit. He’d pushed away anyone who tried a long time ago. The only one who even bothered to pretend any more was Dean, and even Dean was done with him now, finally broken beyond repair, finally driven into the ground by years of taking things he shouldn’t have taken, accepting things he shouldn’t have accepted. Any other kid would have walked away by now, would have learned their dad wasn’t worth the waste of their time he’d become.

But not Dean.

Dean was slow like that. Some would say stupid, even.

He took beatings like other kids took praise. He thrived on them, took pride in his ability to withstand the constant pain of his father’s dependence. No matter what John did, no matter how outrageous his demands, how selfish, how irresponsible, how dangerous, Dean always tried. He did his best, and when his best wasn’t good enough - because nothing he ever did was good enough - he licked his wounds and came back for more, tried again, failed again, licked his wounds and came back for more.

It was an endless cycle to which they’d fallen. Dean trying. Dean failing. Dean trying again. Dean failing again.

And now it was over. After all these years, he’d finally managed to break his son, finally given Dean enough shit that he’d had enough of his shit. The bitter edge to Dean’s voice still cut him, a mortal wound when he least expected it, putting him to a fatal gutting the one time he didn’t deserve it.

But he had deserved it, and he knew it. He’d deserved it for years. And now he had it: Had what he’d been looking for all these years.

Nothing.

Nothing left to care about: Nothing left to care about him. Nothing left to mourn: Nothing left to mourn him.

Dean had tried for so long, held on for so much longer than he should have, for so much longer than anyone else would have. But he was gone now. Turned away. Broken. So it was done. Over. There was nothing left to lose. Nothing left to live for. Nothing left to do but die.

All he wanted to do was die.

"John," she was saying, her hands still on his face, still trying to convince him he wasn’t a waste of time to everyone he’d ever loved. "Can you hear me? Open your eyes, John. Please, just open your eyes."

His name was John. He remembered that suddenly, took comfort in knowing it until he realized it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.

He tried to pull away from her, to sink deeper into himself, to willed it to be over, wanting it to stop, to just stop. To just lie down and stop.

If a man could die from the pure wanting of it - from the pure needing of it - he’d be long dead in the grave and forgotten. But it wasn’t that simple. It was never so simple as simply wanting it, simply wishing to no longer be.

And because it wasn’t, he came back to himself like a bad dream put to flesh, rising into awareness with the bitter, angry realization he wasn’t dead, only rotting from the inside out. His body ached with a pain he couldn’t recall ever feeling. His mind was at once numb and on fire, at once deathly silent and driven mad with the white noise static of unrelenting chaos.

He tried to think but couldn’t manage it. Instinct drove random speculations into a corner, cutting the wheat from the chaff until what was left was the only thing he actually knew, the only thing that made sense to him, the only thing he could discern at this moment in time as real rather than illusory, as tangible rather than a passing notion made of nothing more substantial than his own puerile imaginings.

He needed a drink. He needed a drink so badly he could taste it.

Her hands were an agitation on his skin. Just the feel of being touched was an intrusion, and he wanted it to stop. Wanted her to stop. The pressure of her fingertips made him remember Mary, and it hurt. Hurt like fire. Hurt like death.

"Get the fuck away from me," he whispered, his eyes still closed, his voice coarse and harsh when he spoke.

Her fingers stilled against his skin. For a moment, she didn’t move, didn’t speak; and for that moment, everything in him didn’t ache for it not being another woman’s touch, another woman’s voice.

"John?" she asked cautiously.

He opened his eyes, looked at her. She seemed familiar, but he didn’t recognize her in any way he could put to a specific memory. She wasn’t Mary, and that was all that mattered.

"How do you feel, John?" she asked. Her expression was worried, gentle, encouraging. The intimacy in her eyes was inappropriate. Whatever he’d done to her while he was drunk wasn’t something he was going to do while he was sober.

Most of the women he fucked in Mary’s stead were smart enough to know that.

When he was sober, touching a woman who wasn’t Mary wasn’t something he’d ever been able to do. Wasn’t something he’d ever even wanted to do. But his body betrayed him when he was drunk, telling lies about living and life, trying to find a place in him that could still feel and stir it to caring, or at least to wanting, or perhaps only to needing.

When he was sober, that place didn’t exist. But when he was drunk, it sometimes did; more often now than in years past, more intensely now than when his children were there to lessen the ache of being alone. And when it did show up - when it appeared like fucking Brigadoon in the mists of an alcohol haze, waking the numb of his body up for one day a year, or six, or eleven - he forgot why he’d blocked all the roads to get there or how wrong it felt to go there or be there. He forgot everything except the promise of warm it was against the constant cold of him; and there were times, not even remembering it, that he missed being there like a drowning man misses breathing air.

So on occasion, usually after a particularly hard hunt, or picking a fight with Dean, or just too long on the road - or at home - without connecting with anyone or anything he wasn’t looking to kill, he slipped into a bar somewhere in some town he didn’t know to check the shadows and the cracks in the floor for a woman world-weary enough to understand what they would be to him, fucked in another’s stead often enough to recognize on offer like that for what it was, and to not expect it to be something it wasn’t or last any longer than it lasted.

As long as it took to kill the urge to feel again.

The woman holding his hand didn’t look to be the type. She was fresher than his tastes normally ran, prettier than he liked when he was drunk, when he didn’t care, when it didn’t matter. There wasn’t enough mileage on her face to mark her worn, not enough bitterness to her expression to catch his eye.

She looked like someone he’d meet in polite company, or by introduction, or because some developing pattern led him to her doorstep to be there when something bad came for her. Maybe that’s how he met her … by finding her and saving her from whatever it was that had her marked. By buying her out of mortal danger with broken bones and spilled blood instead of finding her in the dark somewhere, picking her up and fucking her to the inevitable end of wishing he hadn’t, wishing he was stronger, wishing he could remember Mary clearly enough to kill the pain in him the alcohol couldn’t touch.

"John?" she said again, her smile still hopeful, her expression still thinking him worthy of the effort she was expending to remember his name.

John. She was calling him John, not Jack.

Maybe he had saved her then. Maybe there was the blood of some monster between them, or the spiritual residue of some pissed off supernatural entity dusted across her skin in a way that made her mistake him for someone to care about, someone to try and save the way he’d saved her.

He told women he picked up in bars, or on the road, or from a street corner, that his name was Jack. It began as his own inside joke, an amusement at their expense, justified by calling it fair warning they were thinking about fucking an ass. More subtle than Dick, more anonymous than John: He became Jack. Just Jack. My man, Jack.

Over time, though, it became his way of protecting himself against the sound of his name in another woman’s moan. Protecting himself against the intrusion of who she wasn’t ambushing him when he’d fallen far enough away from reality to blur the line between who his body fucked and who his mind loved, to lose track of inconstancy enough to mistake it for ardency, if only for long enough to remember the warmth a woman’s body, to feel the comfort it was simply to be touched.

Hearing Jack whispered, or moaned, or merely spoken against his skin as he gave in to the need to connect was just one more lie in a tapestry of necessary lies he’d woven across the decades of fake identities and phantom lives he’d never lived. But hearing John in a woman’s passion became a wound inflicted every time, the pain always more than the pleasure, the price paid in collateral damage always higher than the benefit derived from finding a place of memory suspended where time could be defied to a reality turned in on itself, a pale and fleeting reflection of what he used to know, of what he still needed; but at least a reflection. At least that, if nothing more.

So he became Jack to the small solaces he sought. Jack to the women he put to bed and fucked, leaving them to tangled sheets before the alcohol haze that allowed him moments of charade burned to a sobriety that punished failure with regret and indulgence with a sense of shame so intense it could ride him on binges that spent themselves to ignominious ends in places he didn’t recognize, with people he didn’t know, taxing even Dean’s capacity to find him in the filth, to recognize him in the darkness he’d become.

But to those he saved, to those he rescued, freeing them from whatever fate they might have otherwise met if he’d never been broken to a need to seek evil and destroy it … to those his name remained John.

And she was calling him John.

"John," she said again. "Talk to me, John. Please say something."

Calling him John in a tone he recognized, with an intimacy he missed, still touching him with hands that had started to move again, fingers that were trying to find him, trying to get his attention, keep his attention.

He’d fucked her. Or perhaps made love to her. He didn’t remember which - didn’t remember either - but he could see it in her eyes when she looked at him. See she thought he was alive when he wasn’t. See she thought she mattered when she didn’t.

She smiled a little, mistaking his recognition of what he’d done as a recognition of who she was. Looking in her eyes, he saw a reflection of himself there that was familiar. It made him think she was seeing a man he might have been once. A man who died the night Mary died, but who took more than twenty years to rot into a stench strong enough for others to notice.

Made love to her then. Drunk. Lying. Pretending she was someone else.

It shamed him to have her see him that way. Shamed him to know he was so empty of any true feeling for a woman that he could make her believe what was in her eyes. That having saved her, he was willing to let her think she could save him in return by caring about him.

That even drunk, he was willing to do that to her, let her pay him by seeking a small respite from the missing of Mary between her legs, by doing so in such a way that he let her believe - made her believe - it was anything more than what it was: a drunk fucking someone he didn’t know to the momentary relief of mistaking her for someone he did, the mercy of an alcohol haze playing pimp to the transaction, allowing him to believe what he wanted to believe, what he needed to believe, if only for a moment, and only in a state he wouldn’t remember later if he tried, which he never did.

Her hand was still resting against his face. He wanted it gone, wanted her gone.

"I said get the fuck away from me," he repeated.

She flinched. Her eyes lost their gentle intimacy, replaced it with a tangible pain that at least saw him more as who he was. As what he was. She pulled back, putting some distance between them. Her hand stayed on his face, but her fingers had gone cold against his skin.

He struggled to his elbows, barely making it. His head throbbed. It hurt to breathe, hurt to move. "Where’s my bottle?" he managed, his voice abraded in his throat, a raw wound put to an unnecessary salting.

She didn’t answer. He didn’t really expect her to.

He wondered if she’d known how drunk he was, how drunk he had to be to put his hands on a woman who wasn’t Mary. Perhaps at the time, she forgave him that as a failure of character, thinking he was a drinker, unaware he was a drinker to excuse himself for being a liar and a waste of any good woman’s time.

Looking around the small room, he tried to place himself, tried to figure out where he was, where his bottle was. His eyes burned as he searched, squinting against the almost unbearable brightness of an overhead light cutting through his head like holy water put to ancient evil.

The bottle would be somewhere close, but he couldn’t find it. The mere act of turning his head made him nauseous. The angles and corners of the room warped, twisted. He kept his balance through pure force of will, supporting his weight on both elbows, fighting off the nausea, struggling to focus, to search, to make sense of what he saw rather than letting it pass through his awareness without leaving a mark in its wake.

He needed his bottle; wanted it with a desperation that forced him to function, forced him to think through the pain, through the sick, through the cold of still air on clammy skin. Right now, it was all he cared about: locating his bottle, finding numb, getting drunk.

Erasing the memory of himself as he’d once been in her eyes.

Erasing the memory of himself as he’d become in Dean’s eyes.

She took her hands off him while he was looking for his bottle. She sat a little more upright on the edge of the bed, watched him from a little more specifically maintained distance. She was getting it now. Understanding he wasn’t the man she thought he was.

The man she wanted him to be.

"Where’s my bottle?" he asked again, willing to look at her now, wanting her to see him as he was. Bitter. Cold. Caring about nothing except where his bottle was, and how to get it back. Nothing she would want. Nothing anyone would want.

It was who he was. Who he wanted to be.

Nothing.

"Do you know where you are, John?" she asked.

He had no idea where he was. The room was vaguely familiar, but he had no idea how he got here.

When he first woke, he expected a thin mattress and cement blocks and an exposed crapper in the corner. When he realized it was a woman talking to him, trying to retrieve him from the dark abyss into which he’d no doubt voluntarily crawled, he expected a shelter of some kind, a room furnished in early garage sale, decorated in hopeful hopelessness, an arguable upgrade from the familiar don’t-give-a-fuck of the drunk tank.

When he finally got his eyes open, squinting past the cutting glare of the room’s lighting to see her, getting past the ache in his bones to feel the touch of her hands against his face and past the static of chaos in his head to hear the intimacy of her voice on his name, he realized he had to be in a home somewhere. The kind of home kept by a woman willing to take a drunk home and fuck him, he’d thought initially. But seeing her as she was rather than how he expected her to be, he began to expect curtains and dressers and framed pictures on the walls, matching sheets and soft pillows and a comforter like the one laid across his lower body.

He was in her bedroom, passed out on her bed, hung-over to a degree that surpassed even his own expectations of how far he could drink himself into a hole, and utterly devoid of any memory of meeting her, of saving her, of fucking her, of passing out on her.

"Sure," he said after a long beat. "Yeah. I know where I am. Your place, right?"

"Yes," she agreed. "My place."

"So where’s my bottle?" he asked.

"You don’t have a bottle, John. You don’t drink any more."

He laughed. The sound was coarse in the small room. Harsh. Almost ugly. "Is that your way of saying you poured it out?" he asked.

"You’ve been sober for almost six years now."

He laughed again. The pressure in his head was escalating. The pain was getting worse - much worse - and the need to escape it was intensifying to equal degree. "No offense, darling," he said, "but I wouldn’t be in your bed if I was sober when I met you. I’m just not that kind of guy."

His head was pounding now, trying to put him under. He needed a drink just to hear himself think. She seemed more familiar than she had a moment ago - like a picture slowly coming into focus - but he still didn’t know who she was, and he still didn’t give a damn. She didn’t matter. Right now, nothing mattered but getting a drink.

"Why don’t you lie back down, John," she said. "Close your eyes and relax. Danny’s just outside. I’ll get him for you."

"Who’s Danny?" he asked. Then, before she could answer, he revised, "Never mind. I don’t give a rat’s ass who Danny is. What I want is my bottle. Just give me my fucking bottle, and we’ll call it even, okay?"

"Even?" She arched a single eyebrow at him. It was such a familiar expression he could feel the resonance of it vibrating in his bones. He squinted harder, trying to see Mary in it, but nothing about the way she was looking at him reminded him of Mary. "What do you mean, ‘call it even,’ John?" she asked. "Even for what?"

"For whatever I killed. However I saved you from whatever it was that was haunting you. Or stalking you. Or hiding in your panty drawer, or trying to suck your soul out through your eyelids. Whatever the fuck it was, the charge is one bottle of whiskey. Bourbon. Scotch. I really don’t give a fuck as long as it burns on the way down and cuts the clatter in my head when it gets there. If it’s over 180 proof, I’m really not all that picky. I can be very easy to get along with when I’m drunk."

"You don’t drink any more, John," she said again as if saying it enough times made it true.

"Oh yeah. I forgot all about that. Getting sober. Growing wings. Sprouting horns." The room’s lights were cutting into his skull, turning the whole world to the blinding glare of morning sunshine glinting off a polarized windshield. He put one hand in front of his eyes, demanding, "Holy fuck, are you planning to land a plane in here or something?"

She hesitated, then said cautiously, like she wasn’t sure what he was asking, "No. Not today."

"Then can you turn the landing lights down a bit?"

"The landing lights?"

He gestured in the direction of the wall switch. "The lights. Turn off the fucking lights." He had to close his eyes. He didn’t want to, but he didn’t have any choice. "Please," he added, his voice harsh with strain. "If you don’t mind." The pain in his head was becoming unmanageable. It was all he could do to keep breathing through it, to concentrate enough to speak, to tell her what he needed.

The lights went out without warning like fire put to water. The pain in his head lessened almost immediately. It became easier to breathe, easier to think. The pressure behind his eyes eased, but not enough to make him feel it was safe to open them again. The tension hardening his muscles to cramps bled away, letting him settle back into the bed, relax into the support of his shoulders.

"Is that better?" she asked.

"Yeah. Thanks." He was breathing hard, like he’d run a hell hound to ground or put a poltergeist in its place. The ache in his body was getting worse, but the relief in his head was tangible enough to allow him to force his eyes open, to look for her, find her, see her.

She was coming back across the room, one hand on her belly to stabilize it as she moved. It was only then he realized she was pregnant. Very pregnant. Putting a hand to the mattress first for balance, she settled back in at his side, giving him a small smile when she saw him watching.

How he could have missed her being pregnant was beyond him. All he’d really noticed was her face, her eyes, her expression. The way she looked at him. The way she seemed to give a shit whether he lived or died.

That she looked pregnant enough to drop a kid in the next thirty minutes had somehow managed to escape him.

"Why don’t you lie back down, John," she suggested again.

He followed her advice this time, easing himself into the nest of pillows behind his head and shoulders. The scatter of static in his head was pulsing in time with his heartbeat. It was like being plugged into a TV set after the station had gone off the air. The constancy of the noise embattled his senses, made it hard to see what he should see, to hear what he should hear, to think what he should think.

He closed his eyes in self defense. The image of her settling to the edge of the bed - one hand on her belly, one hand on the mattress - stayed with him in his mind. It conflicted with the memory of her looking at him, touching him, speaking to him with an intimacy that was inappropriate when he was sober, but ten times more inappropriate if she was pregnant.

He tried to remember what he’d done for her here, what he’d killed to make her care enough about him to sit at his bedside, her hands on his face, her voice calling his name, trying to bring him back to her.

He couldn’t remember anything.

"Who are you?" he asked finally, his eyes still closed, the pain in his head trying to crack it open like a walnut.

"My name’s Julie," she said.

"Julie," he repeated.

"Yes."

For a long time, he didn’t say anything. She waited.

"I know you, don’t I," he said finally.

It wasn’t a question, didn’t need to be a question, but she answered it like one, saying simply, "Yes."

"I don’t remember you," he admitted.

"I know."

He forced his eyes open, forced himself to look at her. She smiled at him, but the look in her eyes was pure pain.

"I’m sorry," he said.

"It’s okay. It’s not your fault." She reached out and touched him again. Her fingers traced scars on his skin like it was something they were practiced at doing. He didn’t remember the intimacy any more than he remembered where he’d gotten the scars.

"Did I … help you?" he asked finally. "Kill something for you? Clear your house? Put something to a salt and burn?"

She frowned a little.

"You have no idea what I’m talking about," he said, realizing it slowly, his head hurting more for the knowing of it. Nausea twisted in his gut. He felt unstable, like someone kept changing the rules of the game while he was playing. "Then how did I get here?" he asked finally.

"It’s a long story, John. I’m going to go get Danny. I should tell him you’re awake."

She started to rise. "No. Wait." He caught her by the wrist, held on to her. He didn’t want her to leave; he didn’t know why. "Please." She capitulated after a beat, settling back to the mattress at his side.

He let her go, released her to prove he wasn’t a threat. He didn’t want to be seen as a threat. Not to her. "What happened to me? Did something get to me while I was hunting?"

"I should get Danny," she said.

"No. Don’t get anybody. Just sit with me for a minute."

She looked unsure.

"Please," he said again. He tried to smile at her; didn’t quite make it. The effort bought him some ground though. She nodded, quit trying to stand and walk away.

Though the pain in his head was less, the confusion was more, and growing worse by the minute. He needed a drink to quiet the static. He needed the buffer of alcohol between his senses and the world around him.

"I’m a little confused here," he admitted, trying to get her on his side in this. "I’m not sure where I am. How I got here."

"It’s okay, John. Let me go get Danny. He can help me explain it to you. He’ll know how to answer your questions, how to tell you what’s going on."

"I know you’re trying to help me," he said. "I can tell you care about me even though I have no idea why you should. I assume I did something to deserve that. Or maybe you’re just a good person, the kind who helps people just because she can."

She slipped her hand in his, held it, squeezed it.

"I really need your help right now, Julie," he said, careful with his words, careful with his tone. "I need my bottle. Please give me back my bottle."

She was shaking her head before he finished speaking. "I can’t, John."

"You can. All you have to do is give it to me. Or tell me where it is, and I’ll get it myself."

"John …"

He kept talking, talking over her to keep her from saying no again. "I don’t know what happened to me. To be perfectly honest, I don’t really care what happened. What I care about right now is getting my bottle back. That’s what I need. Just something to take the edge off. Something to help me focus, help me concentrate."

"John …" she started again.

"Listen to me," he interrupted a little sharply. She blinked, stung by his tone. He worked to control it, too keep it calm rather than letting it escalate to an accurate reflection of the need gnawing at his gut like an incubating demon trying to find its way out. "I’m sorry." He squeezed her hand a little, hoped she bought the contrition he was trying to sell. "Just listen to me for a second, okay? Please. My head is … it’s coming apart at the seams right now. Just talking to you is taking everything I’ve got. This happens to me sometimes, and the only thing that ever helps is whiskey, straight up. That’s what I need right now. If you want to help me, that’s what you can do to help me. Just give me back my bottle. That’s all I’m asking for."

"Your bottle won’t help, John. This isn’t a hangover."

"I don’t know what it is, but a drink will help. A drink always helps."

"What’s the last thing you remember?" she asked.

It took a concentrated effort to resist the urge to expedite matters, to grab her wrist again, put enough pressure there to scare her into doing what he wanted her to do. He didn’t want to scare her - didn’t want to hurt her - but the frustration of trying to reason with her had worn him thin, driven him to a deeper exhaustion than the one already heavy in every fiber of his aching body.

He just wanted his bottle. All he wanted was for her to give him back his bottle.

"I remember having a bottle," he said, working to keep his voice reasonable. "And I remember being old enough to drink out of it if that’s what I want to do."

"You don’t drink any more, John," she insisted.

"Sure I do, Julie. That’s all I really do. Drink. That’s who I am, how I live. It’s how I’ve lived for years."

"Not here," she said. "Not any more."

"I know you’re trying to save me, but I don’t want to be saved. I want a drink."

"This is your home, John. You have a family. You don’t drink any more. You’ve been sober for six years."

The static in his head spiked. Her words were like blows, staccato drumbeats against his bones that jarred him, keeping time to the lies she though he wanted to hear. He closed his eyes, tried not to panic at how hard it was getting to think, to breathe, to not blow up at her or just let go and slip away. He didn’t have a home any more. He didn’t have a family. What he had was a truck and a bottle, and only one of those was something he gave a shit about at this moment in time.

"Did you hear me, John?" she asked. Then she said again, "This is your home."

"I don’t have a home," he said.

"Yes you do. And a family that loves you."

"You mean Dean."

She didn’t answer. He waited for several second before willing his eyes to open again, forcing them to find her in the nebulous haze of a mind that didn’t want to focus any more. It was harder than it looked, and he only just managed it. She was watching him, but looked away as he blinked her back into focus. After a moment, she faced him again. Her smile was convincing; her eyes weren’t.

"Yes," she said. "I mean Dean. Do you want me to get him for you?"

John’s heart cramped in his chest. "Get him? Dean’s here?"
...