Apocrypha 4
He had lost track of how many times Dean had tried to call him over the past three months.
After leaving Pasadena, John had only two days of quiet before Dean realized he wasn't calling back. Then, the phone rang upwards of three times a day. On Halloween day, Dean called no less than five times, leaving a message each time.
The first message he left that day was nonchalant, as if he didn't care if John called him back or not. The next was terse, the third angry, the fourth worried, and the fifth downright pleading.
John erased all but the first one. That was the only one that really sounded like Dean, and in the following weeks he found himself playing it over and over for no good reason.
He did almost call back when Dean let slip in a message that he'd taken Sam with him to Jericho. It took John a while to figure out if he was worried or relieved. Worried, because despite everything, Sam was relatively safe at Stanford. Relieved, because it meant Dean was looking after Sam and Sam was looking after Dean. It also meant that the big thunderstorm and cold front that rolled through Palo Alto on the first of November was probably no more than just a storm. If Dean hadn't called him right after John saw the weather report, John would have headed straight out to Palo Alto.
Sam and Dean being together didn't mean John wouldn't worry, but it meant he didn't have to worry as much. He could concentrate on tracking down this demon and finding a way to kill it.
Then there was the question of why the demon was sowing crops of children and harvesting them with fire.
After a while, his phone stopped ringing so often. Instead of calling three times a day, Dean called once or twice a week, usually at an odd hour of the morning. John wasn't sure if the boy was drunk or simply trying to see if he could catch John in an unguarded moment.
Once this was over, and if he was still alive at the end of it, he would find his boys. He would explain everything. But not now. Not for a while, yet.
There was a message on his phone from Dean right now, but he would listen to it later. He had other things to be concerned about at the moment--such as being overheard.
The stone walls of St. Mary's Convent in Ilchester were thick, and the place had been long abandoned, but the shouts and screams and shattered furniture had been very loud.
All that was over, now. Even though the vestry was only lit by a Coleman lantern, the room seemed much less dark than it had a few moments ago.
"I don't... I don't understand."
John could barely make out the man's words. He sagged against his ropes, and John would have untied him if the ropes weren't the only thing holding him upright in the chair. The demon had not been kind to its meatsuit.
"No one does, Dwayne," John said, using the man's name for the first time now that it was truly Dwayne Pulaski he was talking to. He went to Dwayne's side, no longer worrying about scuffing the lines of the devil's trap chalked around the chair. The demon was gone, sent back to Hell where it belonged.
"What happened?" It was getting even harder to understand what Dwayne was saying. Given his injuries, he probably didn't have long. John kept pressure on the sucking wound in his chest, but the only thing it did was buy the poor bastard a few more minutes. "I remember. I killed my mom! Oh, god. I remember it. How could I--"
"It wasn't you," John said shortly. The information wouldn't be much comfort, so he didn't try to soften it. "That thing inside of you used you and it made sure you'd remember."
John couldn't say if that was worse or better than being made to forget. Remembering, you at least wouldn't have any questions or doubts.
"But you killed it."
"Yes," John lied. The exorcism had simply driven the demon away, but at least this kid could die thinking that everything had been set right.
Dwayne's mouth and chin were stained with his own blood. His mother's blood covered his Ravens hoodie.
"And it was going to kill you," he told John. "It wanted me to kill you slow."
"Me, specifically? It had you hunting me?" John asked. Dwayne's faint 'yes' was answered with a feral grin.
This was the fifth demon possession he had encountered in the last two months. Things were escalating, and if he was right, there were more demon possessions in the past five months than there had been than in the past ten years altogether. If this continued, 2006 would make what happened in 1995 look like a joke.
John had been hoping to learn something from this particular demon--it had claimed to be a lord of Hell--but even its escape would do him some good. It would let its masters know that John Winchester was poking around in Maryland, rattling cages in one of the few places he knew was important to the demon. What had happened in Ilchester back in the seventies was simply the last and goriest part of what had turned out to be a long cycle of deaths.
He had first found out about the convent desecrations when he started digging into his grandmother's history and found out that she might not have been so insane after all.
Maybe all of this was just him grasping at straws, or at some connection to his own past, but the murders had stopped just one year before the start of the first ten-year cycle ending in nursery fires.
What had surprised him was how far back the older cycle went. Ilchester, St. Louis, Chartres, London, Palermo, Venice... There were gaps in the historical record, of course, but there was a pattern of nuns and priests being ritually slaughtered in their convent chapels twenty-eight years apart--a 'Saturnian year,' Bobby had called it, rattling off all kinds of other numerological associations--going all the way back to the Borgia popes, and...
It didn't matter. The pattern had been broken, with what he'd found at Devil's Gate, was even more convinced it hadn't been broken so much as replaced with a new, subtler, and shorter pattern. It would take one more ten-year cycle to actually prove it was a pattern, but John intended to cut it well short of that.
John hadn't gone to Ilchester expecting to find out anything new. The rites he'd performed and symbols he'd scrawled (including some surprisingly effective nonsense that he'd pulled straight from his imagination) in the last place the pattern had repeated might have looked as if he was digging for information, but all he was doing was lighting a signal fire.
If all went well, it would also draw the demon's attention away from Toledo, and whatever the boys were up to out there. Fortunately, while Dean no longer seemed to be expecting a call back, but he still left perfunctory messages to let John know where he was and that he and Sam were okay.
"Well, no demon's going to get the better of me," John told Dwayne, but there was no response. It was over.
John closed Dwayne's eyes and did him the dignity of wiping the blood from his face before wrapping the body in a tarp and throwing it in the back of his truck.
John buried Dwayne Pulaski in the Patapsco valley, salting and burning the body before filling in the shallow grave. It had taken a long time to dig a deep enough hole in the frozen ground, but filling it in went much faster. Snow began to fall as he tamped down the last few shovelsful. Soon, it would completely cover the freshly-dug earth.
In a few weeks, John would phone in an anonymous tip so that at least Dwayne's surviving family wouldn't have to wonder any more.
The demon and its minions were not going to win. One way or another, John would stop it. Some day soon, he wouldn't be one step behind, he would be a step ahead.
He did what he could to ignore the nagging voice asking him exactly how he would accomplish this.
After the work of grave-digging, the January chill set in fast, and even the truck's heater couldn't drive away the bone-deep chill. When he got back to the Home-Style Inn he ignored the phone message in favor of a quick, hot shower. Between the time he got in the shower and the time he got out the number of messages on his phone had gone from one to two.
He held the phone between ear and shoulder as he pulled on a clean pair of jeans and listened to Dean explain that he and Sam were in St. Louis. They were also deep in the middle of a hunt, helping out a school friend of Sam's.
John frowned when he heard that last part. He had had his suspicions about some of Sam's 'school friends' in the past. Still, sometimes, a friend was just a friend even though it was safer never to assume that.
"And hey, I know you're keeping quiet for some reason, but would it kill you to find some way to let us know you you're okay?"
John deleted the message in a flash of irritation. If Dean knew he was keeping quiet for a reason, he should have known that was one hell of a stupid thing to ask. He sat down on the bed, pinching the bridge of his nose and reminding himself he had no good reason to be angry at Dean.
Fine. Dean was worried, and John could understand that. Maybe he could get word to Jim or someone once he thought it was reasonably safe. Four words, actually.
I'm okay.
And along with that, Back off.
He took a few deep breaths, letting the guilt and rage settle. He checked the phone again, half-expecting to see that the most recent call was also from Dean, but the number wasn't familiar.
For a moment, he wondered if it was the mystery caller from back in October. While the call had led him to find that something had emerged from the Devil's Gate, it hadn't borne any fruit since then. Every lead he'd followed on it had turned up a dead end. He'd all but given up trying to find out any more about it. But you never knew...
"This is Travis Donahoe." It took John a moment to remember who that was. It had been about five years or so since he'd worked with Travis. He felt another flash of irritation--the cell phone's message told people to contact Dean rather than leave him a message, so what the hell was Travis thinking?
"You probably remember I live..." There was a sound that made him think that Travis was trying to steady himself. "I'm just outside St. Louis, and I was watching the local news, and god damn it, John, can you just call me back?"
Travis's voice broke in a way John had never heard before. Something was wrong. Very wrong.
John shut the phone and stared at it as if it were a rattlesnake poised to strike. The heat of his annoyance had been replaced with a deep cold that no hot shower could erase.
St. Louis. Dean had called him from St. Louis.
He couldn't make himself move.
He did not want to call Travis back.
He had no choice.
After a few minutes, he was able to make himself imagine a scenario where Dean would be boneheaded enough to use one of John's friends to make the kind of call that John would be sure to return. No doubt Dean and Sam were sitting in Travis's trailer out in Fenton, waiting by the phone and drinking Travis's beer while congratulating themselves on how damned clever they had been.
Righteous anger and giddy relief buoyed him enough to make the call. It was picked up on the first ring and he almost said 'Hello, Dean,' but it was Travis who answered after all.
"John? That you?"
"Yeah, it's me." Everything about this was wrong. Travis usually called him by his last name, not his first. Travis never sounded this shaky, even when he'd been drinking. "Why the hell did you leave a message? Dean's working cases for me while I'm tied up with something."
The long silence dared John to break it, but Travis finally spoke.
"John, I don't know how to tell you this, but I saw it on the news, and I didn't want you to find out by accident. No one deserves that."
"Find out what?" He clutched the phone tightly so he wouldn't throw it across the room. He knew what he was going to hear, but until he heard it, it wasn't real.
"It was... I think it was a hunt gone wrong. I don't know what happened, but the police were involved, and Dean ended up in the middle of it. I hate to be the one to tell you this, but Dean's dead, John. John... You there, John? John? Aw, hell..."
Useless. Everything he'd done. All of it.
Useless.
"I bet it stings, John, knowing now that all you did was fail."
Azazel participates in the torture by showing him images that cut deeper than any of Alastair's blades. If it were not for the curtain, they would have flayed him to bits that could never be put together again.
He sees Dean, who is neither able to save Sam or kill him, fall to the ground with his neck snapped. He sees Sam's eyes go solid black, stark white, poison yellow.
Another image. Sam leans over Dean's body. Then he sits up and his mouth is stained red. His hand is wrist-deep in Dean's chest. The look on his face is nothing human.
Mary burns, over and over and over again. She dies screaming. She dies cursing his name.
He reaches out, and a red-haired woman bursts into flame.
"What was that, John?" Azazel is back in his favorite body. He even wears the janitor's uniform as if it were his ducal robes. "An old girlfriend? Hot date gone wrong?"
He rests a hand on John's forehead, and John's entire body feels like a scream of pain.
Azazel laughs. "Ah, yes. That. That's right. The whole reason I even considered for a moment that you had a chance of being any kind of opponent. Well, it did spice things up a bit. And I suppose I'm glad I didn't fricassee you right along with your slut wife, John. Did I ever tell you how she went around kissing other men?"
This time, Mary bursts into flame as she kisses Azazel, grinding up against him as his hand cups her ass. She breaks the kiss long enough to look at John with scorn, laughing as she burns.
When Alastair offers him a knife, John's hand clenches around the hilt. He squeezes it tightly, and it's a comfort to hold.
He comes very close to breaking (he needs to cut, needs to destroy), but he drops the knife and makes a feeble attempt to spit in Alastair's face.
Alastair slits his throat as Azazel treats him to another nightmare.
In this one, he reaches into Sammy's crib and holds Sammy's mouth and nose shut. He watches calmly as his son flails and struggles before finally going still. Mary would live, and Dean would have something like a normal life. Wouldn't this have been so much nicer? Wouldn't it?
Later, he shoots his children in their sleep, then puts the gun into his mouth and pulls the trigger.
"Once you learned the truth, you realized you had no choice. That's how you really ended up here, Johnny, remember?"
He thinks he does. Everything after that was simply a dream, a flash-forward through what never was in the last seconds of a life that was no longer worth living.
But, then, he remembers that he was with Mary, and Samuel came after them and broke his neck and killed him. That was how he died. Sam and Dean were simply the children who never were, but Azazel made them seem real and then he to tortured John with their loss.
No, no... That wasn't how it happened. Sam and Dean were real, but John lost them along with Mary in the fire. And then he lost them to hellhounds when they couldn't get behind the salt line in time and he had to stand there and watch as they got torn to bits. Except if that happened, he couldn't have shot Dean in the heart when it became all too clear that the werewolf had bitten him after all. Yes, that was what happened. He remembers how Sam had tried to stop him, going wild with rage as Dean fell to the ground, blood spreading across his chest. He remembered how the gun went off as Sam tried to get it away from him and Sam's face went slack with surprise and pain...
In comparison, having his guts reeled out onto a spindle is a joke. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad, taking things out on someone else who deserved it.
He waits for the offer, but Azazel orders him to be returned to the hooks. John is grateful not to be offered the knife again.
Hooks dig into flesh, but time now flows in strange loops. He is aware of voices, now. He has been for what he assumes are a few years, now. The never-ending chord has broken apart into deep, sonorous voices the size of cities. Whatever the voices are saying, it loops and hangs in time like everything else here. Whoever the voices belong to, they pay him about as much attention as he would pay a dust mote.
Then, something strange happens. Two things.
Three, taking into account the fact that anything happening here is strange in itself.
The first thing is that one of those background voices finally makes sense. He has no idea why. The fact that the majestic voice is singing a Jimmy Cliff song somewhere in the background is a different kind of strange, so surreal it's hardly worth wondering about.
I don't know where life will take me,
But I know where I have been.
The second strange thing is that the vivid memories Azazel dragged him through spool out into pale threads of might-have-been. The boys were not murdered by other hunters who thought they were a threat. He and Mary did not have a daughter named Alice and a third son named Jack.
I don't know what life will show me,
But I know what I've seen.
John notes that majestic or not, the voice cannot stay on-key. It drifts closer.
Tried my hand at love and friendship.
The nightmares Azazel had shown him had felt real, but back here on the hooks he thinks he remembers knew what is real.
Real, and important. The voice keeps singing as John thinks through all the ways he did fail his family.
Sitting here in--huh!
John feels a crushing pressure as the singer's attention falls on him. Then it is gone, along with the singer. All that is left is a lingering sense of curiosity.
John waits for the singing to start again, but all he hears now is the deep, background nonsense he has become accustomed to in this place.
...why...not fair...limited time offer...hast thou forsaken...hateyouhateyouhateyou...why...row, row, row your boat...curse your name...why...father, please, PLEASE...dominoes and biscuits...curse your name and die...
He soon tunes it out again the way he tunes out the hooks in his limbs and sides. He finds he misses the singing, bad as it was.
He isn't sure what good it will do him in the long run, but for as long as he can, he will focus on what is truth and what is a damned lie.
John's second reaction on reading about the murder was guilt. The first--and hence the guilt--was sheer relief.
When Mary heard that Harvey Woodson had been murdered in his own garage last night, she had gasped out loud and asked John what this meant for his job. Then she went red and clapped a hand to her mouth.
"That was awful!" She turned back to the paper, trying to look properly sad. "Your boss is dead, and the first thing I thought about was your job! What is wrong with me?"
John poured himself another cup of coffee, careful of his bandaged hand. "Same thing that's wrong with me," he muttered. He sat down across from Mary and didn't look at the newspaper. "It was the first thing I thought of, too."
To be specific, he felt a surge of relief that he no longer had to tell Mary that he had been let go three days ago. It was nothing personal, Mr. Woodson had told him. There just wasn't been enough money coming in to pay two mechanics, and Mike had two little girls who were relying on his paycheck.
John would have broken the news that night. At least he had been planning to. But then, Mary had surprised him with a passionate kiss and an announcement he should have been thrilled to hear.
After nearly two years of trying, Mary was finally pregnant. Fortunately, his shock did a good job of covering his dismay, and he even managed to convince himself that Woodson would give him his job back in light of this news.
That didn't exactly work out as planned.
"Anyhow, who could have done something like that?" she asked. "The police said nothing was taken."
"Hopefully, whoever it is, is long gone." He knew he shouldn't have lied about being laid off. On the first day, it was just an impulse. He didn't want to ruin what should have been a wonderful evening. On the second day, he had hopes that he could put the situation to rights with no one being the wiser, so there was no need to get Mary all worried. Mike had even gone to bat for him with Woodson, and had agreed not to tell Katie about the layoff.
On the third day, he was beginning to see there could be a problem. When Mary asked him how work went, he said it was fine and wondered how much she knew. But he still thought he could make it right. He could provide for her and the baby, and she'd never have to worry about a thing.
Only now, he felt even more guilty. You'd have thought that he had shot or bludgeoned or stabbed Mr. Woodson himself, he felt so twitchy. He knew he hadn't done anything, but he still felt like he had blood on his hands.
He looked at his bandaged palm and wondered what he would say to the police if they asked him where he was last night, and what on earth he would say to Mary when they dragged his possible motive out into the open and blew his lie to little pieces.
"John?" Mary reached across the table and took his hand, turning it palm-up. "What happened to your hand? It wasn't bandaged yesterday, was it?"
John instinctively pulled away, but Mary's grip always surprised him with its strength, even now. "Dunno," he said, and it was the truth. "I don't remember what happened, but it stings like hell."
Mary looked at him quickly by way of apology, then peeled the bandage back. She drew in a hiss of breath. "Oh, John... You should have let me take care of this!"
"It's fine." He tried to pull back.
"Oh, hush, you." She looked critically at the thin cut that crossed his palm. "Wow. It looks like something sliced clean across your hand. How on earth could you not have noticed?"
"Let it alone, Mary!"
Mary glared at him. "I'm not one of your Marines, John, so don't you dare talk to me like I am! And don't tell me it's fine. Why do you always turn into Drill Sergeant Winchester when you're worried or in over your head?"
"I'm not worried," he grumbled, not looking her in the eye.
"Yes you are, worry-wart. You've been a pill ever since I told you about the baby. It would be sweet, if it didn't make me want to smack you in the head with a skillet. The big, cast iron one." Mary turned her attention back to the wound. "It looks like it's mostly healed, whatever it is, but let me get some peroxide on it anyway. You're lucky it wasn't deeper--it's going to leave a nasty scar as it is."
John felt a wave of cold nausea at the thought of severed tendons. A layoff that never was, was one thing. Not being able to work was another.
Two days later, on Monday, John showed up at the garage. There was plenty of work for both him and Mike to do. A week later, Mike floated an idea past him. It was crazy risky, especially for two guys who either had kids or had one on the way.
John said yes, and got yelled at by Mary that night for making a big decision like that without her. It didn't matter that she thought him going into business with Mike and buying out Woodson's widow was a good idea. It was the principle of the thing.
Going out and buying the exact crib she wanted mollified her enough that John half-suspected her of looking for an excuse to be mad at him.
After he finished putting it together, he stood back and admired his handiwork. He flexed his hand a few times to get rid of the ache. For whatever reason, that cut on his hand had taken the longest time to heal, and it was still a little sore. Mary kept worrying that it might have gotten infected, but it never did. It simply healed slowly, leaving a fine, perfectly straight scar.
You'd think he would remember getting a cut like that.
"John, would you--oh, that looks wonderful!" Mary walked in to the nursery, and the smile when she saw the crib made his heart feel like it was glowing.
She rose up on tip-toe to kiss him, and he forgot that an argument had led to the crib in the first place.
Mary broke the kiss and settled back on her heels. John smiled down at her and rested a hand on her shoulder.
The world slipped sideways.
"John?"
He looked at his hand, resting on her shoulder. The late afternoon light made her golden hair look red, made it glow like fire.
"John, what's wrong?"
He had no idea. Something clanged at the back of his mind. Some memory, trying to kick loose.
"I don't know," he said, and his voice sounded far away, even to him. He ran his free hand down his face--it felt clammy. "Just came over woozy or something. I'm okay. I'll be okay."
"Here. Sit in the rocker." Mary herded him towards the nursery chair with urgent efficiency, and he tried to ignore the tight fear in her voice. He knew what she was thinking. His dad had had his first heart attack when he was forty, and another one had hit him back in February. She took his wrist, and he felt her fingers searching for a pulse. "Your hands are freezing, John. Are you sure you're all right?"
He nodded. And it wasn't a lie. That sudden surge of something was gone as if it had never happened. It was as if he heard a smooth voice telling him that nothing was wrong, that nothing had happened, that nothing would happen. Everything was fine.
Everything was going to be just fine.
The thought brought with it a sort of drowsy peace, and a sense that they were being watched over and guarded.
He pulled Mary close. He breathed in the scent of her hair and tried to make himself comprehend that there was, in fact, a brand-new person growing inside of her.
He was going to be a dad.
That sense of peace came and went over the weeks and months to come. When it left, it left abruptly, often in the middle of the night when his eyes would slam open at three a.m. and his brain acted like it had forgotten how to do anything other than be afraid.
One morning, Mary found him down in the den, trying to find a TV station that had something other than a test pattern or the Farm Report.
"Can't sleep?" He turned to see Mary flickering in the light of television static. Her hand rested on her belly the way it often did now that she had started to show. "Were you dreaming about the war again?"
He shook his head wearily. He gave up on the TV and turned it off. He blinked a few times, and his eyes adjusted to where he could just see Mary in the glow of the streetlight coming through the curtains. "No, not nightmares, not this time."
Mary knew about how he'd been wounded in a mortar attack, and how he would have bled out if Deacon hadn't been right there and had enough sense to keep pressure on the wound. One man had been killed outright, and another had died screaming as they were choppered back to the field hospital.
When John had figured out that Mary assumed his nightmares were about that battle, he didn't bother to correct her.
He had never told her what the dreams were really about, and he probably never would.
When he dreamed about Vietnam, he dreamed about that close call right before he was going to go home. Sometimes the dream ended with the bomb going off and him dying screaming as Deacon tried to hold him together. Other times it ended with a gaunt old man in dress blues showing up at his door (or at dinner or at his bedside or at any other random moment) to politely inform him that there had been a grievous error and his being alive was screwing everything up.
When he woke, it was always with a jolt and in a cold sweat that wouldn't go away for hours.
"I'm just worried, is all." He reached out and put his hand on her stomach. He was always surprised at how firm and warm the rounded belly felt. "About you, and the baby, and all the... I don't know, monsters and stuff that might be out there waiting to get us."
Out loud, it sounded silly, but there was no other way to describe the sudden whirl of fright that would send him bolt upright in bed, heart going so fast he wondered if it was going to explode.
"Monsters?" He would have expected it to sound teasing, but she sounded very serious indeed.
"Not really," he said, and he got a tight little laugh as a reward for the half-truth. "It's just that there are so many things that can go wrong. We both know that. We've both seen it. Come on, let's go back upstairs."
They went, and as they passed the photo of his grandparents, Mary reached out to straighten it even though it didn't need straightening. It was a habit that seemed to have little meaning anymore, but from the look she gave the photo, he suspected some of the old meaning had returned.
Monsters weren't real, but they may as well have been. His mother had been slowly devoured from the inside out by a particularly nasty one, losing the ability to walk shortly after the first and only time she walked him to kindergarten. Another was lurking in wait for his father. A different monster had struck down Mary's parents out of the blue in one night. Further back, his grandmother had been murdered, and rumor had it she had seen her own parents murdered when she was a child. His grandfather had been broken beyond repair by war and grief and disease, and there were times John wondered what would have become of Uncle Jack if he hadn't had to hold it together to look after his nephew.
And then there was another monster, one that was only in his own mind, one that lurked just out of sight, vanishing every time he tried to look at it directly. Something was there, but he didn't know what it was, and he could only hear it breathing in the small hours of the morning.
Once they were back in bed, John pulled Mary close to him and sighed as her head rested in its usual place beneath his chin. Like this, it was easy to forget what was imagined and remember what was true. She reached between them, and there was a moment of laughter as she accidentally tickled him as she tried to find his hand. It was awkward, but they clasped hands as they lay there together.
"I won't let anything happen to you or our children," he said after a while. "No monsters. I promise."
She didn't say anything, but she squeezed his hand hard enough to hurt. It was okay, though. Everything was going to be okay.
Everything had gone to hell.
He had been caught off guard, and he had lost. Dean was gone.
And Sam, what about Sam? What would he do? John had to go to him, but he couldn't, that was the whole point...
"John? John, are you there?"
...but there wasn't any point any more. He had stayed away to keep them safe, and it had all gone to hell.
What did any of it matter, if his son was dead?
John snapped the phone shut. The frozen calm he felt right then would have terrified him if he could feel terror.
If he could feel anything.
Every thought was cold and stark and rational. If he had been there, Dean would be okay. But he hadn't been. All the ways John had tried to prepare them, it hadn't been enough in the end. In the end, he hadn't been there when Dean had needed him most.
What now? he thought, but he couldn't get past those two words, and just repeated them over and over again.
He felt far away from himself, with no idea how to get back. Perhaps he would simply walk out of his motel room and into the snow, never mind that he was only half-dressed, and feel the cold, feel the wind.
St. Louis again, he thought numbly. And another Winchester was dead.
There had to be significance, somewhere, some piece of the master plan, but what did that matter now?
Not one single god-damned bit.
The phone rang, startling him into swearing out loud and nearly throwing the thing up to the ceiling. He caught it and felt something shift sideways when he saw it was Dean's number.
Sam. It had to be Sam. He should answer. What good would avoiding the truth do him now? Staying away and staying silent had done nothing to save Dean, so why should he think it would help Sam?
He continued to stare at the phone as it rang. The cold rationality that shielded him was starting to crack and crumble. Any second now, it would shatter, taking him with him.
The call went to voice mail right as he hit 'talk.' It was only thanks to habit and discipline that he waited to see if there would be a message rather than giving in to the hysterical voice deep inside demanding he call back right now to hear that Sam was all right.
Not that Sam could possibly be all right. Not now. Not ever again.
He didn't know what to expect. Maybe Sam would give a cool, concise report of what had happened. Just as John had trained him to do.
Maybe Sam would let John know exactly what he thought of him for not being there and for not calling back all those times Dean had tried to get hold of him.
Part of him wondered if he would hear a boy who wanted his father, and he hated that he wondered that.
He was not expecting to hear Dean's voice.
"Hey, Dad." He sounded bored but tightly wound beneath the boredom. "I'm hoping this gets to you before anyone else calls to break the news. We were in St. Louis, and Sam and I ran into a shifter--wouldn't have figured out what it was without your journal, so thanks for that--and to make a long and messy story short, the bastard was wearing my face when it was killed. So, if someone tells you I'm dead, I'm not."
Cold dread was blasted away by white-hot rage.
Goddamn fucking Travis, not double-checking his leads, he should have known better...
"Sam and I are both okay." There was a pause, and the sound of Dean clearing his throat. "Just thought you'd kind of want to know that, and... Well, might be nice if you returned the favor? Let us know that you're okay? Just one--"
There was an intake of breath as if Dean was about to say something else, but the message cut off abruptly when he thought better of it.
John put the phone down slowly, telling himself over and over that he was not going to throw it against the fucking wall and watch it shatter into a million pieces.
His hands remained very, very steady as he poured himself a shot of Jim Beam. They were still steady when he poured a second. They were still steady enough when he roared in frustration and flung the bottle against the dresser mirror, sending glass and whiskey everywhere.
He sat down hard on the floor at the foot of the bed, fingers digging into his scalp.
None of this should have happened. Why was he here in a motel that could have been in Maryland or Michigan for all he cared? He shouldn't have simply imagined Mary's voice, telling him to clean up the glass before one of the boys got hurt. She should have fucking been there.
Twenty-three years. She had been gone almost ten years (be seeing you in ten years, give or take) longer than they had been together. So why did it have to feel as raw now as it did then?
Even though he knew Dean was alive and okay and a little pissed at him--John still felt the jagged, bleeding edges of the loss as if it had really happened.
He had become used to things that shouldn't be real being all too real. He hunted monsters and demons and other things he didn't believe in a quarter-century ago.
But there were also times when things that should be real weren't. Even after all these years he sometimes felt like he should wake up with a start back in his own bed and have a sleepy-worried Mary ask him if he was dreaming about the war again.
He pulled himself up onto the bed, not bothering to take off his jeans or pull back the bedspread. Eventually, he was able to fall asleep, and what was real and what was not tumbled over themselves in his dreams. He dreamed about Dean. He dreamed that the message he received was just a dream. He dreamed that he was standing in front of Dean in a dilapidated house somewhere, and Dean was angrily demanding that John fix things, that he bring Sam back right now.
In that dream, it didn't matter that Dean was angry at him or that Sam was gone. All that mattered was that they did what they were told. He'd raised his boys to do as they were told. They were obedient sons. They were doomed. It was in their blood. His blood. Their family's blood.
In the dream, Dean looked at him with nothing but hatred and contempt.
He woke with a start and automatically looked to Mary's side of the bed, but he was alone. His head pounded viciously, and he had to listen to Dean's message three more times before he could believe it was not just another dream.
After fifty years (he thinks it is fifty), it is no longer so easy to tell false memory from true. When they return him to the hooks, he remembers whatever they show him as if it were real.
Some things they show him are real, and they invariably hurt more than anything they could have made up.
This time, he is convinced that he is the one who sliced Mary's belly open. He remembers how he became short-breathed and painfully aroused as he watched the red bloom across the pure white of her nightgown. He thinks that perhaps it would feel good to slice someone else open like that, and that Alastair's knife would feel good in his hands.
When he returns to the hooks, reality sorts itself out in fits and starts, and he wonders what reason Alastair and Azazel would have for letting his sanity reassert itself after each torture session.
It's probably just another part of the torture. One of these days--if he doesn't take the knife, first--he'll probably end up as just another insane voice in the red, timeless swirl.
Some memories never do sort themselves out clearly.
For one thing, he remembers a conversation with Dean that he knows he never had. It reminds him of a dream he used to have, back in the days when everything was still good and sane and safe. In this dream, Dean is older than John remembers (but he does remember it, and he is not sure why).
As always, there is the red-haired woman. That is something he knows he saw. Now, though, he remembers details of a conversation with Dean that he knows he never had. There are lines at the corners of his eyes that weren't there when John last saw Dean in his hospital bed.
It feels like something real, but he knows it's not something that ever happened to him.
Ooh. I think you may be on to something there, pally.
It's not the strange but familiar voice that showed him how to shield himself from the worst of the torture and that told him that there would be consequences to accepting Alastair's offer.
This voice is a snide descant that pulls itself free from the deep muttering that surrounds him in the void.
Whoever it is, he thinks he's heard the voice before. But it wasn't him who heard it. Even though it's his thought, it doesn't make sense, even to himself.
Getting warmer! Or is that a tasteless choice of metaphor? Yeah, I think it's tasteless.
The voice sounds quite pleased with itself. John asks the voice who it is, even though he feels like he should know. He's pretty sure it's the thing he heard singing...
Yep.
...but that's not where he knows this voice from.
Who are you, he asks.
Call me Ish... Nah, call me Virgil.
John asks if he should know who the fuck this person is.
Mmmaybe?
Part 5