Supernatural Fic: We Looked Like Giants
Title: We Looked Like Giants
Author: xaara
Rating: PG
Timeline: pre-series, spoilers up through 2.06 “No Exit”
Characters: Ellen, John, Bill, tangentially Jo and the boys
Summary: “Ma’am,” he says in a voice like dusk. “Ma’am, I’m John Winchester. ‘m looking for William Harvelle, and I was told I might find him here.”
ETA: So I was rewatching an episode as sort of background for some more ficwriting, and guess what? Harvell? Has an E at the end. *wins at fact-checking*
A/N: Something about what we learned about the relationships between John, Ellen, and Bill didn’t sit quite right with me, and so, even though I should be working on NaNo, I ended up writing 4500 words of their history instead.
We Looked Like Giants
He comes through the door with a gust of winter wind, brushing snow from his shoulders. With his hat pulled low over his ears and collar turned up against the cold, he looks like a stumbling bear. Ellen frowns as he stomps by the door, leaving a pile of snow that will become a puddle next to the mat there. He tramps his goddamn wet boots all the way across her clean floor, past three hunters who look at him and then away, and up to the bar.
“Ma’am,” he says in a voice like dusk. “Ma’am, I’m John Winchester. ‘m looking for William Harvelle, and I was told I might find him here.”
“Bill’s out,” Ellen says. “Should I tell him you came by?”
His eyes, when she sees them for the first time, are nothing like dusk at all. “No ma’am,” he says. “If you don’t mind, I’ll wait for him.”
--
She doesn’t decide to hate him until the second time he comes through her door, laughing at something illustrated by Bill’s splayed fingers. Neither man has shaved in days, and the thick dark stubble on their faces stands out against the rush of blood in their cheeks. John laughs with his whole body, huge gut-deep laugh that makes the men sitting at the bar stiffen for a moment, their hands flashing out of sight until they relax into the warmth of the sound.
If she’s told him once, she’s told him a thousand times--“Bill, you are not coming into my place like that. You clean those boots before you walk through that door or--”
John looks up, little-boy contrite, the laugh suppressed but the smile still curling in his eyes, and nods. “Sorry, ma’am,” he says. “Didn’t mean to--only meant to get in out of the cold a minute. Was just leaving.”
“You do that,” she says, because he’s flushed and grinning, hulk of a man, glowing with something she doesn’t have a name for. And it’s love him or hate him, no quarter given, no prisoners.
She has a husband. His name is William Anthony Harvelle. He can down a bottle of whiskey and still weave stories like no one’s ever heard. He’s generous and mostly kind, never anything but good to her. His hands know her as well as she knows herself, and sometimes he watches Joanna with such agony in his eyes that she wants to take him close and whisper promises she can’t make.
There’s no room in her family, none in her heart. Leave, she thinks, leave now and don’t come back.
But he keeps coming back. Keeps coming back.
--
It’s almost a year and no word when he comes in again. This time is nothing like the last; he’s dropped weight and it doesn’t suit him. His jacket hangs awkwardly and he favors his left leg. No greeting for Ellen, he drops onto a stool at the bar. “Bill in?”
“Yeah,” says Ellen. She almost asks, but she doesn’t want to know, can’t imagine what would bring a man like John Winchester limping into a bar with defeat in the slant of his shoulders. “Joanna Beth, go find your father.” Jo, pigtails bright in the semi-darkness of the bar, looks up from her coloring with the beginnings of rebellion written across her face, but Ellen gives her the mama’s-not-messing-around look and cuts that off at the pass.
“Something to drink?” Ellen asks.
“Just a glass of water,” says John. He’s swaying, she notices. His fingers grip the edge of the bar until the blood drains from them, and she has about two seconds of warning before he slumps into unconsciousness, slipping in a dead weight from his seat. “John!” she yells at him, already moving, already thinking, cataloguing. No injuries she can see, could be a concussion, internal bleeding, could just be the flu, seen that happen to hunters before, think they’re invincible, the lot of them, stupid bastards--
“Ellen?” Bill asks from behind her, and then he’s beside her, helping her lift John onto a nearby table. John’s breathing, she sees, relieved, but they’re shallow breaths and his forehead glistens with sweat. His pulse beats like a drumroll against her seeking fingers. When Bill rips open John’s shirt, buttons clinking underneath the bar, Ellen swallows bile and touches a finger beside the reddened, infected wound along John’s ribcage.
Bill takes a sharp breath. “Crazy fuck,” he says. “Call the ambulance.”
--
Bill insists that she stay with John until he wakes up. Won’t react well to waking up someplace where he doesn’t know anyone, and she was the last person he saw before he passed out. So she sits at his bedside, book open on her lap, staring out the window at the parking lot below. Smells like a hospital in the room, like a veneer of clean and all right over a rot that won’t go away. She doesn’t have an opinion on hospitals, really, doesn’t associate them with anything in particular. Jo’s birth, maybe, or the one time Bill fell from the roof trying to fix the gutter and broke his arm.
The sound of rustling sheets brings her back to the present. John’s awake on the bed, his eyebrows drawn down over groggy eyes, his hand reaching towards her. Without thinking about it, she reaches for him, takes his hand between both of hers.
“John, you asshole,” she says. “What’re you trying to do, die in my bar?”
“No ma’am,” he says. “Was just lookin’ for your husband.”
“You were ‘lookin’ for my husband’ with a three-inch infected wound in your side.” She looks down at him and feels the belated fear in her belly, hot like whiskey. “Don’t you ever do that again, you hear me? You need help, you just ask for it, we’re here.”
He looks at her so intently that she flushes, snatches her hands back into her lap. John’s face opens for a moment in surprise, then shuts down into the shuttered expression of the man she could live with for the rest of her life and never know. “Yes ma’am.”
“And stop calling me ma’am. The name’s Ellen.”
His smile, she decides later, would be best described as cheeky. “Yes ma’am,” he says.
--
She loves the way he talks about his sons. M’boys, he calls them, low and gruff, still a little wondering. It’s the same way Bill talks about Jo, the same awestruck, fearful cadence men of faith use to talk about God. A little bit of I did this coupled with a helluva lot of what if I fuck this up?
“Dean, he’s faster’n me, sometimes,” John says. “Can pick up a trail in a night so dark I can’t see my own hands, and follow it clean.” He runs a finger over the creased and re-creased photo of himself, his wife, his legacy. “Sammy, now, Sammy’s the bright one. Learned to read in the backseat, Dean taught him some, but he picked it up mostly by himself. Almost nine now, and the kid knows more about the research than most hunters I’ve met.” Smiling wistfully, he tucks the picture back into his wallet. “Mary, I think, I mean, she would’ve been--”
Ellen aches for him, a deep burning pain that crowds her lungs and makes it hard to breathe. “She would’ve been proud, John,” she murmurs. “Any mother would be proud, such beautiful boys.”
“I hope so,” says John, “because sometimes I-- I just. Hope so.”
--
Three days before Christmas, Ash has come up with some harebrained plan to string lights up outside the roadhouse. “Not festive otherwise, Ellen,” he says. He’s been outside all day long, coming in for the occasional drink “to warm the blood.” By the time Ellen drags his ass inside, he’s drunk as she’s ever seen him, grinning at her, his hands heavy at her waist. “Fucking bastards,” he says, “fucking bastards, I was brilliant.”
“You are brilliant,” she says. “When you aren’t stupid as shit.”
“Naw, Ellen, you--shit, I was a fucking genius.” He’s sloppy drunk, half-slouched against the pool table; when he speaks his voice drawls slow and bitter. “I was better’n the lot of ‘em, and they--they, fuck, Ellen,” and he’s crying, sinking to the floor, folding in on himself. Ellen doesn’t think about it too hard, just goes down with him, gathers him to her, rocking.
“Ash, honey, come on,” she says, “come on, it’s all right.”
He sobs against her, buries his face in her lap and clings while she strokes his hair and ignores the cramp in her thigh. By the time he’s done, used up and passed out against her, it’s long past midnight. Bill’s out on an errand, told her not to wait up for him. She doesn’t know who he thinks he’s kidding, because she always waits up, sometimes so late that by the time he makes it home, she falls asleep as soon as she hears his boots in the hallway. So when the door opens and she feels the cold draft against the back of her neck, she just shivers and eases out from underneath Ash’s weight.
“Think he’s done for the night,” she says, turning around and running into a puzzled expression on John’s face as he takes in the scene before him.
“Oh,” he says, jumping to all sorts of wrong conclusions of the kind no self-respecting hunter should ever allow himself. Ellen sighs.
“He still misses it,” she says. “School. Being there, people smart as him. Hits him real hard sometimes, this time of year.”
John’s face twists into something more like understanding. “I know the feeling,” he says.
Ash is too heavy for either of them to carry alone, but together, John and Ellen manhandle him to his room, drop him onto the bed there. Ellen maneuvers him to his side and leaves the trash bin by his pillow, combs the hair away from his face with gentle fingers. Lets her hand rest there for a moment, wishing there was something she could do, something she could say to make it better. “Night,” she whispers, and slips out past John, who leaves the door ajar behind them.
“Bill home?” he asks when they return to the bar.
“He’s out doing something, said not to wait up.” Without Ash, her hands feel clumsy, so she busies them mixing rum with the eggnog she’s pulled from the cooler. “Want some?”
“Sure,” says John, sitting down on the other side of the bar. She pours it into two glasses, sets one in front of him. “Cheers,” he says.
She takes a sip of the drink and thinks about a woman, heavily pregnant with the world’s savior, shivering in the brisk desert December. It’s a good story. Sometimes, she wishes she believed it.
“I needed to see Bill about a job,” John’s saying, looking down at where his hands are folded on the bar. “I’m sorry, it being Christmas Eve, but it’s. The thing, it’s killing people, and no one deserves that, not in the middle of a celebration. Shouldn’t take long. I’ll have him back to you before you can blink.”
She rolls her eyes. She knows John’s sense of how long it takes to blink. “Fine,” she says. “Just bring him back in one piece, we’ll be square.”
--
One of the last Christmases that Jo will believe in Santa, and Bill is still out on some damn fool hunt with John, neither one of them used to working together, but both of them knowing that whatever is killing has to be stopped. Once Bill had returned from his errand, swept John into the uncompromising hug of men who didn’t know whether the last time was really the last, she’d gone to check on Ash. Sat at his bedside for a while, humming tunelessly to him, while John and Bill parsed out a strategy in the next room.
A shadow had fallen across the open crack of the door. Bill had poked his head in, nodded for her to join him in the hall. “I’ll be back by tomorrow morning,” he’d said. “Should be an easy hunt, run-of-the-mill angry spirit, except it’s got a few friends and you know how that stuff gets stronger, this season.”
Ellen had smiled and kissed him, his hands fitting her face like they had since they were nineteen and so in love it hurt to think about it. “I’ll be back,” he’d said again, with conviction. The curve of his smile had made his eyes sparkle in the low light. “Tell Santa I could use a new shotgun.”
Barking a laugh that she’d tried to stifle behind one palm, Ellen shoved at him with her other hand. “Shoo,” she said. He went.
Now she sits up for him, staring out the window. At one o’clock in the morning, it starts to snow, slowly at first, and then so thick it looks like foam, rushing from the sky. Ellen thinks about stuffing Jo’s stocking, but can’t quite stand to do it without Bill there, so she waits. There’s time yet.
She must have fallen asleep, because the next thing she remembers is John’s hand on her shoulder, shaking her awake. “Ellen,” he says. “Ellen, wake up.”
Never sleeping in this chair again, she thinks. Her back creaks and spasms when she stretches. She opens her eyes and focuses on him in the grey light of the hour just before dawn. He looks exhausted, worn in a way she’s never seen, a fresh cut on his cheekbone still oozing blood down his face. It’s the look in his eyes, though, that scares her.
“What is it?” she asks, sitting up, tugging her clothes back into presentable order.
John starts to say something, cuts himself off, tries again. “It’s--I don’t know how to,” he starts, tripping over his own words. With each syllable that leaves his mouth, Ellen’s heart rises through her chest until it’s pressed tight against her throat.
“What?” she asks again, because she needs to hear it. She needs to know. “Where’s Bill?”
“The thing we were chasing--”
“No,” she says. And it’s as simple as that. Nothing happened to Bill because nothing can happen to him. She refuses to allow it.
“Ellen--”
“Please leave,” she says. “Now.”
He reaches a hand towards her, palm up, nonthreatening.
“If you touch me,” she says in a perfectly even voice, “I will break each one of your fingers.”
--
The story comes in pieces. Turns out, John told a friend of his, who told a buddy of his, who tells it in a whisper in the corner of the roadhouse until Ellen walks up to the table, sits, and says, “Tell me.”
“Spirit really didn’t want to be returned to its resting place. John and Bill, they set a trap for it, meant for Bill to herd it in one direction while John waited for it at the edge of the woods. Way it went down, though, John came out of hiding too early, and the thing saw him, decided Bill was the better bet.”
--
“Ellen. I know you won’t pick up the phone, but damnit, I want--I want to say I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’d do, I was you, but it wouldn’t be talk to me. I don’t think. But. Fuck, Ellen, I--”
“Yeah, me again. Wanted to tell you how sorry I was. Again. Can’t stop thinking about it, and Ellen, come on, pick up the fucking phone. Just talk to me. Please, Ellen, don’t make me, I mean, please.”
“Okay, it’s been a while, Ellen, this is-- Please pick up?”
--
It takes a year, but John’s back at the roadhouse just after she closes up shop. She thinks about letting him in, but figures if he gets cold enough, he’ll break in anyway. She could use the excuse to make him fix the lock on the front door.
Four blankets later, she’s still shivering, and she’s not surprised when he turns up at the door to her bedroom. “Ellen?” he whispers. He reeks of alcohol, of sweat and salt and soil.
“Go away,” she says. “I told you, John, I don’t--”
“Please,” he says, “I didn’t mean--”
“I know,” she says. She does. He no more meant to kill her husband than she meant to drop the bottle of gin earlier; shit happens, sometimes, and all you can do is keep your head above the water and try to outlast the storm.
“Do you?”
“I forgive you, John Winchester,” she says. She wonders whether she will finally cry--tears prick against her eyelids, burn at the inner corners. But no, she pulls herself together, curls more tightly beneath the blankets. “Now get the fuck out of my room.”
--
They dance, carefully. For a long time, he doesn’t call, doesn’t answer when she calls him. He turns up from time to time, almost always fresh off the hunt. He never brings his boys, and she doesn’t ask about them. Occasionally, he talks about them, about how Sammy’s making straight As or how Dean can tune a thirty-year-old engine until it purrs like a sated cat. She tells him how Jo can throw a knife to hit a moving target at thirty yards.
“Bill was always good with knives, too,” he says, so incautiously that Ellen thinks for a minute he must be talking about another Bill. He’s talking about hers, though--she sees it in the way he can’t meet her gaze.
She pulls a bottle of scotch from beneath the bar. “On the house,” she says. “What else do you remember about him?”
--
By the time they’ve half-finished the bottle, Ellen’s warm and loose, laughing at a story about how Bill couldn’t pitch a tent worth shit and ended up collapsing one on himself in the middle of a hunt. John smiles with her, leans forward. “He woke up covered in twenty pounds of canvas, decided that something was attacking him. Grabbed his knife, started slicing at it. Course, once he realized it was only the tent, he laid off and set it back up, but later that night, it rained an inch and a half, and the next morning, he looked like someone’d dumped him in the lake.”
“Couldn’t tie a tie, either,” Ellen says. “It’s a mystery how he ended up hunting at all, hands as useless as his could be.”
“Some of us, it’s a calling.” John’s abruptly serious, his stare gone distant.
“Tell me about her,” says Ellen. When he hesitates, “You owe me that. You saw something of my husband, I get to see something of your wife.”
John takes a deep breath, lets it out. “First time I saw her, she was wearing a pair of jeans so old they were almost grey, a man’s white t-shirt. Farm girl, you know? Never once let me forget how I couldn’t grow a plant to save my life. She liked flowers, hated cut ones. Said it was just depressing as hell when they died anyway, just a pointless death. Nothing worse than a pointless death.” As he speaks, his words become steadily more monotone, almost ritual. “Last time I saw her, she was pinned to the ceiling of Sam’s nursery, gash across her stomach, in too much pain even to scream.”
“You know what did it?” Ellen asks.
“Demon,” says John, shrugging. “Don’t have a name for it yet, but I’ve been tracking it, over ten years now. When I catch up, then. Then, we’ll see.” The emptiness in his voice, the raw determination frightens her. His fingers tap against the bar, against his glass. She reaches to still them and finds her hand enclosed in his warm, calloused palm. Stupidly, she stares at their joined hands while he bushes his thumb against her wrist, tiny strokes, up and down.
She meets his eyes, and jerks her hand from his, stands. The room wavers; she keeps it upright through sheer force of will. “I think you’d better go,” she says.
John can’t look at her. He kicks one toe against the splintering floorboards and bows his head.
--
She doesn’t see him again for seven years. She hears of him, sure, hears the stories about the Winchesters. They’re a little legend, round her place; everyone’s heard of the qutrub incident in Little Birch, or the ninyo off the Oregon coastline. They’ve fought and defeated things no one else has even heard of, and when hunters come in nursing wounds and questions, Ellen knows who to call.
And then one day, as always just after close, John comes through her front door, sits down at the bar, and says, “Sammy’s gone.”
She thinks for a second that he means dead, because they have their private language of grief, these hunters, and no one is ever dead lest they be forgotten. But he continues, tells her about Stanford and scholarships, about the way Dean won’t talk to him or hell, even look at him straight sometimes. It reminds her of Ash. She wonders whether Sam has it in him to make it with normal people, people who don’t understand true unconditional love, pure sacrifice.
His father, though, his father understands, and when he leans his elbows on the table and says, “I can’t protect him there, Ellen, I can’t, and he’s so smart but Jesus such a kid still, sometimes, and I can’t protect him,” all she wants to do is take Sam by one ear and haul him back home, say Your father loves you, you idiot kid, he loves you.
“He’ll be all right,” she says instead, pouring John a whiskey. “They’re always all right, in the end.”
“I’m going to find that sonovabitch,” says John, “and then I’m going to waste it.”
She doesn’t ask whether he means the demon, or Stanford, or the rebellious streak she suspects Sam inherited directly from his father. It doesn’t matter, not really. All that matters is this man, and his mourning, a secret, personal pain that he will never show anyone else. Ellen thinks about Jo, and about how good she is with calculus or with a throwing star, one and the same. Thinks about Ash, frustrated genius, helping with the hunt because it’s what he’s been raised to, the only thing he knows.
This might be the only thing John knows. “Can I do anything to help?”
--
She collects leads and channels them to him. Possessions in Tulsa, mysterious house fire in Edina. Crop failures in a circle around Ten Sleep.
“I’m going after it,” he tells her finally. “I’m sending Dean on a hunt, and I’m going to ground. Can’t think the same way, move the same way, with him in the mix.”
John Winchester, she thinks, you think you’re blind just because it’s too dark to see the path. The problem’s not always with you. “Fine,” she says. “But you--” she doesn’t know quite how to phrase it, and settles for, “You don’t let anything happen just because you think there’s no other way out. There’s always another way out.”
“I’m not, Ellen, I’m not going into this--”
“Thinking you’re going to die? Yes you are, John, you think this is your last battle and you’re walking to where no one will find your body.” She swallows, hard, hears him clear his throat on the other end of the line. “You’re coming out, you hear me? You’re coming out of this alive, you promise me that.”
“Ellen, I--”
“No, John, you promise.” It’s selfish, she knows it’s selfish, but she won’t lose him, can’t lose him. Not after, not after everything.
“All right,” he says at last. His voice is low and unsteady. “All right, Ellen, I promise.”
She hangs up without saying goodbye.
--
“Got word on three possessions all within a week, up in Arkansas. Give me a call, I’m still working on the details. Bobby might know a few more, but for now, just know that. Brings the count up to nineteen, just these past six months. Something’s going down, John, something big.”
“Still haven’t called me back about the last time, but John, this is bigger than you think. Signs everywhere, and the hunters are nervous as hell, haven’t heard anything about the Winchesters in God knows how long. Makes ‘em twitchy.”
“John, it’s Ellen. Again. Look, don’t be stubborn, you know I can help you. Call me.”
--
She doesn’t even suspect something’s happened until four months after she leaves her last message. Two boys come breaking into her place, all leather and cocky grins and yes’m, no’m. Sam and Dean.
Somehow, they look exactly like she imagined they would. They sit, while Dean nurses the throbbing in his nose brought on by Jo’s punch, and they tell her that their father is dead. And she thinks That bastard, because the only promise he ever made her was that he would be all right, that he would come back whole, and that bastard.
“Never trust a hunter,” Bill used to tell her. “We can’t be trustworthy. Only place we’re ever trustworthy is on the hunt, and then, well, then things can go sideways so fast it leaves your head spinning, and we’re human. We fuck up.”
She looks at Dean and sees his father, looks at Sam and sees the hole the man left behind. Looks at Jo looking at Dean and thinks no. I won’t lose you too, I won’t, Jo, I can’t.
--
Jo runs off anyway, of course, girl always did have too much resourcefulness for her own good, but Ellen hauls her back home and tells her the story of John Winchester. Part of it, at least, the part that will keep Jo away from his son. Because you can’t trust a hunter.
He’ll spin stories out of darkness and silver bullets, and his words will enthrall you and you will never be so happy as when he comes home. And you will never know such grief as when he doesn’t, one day.
Jo won’t be speaking to her for a while, but she will live. One day, she will marry a quiet man, a safe man, and he will love her for her fierceness and protect her from it.
Night is coming on, creeping in over the plains. Ellen stands just outside the door of the roadhouse, her arms folded against the chill of the shadows. She hopes wherever hunters go when they die, Bill and John are together. Sharing war stories over a corner table, grins like celebrations. She imagines Mary joining them, jostling John aside until she can nestle into him, comfortable, warm.
One day, she thinks. One day.
Author: xaara
Rating: PG
Timeline: pre-series, spoilers up through 2.06 “No Exit”
Characters: Ellen, John, Bill, tangentially Jo and the boys
Summary: “Ma’am,” he says in a voice like dusk. “Ma’am, I’m John Winchester. ‘m looking for William Harvelle, and I was told I might find him here.”
ETA: So I was rewatching an episode as sort of background for some more ficwriting, and guess what? Harvell? Has an E at the end. *wins at fact-checking*
A/N: Something about what we learned about the relationships between John, Ellen, and Bill didn’t sit quite right with me, and so, even though I should be working on NaNo, I ended up writing 4500 words of their history instead.
We Looked Like Giants
He comes through the door with a gust of winter wind, brushing snow from his shoulders. With his hat pulled low over his ears and collar turned up against the cold, he looks like a stumbling bear. Ellen frowns as he stomps by the door, leaving a pile of snow that will become a puddle next to the mat there. He tramps his goddamn wet boots all the way across her clean floor, past three hunters who look at him and then away, and up to the bar.
“Ma’am,” he says in a voice like dusk. “Ma’am, I’m John Winchester. ‘m looking for William Harvelle, and I was told I might find him here.”
“Bill’s out,” Ellen says. “Should I tell him you came by?”
His eyes, when she sees them for the first time, are nothing like dusk at all. “No ma’am,” he says. “If you don’t mind, I’ll wait for him.”
--
She doesn’t decide to hate him until the second time he comes through her door, laughing at something illustrated by Bill’s splayed fingers. Neither man has shaved in days, and the thick dark stubble on their faces stands out against the rush of blood in their cheeks. John laughs with his whole body, huge gut-deep laugh that makes the men sitting at the bar stiffen for a moment, their hands flashing out of sight until they relax into the warmth of the sound.
If she’s told him once, she’s told him a thousand times--“Bill, you are not coming into my place like that. You clean those boots before you walk through that door or--”
John looks up, little-boy contrite, the laugh suppressed but the smile still curling in his eyes, and nods. “Sorry, ma’am,” he says. “Didn’t mean to--only meant to get in out of the cold a minute. Was just leaving.”
“You do that,” she says, because he’s flushed and grinning, hulk of a man, glowing with something she doesn’t have a name for. And it’s love him or hate him, no quarter given, no prisoners.
She has a husband. His name is William Anthony Harvelle. He can down a bottle of whiskey and still weave stories like no one’s ever heard. He’s generous and mostly kind, never anything but good to her. His hands know her as well as she knows herself, and sometimes he watches Joanna with such agony in his eyes that she wants to take him close and whisper promises she can’t make.
There’s no room in her family, none in her heart. Leave, she thinks, leave now and don’t come back.
But he keeps coming back. Keeps coming back.
--
It’s almost a year and no word when he comes in again. This time is nothing like the last; he’s dropped weight and it doesn’t suit him. His jacket hangs awkwardly and he favors his left leg. No greeting for Ellen, he drops onto a stool at the bar. “Bill in?”
“Yeah,” says Ellen. She almost asks, but she doesn’t want to know, can’t imagine what would bring a man like John Winchester limping into a bar with defeat in the slant of his shoulders. “Joanna Beth, go find your father.” Jo, pigtails bright in the semi-darkness of the bar, looks up from her coloring with the beginnings of rebellion written across her face, but Ellen gives her the mama’s-not-messing-around look and cuts that off at the pass.
“Something to drink?” Ellen asks.
“Just a glass of water,” says John. He’s swaying, she notices. His fingers grip the edge of the bar until the blood drains from them, and she has about two seconds of warning before he slumps into unconsciousness, slipping in a dead weight from his seat. “John!” she yells at him, already moving, already thinking, cataloguing. No injuries she can see, could be a concussion, internal bleeding, could just be the flu, seen that happen to hunters before, think they’re invincible, the lot of them, stupid bastards--
“Ellen?” Bill asks from behind her, and then he’s beside her, helping her lift John onto a nearby table. John’s breathing, she sees, relieved, but they’re shallow breaths and his forehead glistens with sweat. His pulse beats like a drumroll against her seeking fingers. When Bill rips open John’s shirt, buttons clinking underneath the bar, Ellen swallows bile and touches a finger beside the reddened, infected wound along John’s ribcage.
Bill takes a sharp breath. “Crazy fuck,” he says. “Call the ambulance.”
--
Bill insists that she stay with John until he wakes up. Won’t react well to waking up someplace where he doesn’t know anyone, and she was the last person he saw before he passed out. So she sits at his bedside, book open on her lap, staring out the window at the parking lot below. Smells like a hospital in the room, like a veneer of clean and all right over a rot that won’t go away. She doesn’t have an opinion on hospitals, really, doesn’t associate them with anything in particular. Jo’s birth, maybe, or the one time Bill fell from the roof trying to fix the gutter and broke his arm.
The sound of rustling sheets brings her back to the present. John’s awake on the bed, his eyebrows drawn down over groggy eyes, his hand reaching towards her. Without thinking about it, she reaches for him, takes his hand between both of hers.
“John, you asshole,” she says. “What’re you trying to do, die in my bar?”
“No ma’am,” he says. “Was just lookin’ for your husband.”
“You were ‘lookin’ for my husband’ with a three-inch infected wound in your side.” She looks down at him and feels the belated fear in her belly, hot like whiskey. “Don’t you ever do that again, you hear me? You need help, you just ask for it, we’re here.”
He looks at her so intently that she flushes, snatches her hands back into her lap. John’s face opens for a moment in surprise, then shuts down into the shuttered expression of the man she could live with for the rest of her life and never know. “Yes ma’am.”
“And stop calling me ma’am. The name’s Ellen.”
His smile, she decides later, would be best described as cheeky. “Yes ma’am,” he says.
--
She loves the way he talks about his sons. M’boys, he calls them, low and gruff, still a little wondering. It’s the same way Bill talks about Jo, the same awestruck, fearful cadence men of faith use to talk about God. A little bit of I did this coupled with a helluva lot of what if I fuck this up?
“Dean, he’s faster’n me, sometimes,” John says. “Can pick up a trail in a night so dark I can’t see my own hands, and follow it clean.” He runs a finger over the creased and re-creased photo of himself, his wife, his legacy. “Sammy, now, Sammy’s the bright one. Learned to read in the backseat, Dean taught him some, but he picked it up mostly by himself. Almost nine now, and the kid knows more about the research than most hunters I’ve met.” Smiling wistfully, he tucks the picture back into his wallet. “Mary, I think, I mean, she would’ve been--”
Ellen aches for him, a deep burning pain that crowds her lungs and makes it hard to breathe. “She would’ve been proud, John,” she murmurs. “Any mother would be proud, such beautiful boys.”
“I hope so,” says John, “because sometimes I-- I just. Hope so.”
--
Three days before Christmas, Ash has come up with some harebrained plan to string lights up outside the roadhouse. “Not festive otherwise, Ellen,” he says. He’s been outside all day long, coming in for the occasional drink “to warm the blood.” By the time Ellen drags his ass inside, he’s drunk as she’s ever seen him, grinning at her, his hands heavy at her waist. “Fucking bastards,” he says, “fucking bastards, I was brilliant.”
“You are brilliant,” she says. “When you aren’t stupid as shit.”
“Naw, Ellen, you--shit, I was a fucking genius.” He’s sloppy drunk, half-slouched against the pool table; when he speaks his voice drawls slow and bitter. “I was better’n the lot of ‘em, and they--they, fuck, Ellen,” and he’s crying, sinking to the floor, folding in on himself. Ellen doesn’t think about it too hard, just goes down with him, gathers him to her, rocking.
“Ash, honey, come on,” she says, “come on, it’s all right.”
He sobs against her, buries his face in her lap and clings while she strokes his hair and ignores the cramp in her thigh. By the time he’s done, used up and passed out against her, it’s long past midnight. Bill’s out on an errand, told her not to wait up for him. She doesn’t know who he thinks he’s kidding, because she always waits up, sometimes so late that by the time he makes it home, she falls asleep as soon as she hears his boots in the hallway. So when the door opens and she feels the cold draft against the back of her neck, she just shivers and eases out from underneath Ash’s weight.
“Think he’s done for the night,” she says, turning around and running into a puzzled expression on John’s face as he takes in the scene before him.
“Oh,” he says, jumping to all sorts of wrong conclusions of the kind no self-respecting hunter should ever allow himself. Ellen sighs.
“He still misses it,” she says. “School. Being there, people smart as him. Hits him real hard sometimes, this time of year.”
John’s face twists into something more like understanding. “I know the feeling,” he says.
Ash is too heavy for either of them to carry alone, but together, John and Ellen manhandle him to his room, drop him onto the bed there. Ellen maneuvers him to his side and leaves the trash bin by his pillow, combs the hair away from his face with gentle fingers. Lets her hand rest there for a moment, wishing there was something she could do, something she could say to make it better. “Night,” she whispers, and slips out past John, who leaves the door ajar behind them.
“Bill home?” he asks when they return to the bar.
“He’s out doing something, said not to wait up.” Without Ash, her hands feel clumsy, so she busies them mixing rum with the eggnog she’s pulled from the cooler. “Want some?”
“Sure,” says John, sitting down on the other side of the bar. She pours it into two glasses, sets one in front of him. “Cheers,” he says.
She takes a sip of the drink and thinks about a woman, heavily pregnant with the world’s savior, shivering in the brisk desert December. It’s a good story. Sometimes, she wishes she believed it.
“I needed to see Bill about a job,” John’s saying, looking down at where his hands are folded on the bar. “I’m sorry, it being Christmas Eve, but it’s. The thing, it’s killing people, and no one deserves that, not in the middle of a celebration. Shouldn’t take long. I’ll have him back to you before you can blink.”
She rolls her eyes. She knows John’s sense of how long it takes to blink. “Fine,” she says. “Just bring him back in one piece, we’ll be square.”
--
One of the last Christmases that Jo will believe in Santa, and Bill is still out on some damn fool hunt with John, neither one of them used to working together, but both of them knowing that whatever is killing has to be stopped. Once Bill had returned from his errand, swept John into the uncompromising hug of men who didn’t know whether the last time was really the last, she’d gone to check on Ash. Sat at his bedside for a while, humming tunelessly to him, while John and Bill parsed out a strategy in the next room.
A shadow had fallen across the open crack of the door. Bill had poked his head in, nodded for her to join him in the hall. “I’ll be back by tomorrow morning,” he’d said. “Should be an easy hunt, run-of-the-mill angry spirit, except it’s got a few friends and you know how that stuff gets stronger, this season.”
Ellen had smiled and kissed him, his hands fitting her face like they had since they were nineteen and so in love it hurt to think about it. “I’ll be back,” he’d said again, with conviction. The curve of his smile had made his eyes sparkle in the low light. “Tell Santa I could use a new shotgun.”
Barking a laugh that she’d tried to stifle behind one palm, Ellen shoved at him with her other hand. “Shoo,” she said. He went.
Now she sits up for him, staring out the window. At one o’clock in the morning, it starts to snow, slowly at first, and then so thick it looks like foam, rushing from the sky. Ellen thinks about stuffing Jo’s stocking, but can’t quite stand to do it without Bill there, so she waits. There’s time yet.
She must have fallen asleep, because the next thing she remembers is John’s hand on her shoulder, shaking her awake. “Ellen,” he says. “Ellen, wake up.”
Never sleeping in this chair again, she thinks. Her back creaks and spasms when she stretches. She opens her eyes and focuses on him in the grey light of the hour just before dawn. He looks exhausted, worn in a way she’s never seen, a fresh cut on his cheekbone still oozing blood down his face. It’s the look in his eyes, though, that scares her.
“What is it?” she asks, sitting up, tugging her clothes back into presentable order.
John starts to say something, cuts himself off, tries again. “It’s--I don’t know how to,” he starts, tripping over his own words. With each syllable that leaves his mouth, Ellen’s heart rises through her chest until it’s pressed tight against her throat.
“What?” she asks again, because she needs to hear it. She needs to know. “Where’s Bill?”
“The thing we were chasing--”
“No,” she says. And it’s as simple as that. Nothing happened to Bill because nothing can happen to him. She refuses to allow it.
“Ellen--”
“Please leave,” she says. “Now.”
He reaches a hand towards her, palm up, nonthreatening.
“If you touch me,” she says in a perfectly even voice, “I will break each one of your fingers.”
--
The story comes in pieces. Turns out, John told a friend of his, who told a buddy of his, who tells it in a whisper in the corner of the roadhouse until Ellen walks up to the table, sits, and says, “Tell me.”
“Spirit really didn’t want to be returned to its resting place. John and Bill, they set a trap for it, meant for Bill to herd it in one direction while John waited for it at the edge of the woods. Way it went down, though, John came out of hiding too early, and the thing saw him, decided Bill was the better bet.”
--
“Ellen. I know you won’t pick up the phone, but damnit, I want--I want to say I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’d do, I was you, but it wouldn’t be talk to me. I don’t think. But. Fuck, Ellen, I--”
“Yeah, me again. Wanted to tell you how sorry I was. Again. Can’t stop thinking about it, and Ellen, come on, pick up the fucking phone. Just talk to me. Please, Ellen, don’t make me, I mean, please.”
“Okay, it’s been a while, Ellen, this is-- Please pick up?”
--
It takes a year, but John’s back at the roadhouse just after she closes up shop. She thinks about letting him in, but figures if he gets cold enough, he’ll break in anyway. She could use the excuse to make him fix the lock on the front door.
Four blankets later, she’s still shivering, and she’s not surprised when he turns up at the door to her bedroom. “Ellen?” he whispers. He reeks of alcohol, of sweat and salt and soil.
“Go away,” she says. “I told you, John, I don’t--”
“Please,” he says, “I didn’t mean--”
“I know,” she says. She does. He no more meant to kill her husband than she meant to drop the bottle of gin earlier; shit happens, sometimes, and all you can do is keep your head above the water and try to outlast the storm.
“Do you?”
“I forgive you, John Winchester,” she says. She wonders whether she will finally cry--tears prick against her eyelids, burn at the inner corners. But no, she pulls herself together, curls more tightly beneath the blankets. “Now get the fuck out of my room.”
--
They dance, carefully. For a long time, he doesn’t call, doesn’t answer when she calls him. He turns up from time to time, almost always fresh off the hunt. He never brings his boys, and she doesn’t ask about them. Occasionally, he talks about them, about how Sammy’s making straight As or how Dean can tune a thirty-year-old engine until it purrs like a sated cat. She tells him how Jo can throw a knife to hit a moving target at thirty yards.
“Bill was always good with knives, too,” he says, so incautiously that Ellen thinks for a minute he must be talking about another Bill. He’s talking about hers, though--she sees it in the way he can’t meet her gaze.
She pulls a bottle of scotch from beneath the bar. “On the house,” she says. “What else do you remember about him?”
--
By the time they’ve half-finished the bottle, Ellen’s warm and loose, laughing at a story about how Bill couldn’t pitch a tent worth shit and ended up collapsing one on himself in the middle of a hunt. John smiles with her, leans forward. “He woke up covered in twenty pounds of canvas, decided that something was attacking him. Grabbed his knife, started slicing at it. Course, once he realized it was only the tent, he laid off and set it back up, but later that night, it rained an inch and a half, and the next morning, he looked like someone’d dumped him in the lake.”
“Couldn’t tie a tie, either,” Ellen says. “It’s a mystery how he ended up hunting at all, hands as useless as his could be.”
“Some of us, it’s a calling.” John’s abruptly serious, his stare gone distant.
“Tell me about her,” says Ellen. When he hesitates, “You owe me that. You saw something of my husband, I get to see something of your wife.”
John takes a deep breath, lets it out. “First time I saw her, she was wearing a pair of jeans so old they were almost grey, a man’s white t-shirt. Farm girl, you know? Never once let me forget how I couldn’t grow a plant to save my life. She liked flowers, hated cut ones. Said it was just depressing as hell when they died anyway, just a pointless death. Nothing worse than a pointless death.” As he speaks, his words become steadily more monotone, almost ritual. “Last time I saw her, she was pinned to the ceiling of Sam’s nursery, gash across her stomach, in too much pain even to scream.”
“You know what did it?” Ellen asks.
“Demon,” says John, shrugging. “Don’t have a name for it yet, but I’ve been tracking it, over ten years now. When I catch up, then. Then, we’ll see.” The emptiness in his voice, the raw determination frightens her. His fingers tap against the bar, against his glass. She reaches to still them and finds her hand enclosed in his warm, calloused palm. Stupidly, she stares at their joined hands while he bushes his thumb against her wrist, tiny strokes, up and down.
She meets his eyes, and jerks her hand from his, stands. The room wavers; she keeps it upright through sheer force of will. “I think you’d better go,” she says.
John can’t look at her. He kicks one toe against the splintering floorboards and bows his head.
--
She doesn’t see him again for seven years. She hears of him, sure, hears the stories about the Winchesters. They’re a little legend, round her place; everyone’s heard of the qutrub incident in Little Birch, or the ninyo off the Oregon coastline. They’ve fought and defeated things no one else has even heard of, and when hunters come in nursing wounds and questions, Ellen knows who to call.
And then one day, as always just after close, John comes through her front door, sits down at the bar, and says, “Sammy’s gone.”
She thinks for a second that he means dead, because they have their private language of grief, these hunters, and no one is ever dead lest they be forgotten. But he continues, tells her about Stanford and scholarships, about the way Dean won’t talk to him or hell, even look at him straight sometimes. It reminds her of Ash. She wonders whether Sam has it in him to make it with normal people, people who don’t understand true unconditional love, pure sacrifice.
His father, though, his father understands, and when he leans his elbows on the table and says, “I can’t protect him there, Ellen, I can’t, and he’s so smart but Jesus such a kid still, sometimes, and I can’t protect him,” all she wants to do is take Sam by one ear and haul him back home, say Your father loves you, you idiot kid, he loves you.
“He’ll be all right,” she says instead, pouring John a whiskey. “They’re always all right, in the end.”
“I’m going to find that sonovabitch,” says John, “and then I’m going to waste it.”
She doesn’t ask whether he means the demon, or Stanford, or the rebellious streak she suspects Sam inherited directly from his father. It doesn’t matter, not really. All that matters is this man, and his mourning, a secret, personal pain that he will never show anyone else. Ellen thinks about Jo, and about how good she is with calculus or with a throwing star, one and the same. Thinks about Ash, frustrated genius, helping with the hunt because it’s what he’s been raised to, the only thing he knows.
This might be the only thing John knows. “Can I do anything to help?”
--
She collects leads and channels them to him. Possessions in Tulsa, mysterious house fire in Edina. Crop failures in a circle around Ten Sleep.
“I’m going after it,” he tells her finally. “I’m sending Dean on a hunt, and I’m going to ground. Can’t think the same way, move the same way, with him in the mix.”
John Winchester, she thinks, you think you’re blind just because it’s too dark to see the path. The problem’s not always with you. “Fine,” she says. “But you--” she doesn’t know quite how to phrase it, and settles for, “You don’t let anything happen just because you think there’s no other way out. There’s always another way out.”
“I’m not, Ellen, I’m not going into this--”
“Thinking you’re going to die? Yes you are, John, you think this is your last battle and you’re walking to where no one will find your body.” She swallows, hard, hears him clear his throat on the other end of the line. “You’re coming out, you hear me? You’re coming out of this alive, you promise me that.”
“Ellen, I--”
“No, John, you promise.” It’s selfish, she knows it’s selfish, but she won’t lose him, can’t lose him. Not after, not after everything.
“All right,” he says at last. His voice is low and unsteady. “All right, Ellen, I promise.”
She hangs up without saying goodbye.
--
“Got word on three possessions all within a week, up in Arkansas. Give me a call, I’m still working on the details. Bobby might know a few more, but for now, just know that. Brings the count up to nineteen, just these past six months. Something’s going down, John, something big.”
“Still haven’t called me back about the last time, but John, this is bigger than you think. Signs everywhere, and the hunters are nervous as hell, haven’t heard anything about the Winchesters in God knows how long. Makes ‘em twitchy.”
“John, it’s Ellen. Again. Look, don’t be stubborn, you know I can help you. Call me.”
--
She doesn’t even suspect something’s happened until four months after she leaves her last message. Two boys come breaking into her place, all leather and cocky grins and yes’m, no’m. Sam and Dean.
Somehow, they look exactly like she imagined they would. They sit, while Dean nurses the throbbing in his nose brought on by Jo’s punch, and they tell her that their father is dead. And she thinks That bastard, because the only promise he ever made her was that he would be all right, that he would come back whole, and that bastard.
“Never trust a hunter,” Bill used to tell her. “We can’t be trustworthy. Only place we’re ever trustworthy is on the hunt, and then, well, then things can go sideways so fast it leaves your head spinning, and we’re human. We fuck up.”
She looks at Dean and sees his father, looks at Sam and sees the hole the man left behind. Looks at Jo looking at Dean and thinks no. I won’t lose you too, I won’t, Jo, I can’t.
--
Jo runs off anyway, of course, girl always did have too much resourcefulness for her own good, but Ellen hauls her back home and tells her the story of John Winchester. Part of it, at least, the part that will keep Jo away from his son. Because you can’t trust a hunter.
He’ll spin stories out of darkness and silver bullets, and his words will enthrall you and you will never be so happy as when he comes home. And you will never know such grief as when he doesn’t, one day.
Jo won’t be speaking to her for a while, but she will live. One day, she will marry a quiet man, a safe man, and he will love her for her fierceness and protect her from it.
Night is coming on, creeping in over the plains. Ellen stands just outside the door of the roadhouse, her arms folded against the chill of the shadows. She hopes wherever hunters go when they die, Bill and John are together. Sharing war stories over a corner table, grins like celebrations. She imagines Mary joining them, jostling John aside until she can nestle into him, comfortable, warm.
One day, she thinks. One day.