It was never supposed to come to this. Things were never supposed to go this far. A life wasn't supposed to have been lost, whether accidentally or not. She wasn't supposed to feel this way. He wasn't supposed to want her. She wasn't supposed to have access to the gun he'd stowed away before his death in the safety deposit box under the alias Jonathan Van Zant. She wasn't supposed to feel conflicted as she stared down the man responsible for destroying everything she had worked so hard and so long to build up. But as her finger ghosted along the trigger, that was exactly what she felt.

It was raining, and her hair clung to her face. Everything had been taken away from her at this point. Dean was long gone; three years gone, to be precise. Lucas—poor, sweet Lucas who had nothing to do with this world she had gotten herself into of her own free will—thought she was a monster now. Had she really become the person she'd feared being all along? Was she truly a monster? Her heart ached as she lifted the gun with a trembling hand, aiming it at the older man's forehead. She needed to say something, needed to speak her mind, to make herself feel a little less guilty about what she was about to do.

"Why?"

It wasn't much. But it was all she had. Words were all Peyton had left. The man before her had taken everything else from her, so all she had was what she had come into the world with. A sob threatened to tear through her lips as she stood there, shuddering in the cold as the downpour picked up speed. She didn't want this life, didn't want to have to be on the run. She'd never chosen this for herself. All she had wanted was to be happy with a man she'd loved, but he was gone. She'd allowed herself to mend and had fallen again, but he was gone, too. Now all she had left was the monster standing before her; and the monster within her as well.

"Shoot me."

Avoiding the question was what John had learned to do best in his nearly fifty years on earth. He wished he knew why he had done all of this, why he had essentially been responsible for his own son's death, why he'd been so hell bent on making a woman—and one he didn't even know, at that—love him. But he had been. He'd been like a man possessed. There was no hope for him to continue with his life at this point, so as he dropped his own gun to the ground, he resigned all hope of living.

"All hope abandon, ye who enter here."

The words were murmured under his breath as he dropped to his knees, his eyes pleading for her to just get it over with already, to take him out of his misery. And then it happened. A shot was fired.

But not from Peyton's gun.

His eyes clouded over as he looked at the owner of the gun. He had to be seeing things. There was no way that the man he saw could be standing in front of him, while he himself fell backwards, the shot having hit square in his chest. But as the mysterious gunman stepped forward, it was clear that nothing in the world had been as John had thought it was. It was as he recognized the familiar prominent jaw, gleaming hazel eyes and arrogant demeanor that he realized he wasn't the monster in all of this.

John Winchester had been the victim of his own villainy, and a man thought to be dead had been his undoing.