Hunters
In the world of hunters, there are four classes, Bobby reflected over a glass of whiskey. It was Sunday afternoon, Sam sprawled out over his sofa, feet dangling off the end, snoring fit to wake the dead. Dean was leafing through his father's journal, acting as if he didn't already have the thing memorized. They were both content to just be there, to snitch the food from his fridge and empty his liquor cabinet.
The newbies are the most useless, as hunters go. The term isn't really fair, since a lot of them aren't new to this, have been hunting things that go bump in the night for years. But they're called newbies anyway, because they don't have a lick of common sense between them. They're the ones that you would occasionally take a hunt, try to train them to move up to the second class. John Winchester started here. He got 'The Talk', and was handed a canister of salt. Unlike most newbies, he picked up the hunt right away, within months moving up to the intermediate class, and from there to the Very Good. Martin Creaser was a veteran of this rank, starting here in his early twenties and staying until the day he mouthed off to the wrong Vampire.
The intermediates were good. In a team up, you'd want at least one of them, preferably more. Garth, damn him, was in this class. They were good enough to be a resource, but bad enough to know their lives depended on following good orders. Often, they had one focused skill that they exceeded at, such as marksmanship or research. More often, they were simply jack of all trades, good in many fields, but not good enough to be experts. Ellen and Jo fit this category pretty well, Bobby mused. They weren't in the field, but if called upon, they were capable of caring for themselves. If they ever came out of retirement, Bobby would be forced to bump them up to Very Good.
The Very Good were harder to fit in. They were valuable in small doses, but too many of them would begin to butt heads. Bobby himself belonged here. They were the team leaders, the ones who took on the newbies because they could cover themselves and another man. They were the ones who drowned themselves in liquor to forget the screams of those they couldn't save, to bury the faces of the monsters they had faced. If called on, they could take care of most problems within a week.
Then, there were the best.
The best hadn't been a category in Bobby's mind. The best would imply near perfection, the ability to kick ass and save the victims damn close to every time. They would be the ones to push on, to continue until they ended up dead. And of course, if they were dead, they were no longer the best. Therefore, Bobby had reasoned for many years, the best couldn't exist.
That was before the Winchester boys. It was before Sam and Dean both came back to life, within a year of each other. It was before they opened the Gates of Hell and closed them, before they started the damned apocalypse and gave their all to end it. And they had succeeded. It had taken Sam's life, and later his soul, but they had ended a fucking apocalypse. Alright, so maybe they started it, too, but it's a hell of a lot easier to start something than to end it.
And the two idjits continued to defy his rules. If you're dead, you can't go on. So they came back to life. Sometimes, in his darker moments (usually when the whiskey was gone and Dean called, drunk, because Sam wasn't picking up his phone. Sam wasn't picking up his phone because Dean was drunk, by the way.), he wondered if they did it just to prove him wrong, that there could be a best.
'Course, Bobby snorted to himself as he surveyed his living room and the two giants with in it, when he envisioned the best, he didn't think of a salad hungry sasquatch and a porn adoring slightly-less-of-a-sasquatch.
But then Sam snuffled in his sleep, smiling into his pillow, and Dean glanced up, a quick check on his brother. No, Bobby decided, they had been exactly what he had been thinking of when he decided the best could exist.