Do you really think I'd be posting stories on this site if I owned anything to do with the Winchester boys?
Once upon a time
In another life, John didn't turn back after he'd gotten Sammy out of the burning nursery. Instead, he carried both boys out of the front door himself.
In another life, John didn't even think to go to Missouri. Instead, he accepted the official explanation for the fire and tried to forget about what he'd seen, telling himself it had been imagination, PTSD, lack of oxygen.
In another life, John didn't take the boys and disappear. Instead they just moved to a different part of town after the insurance money arrived, and began to heal.
In another life, John never learned to hunt. Instead he learned to let go: of Mary, of the past, although he never remarried.
In another life, Sam and Dean were as close as siblings normally are. That is to say, they were always close, but never close.
In another life, Dean went to college – not an Ivy League like Sam, but a good school. So John was surprised when Dean told him he wanted to join the Marines. "I need to do something, Dad," Dean tried to explain, and John thought he understood.
In another life, John didn't fight with Sam anywhere near as much, although they didn't always understand each other. Instead, John drove Sammy to Palo Alto himself, and Dean helped him move in with Jess, two years later.
In another life, Dean made Sam announce his and Jess' engagement at Dean and Lucy's first anniversary party, and then told Jess that she must have been crazy to say yes. Sam threw a sausage roll at him, laughing.
In another life, Sam and Jess were up to their elbows in wedding preparations when, one day, Sam was just… gone.
In another life, after the Winchesters had been searching for Sam for three increasingly frantic months, the Wyoming police found four horribly mutilated bodies in the woods not far from a deserted cemetery: three men and a woman, all between twenty and twenty-five years of age, as the coroner's report put it.
In another life, it took another week before one of the bodies was identified as Samuel Winchester, 23, born in Lawrence, Kansas.
The next day, a pretty dark-haired girl called Ava walked through a deserted cemetery in Wyoming, fit an antique six-shooter into the keyhole in the mausoleum's doors, and turned it with a sharp twist of her wrist.
In another life, John never learned to hunt, nor taught his sons to do so. Instead, all hell broke loose upon the world.