This is a disclaimer.
AN: Title from Janis Joplin. If Ellen was ever in love with John, then she repressed it real good, I think.
If it makes you feel good
The first time it happened, it went like this.
Midnight in the Roadhouse. There was something nervous in the air that day, and Ellen was wandering around the bar wiping clean tables and rearranging chairs just to give herself something to do. The only customers left were Tom Olsen and Wes Rimes, finishing up their respective drinks and going over the last snippets of gossip they hadn't already discussed.
"Hear Winchester took out that witch in Arizona," Tom said.
"Hear Winchester's dead," Wes replied and took a long drag on his cigarette. It was some French brand or other, and the smell was making Ellen physically sick just then. "Got hisself done for by some poltergeist, up in Amherst. You hear any different, Ellen?"
"I hear nothing," Ellen said. "I just serve drinks. But I ain't about to believe John Winchester's dead till I've put the torch to his corpse with my own two hands."
The two men exchanged awkward looks. Bill had been gone for so long, it was almost easy to forget who'd been with him that night. Almost.
"If you're done," Ellen said with biting sarcasm, hands on hips.
*********
The second time it happened, it was pretty much the same thing. And the third. And the fourth. By the time the word got round that John Winchester had literally dropped off the face of the earth, no one had heard from him in months and word was those boys of his were searching high and low for traces of their old man, Ellen was immune to the rumours. They were always bullshit. True, she'd never actually seen John again, but she'd talked to people who knew for a fact that the man was alive, and that the stories were crap.
Every time, that was enough.
*********
It wasn't that she was in love with him. Sometimes Ellen was sure that half the people who mentioned John in her presence thought that she was, and the other half were equally sure she hated him for being the cause of Bill's death.
The truth, as the truth so often is, was somewhere in between. They'd never been involved, she and John, but they had been friends, of a shaky and slightly mistrustful sort. She'd liked him. She'd sympathised with him, with the sheer agony of losing his wife, of bringing his sons up without their mother.
She'd been like him once, struggling to find her way alone in this new shadow world that had swallowed up her life and left scarcely a trace of who Ellen had once been behind.
"You always listen closest to the ones who gossip about the Winchesters," Jo said once.
"John was a friend," Ellen shrugged.
"Of Dad's?" Jo asked innocently, and there she'd hit the nail on the head. John Winchester, in some twisted, fucked-up way that nobody who wasn't a hunter would ever be able to understand, was the last and only link that Ellen had left to her husband. The idea that he might be dead carried with it the implication that one of the last people in the world who'd actually known her husband was gone, and Ellen could not support that thought.
*********
Once it seemed a certainty that John was missing - after that demon that murdered his wife, some speculated - Ellen called him. It was the first time she'd done so in years, but Ash had been talking about signs and portents and rising demonic activity for weeks now, and maybe - maybe it was all connected.
Maybe she was fooling herself, and just wanted to see him again. He didn't answer his phone.
Ellen was tempted to throw hers through the window when she hung up. What the hell was she doing, calling the man who was responsible for her husband's death like this? She ought to hate him with every fibre of her being, not offer to help him, for God's sake.
"It's just time," she told her reflection in the mirror. "It's been so long, why stay angry? It won't bring Bill back."
Her reflection watched her silently. Crow's feet around her eyes, and if she looked too closely at her hair, she could see the grey strands there, the split ends.
"I should have just fucked him and got it all out of my system," she said savagely.
*********
Then, one sunny afternoon before she opened the bar for business, they broke in.
Ellen had spent years disbelieving the news that John Winchester was dead, but there was no arguing with the look in Dean's eyes.