Warnings: SPOILERS for s9 upto 9.17: Mother's Little Helper. Some swearing, experimental, disordered storytelling.
John was actually really fun to write! Yeah, IDK, either.
Legacy
It's an enormous place, all wood panelling and soft yellow lights and rows and rows of books everywhere, and Sam's standing in the middle, spreading his arms and going, welcome home, dad, but all John can see is that yellow light glinting off Sam's ridiculously long hair and think about the unease churning deep in his gut—
"Dad?" Dean says from beside him, and though his face is older than John ever thought it could get, he can still recognise that tentative, hopeful look in his eyes.
(dad is this okay i did this is it okay is it okay)
"Must cost a bomb to upkeep," John says, although it's far from the first thing he wanted to say; hell, he hadn't even really thought about that shit at all, and isn't it a fucking shame that he's seeing his boys for the first time in centuries, and all he can say is well, shit, how much do you pay for this place, because 'homes' mean budgets, and a hunter's budget means ratty, cockroach infested motel rooms, not luxurious libraries and steam showers.
Dean's face falls, but Sam just cocks his head and goes, "Well, there's a lot of spellwork that keeps this place going; we don't actually have to do much. We're trying to figure out the magic, but, uh. It's kinda slow going. There's just—so much we don't know, dad." There's a reverence to his tone as he finishes, and all it serves to do is heighten John's unease.
"Yeah?" he says, picking up a book and flipping through page after yellowed page of Latin, remarkably well-maintained for something that's over a century old. He doesn't like the neatness of it, the coziness—his memories of 'research' are punctuated by endless drives to libraries for obscure books; trying to learn Latin in under six months, fuelled by whiskey and desperation and the incessant cries of his sons; pages smudged with grease and annotated with messy scrawls that probably involved a cuss word or two; how some cases would take months to solve by the time he painstakingly assembled everything together.
This is… sterile. Academic. No wonder is Sam is so reverent.
"Yeah," he hears, but to his surprise, it's not Sam, it's Dean. "This is our legacy, Dad. Ours. It's—the home we were supposed to have."
John slides the book back onto the shelf. "It's something, all right."
His boys find him first, just like he always knew they would.
Sam is taller than John remembers him ever being (and John remembers that at eighteen, he was already looming over both him and Dean), with his hair long enough that it's on the verge of flowing down to his shoulders. His eyes are wide, mouth gaping, one hand worrying at the pocket of his ill-fitting jacket, and it's all so Sam that John is equal parts relieved and exasperated.
Dean, however—
Dean is bulkier, gruffer, with stubble on his face, lines and shadows around his eyes. It's the anger that sets John back on his heels, though—it's a pure, scorching thing that radiates off him. He's staring down at John like he'll only need all of two seconds to kill him and strew his body parts in the air, and John knows because he's seen it before (sometimes in his own mirror) and it's the kind of thing that he thought he was protecting his sons from, with his selective education of them.
"Dad?" Sam says, and of course it's Sam; Sam, who's just too damn trusting, still, who—
"Christo." Dean throws what he presumes is holy water in his face, and of course his skin doesn't sizzle, and before John can open his mouth to say anything, he's being held by an iron grip around his neck, feeling the cold metal of a blade at the underside of his chin. It's Sam, and holy hell, when did Sam even move?
Sam nicks him with the blade, but doesn't let go: Dean's opening another flask, and when he pours the contents of that all over his face—
"What the hell are you doing, pouring floor cleaner all over me?"
The arms around his neck go slack, and Dean breaks into a dizzyingly blinding grin.
"Remember that hunt in Minnesota? Uh, it must've been '95, I think? Or something. I mean, I was still in school at the time."
John leans back in his chair, puts his boots up on the table. "If you mean the Black Dog that nearly tore us to pieces—hell, yeah. You don't forget something like that."
Dean takes a pull from his beer. "You gave me whiskey that night for the first time after we torched the sucker." He laughs, and it's a bitter, hollow sound. "Simpler times, huh?"
"Just how much more simple is the question I'm ponderin' here," John says carefully, without even knowing why he's being careful (he never had to be, before)—just that the very memory of Dean's anger still makes his blood run cold.
Dean gets up, scratches at the inside of his right arm, says, "oh, you have no idea," and walks away.
They move like old, old men—still in sync, of course, but the synchrony this time is because of years upon years of being together and habits carved into them like rivers, not because of any real understanding. Sam's taking the lead right now, into a large cavernous room lined with bottles containing little glowing blue orbs. Dozens of eyes turn toward them, and they all turn pitch-black, eerily reflecting the blue light.
John's barely even finished thinking, demons and this is too many even for me when Sam skewers the nearest demon with a knife, and to John's surprise, it glows and flickers like a human-shaped jack o' lantern and dies. Dean is moving to his other side, flinging holy water and stabbing, and the two of them are reciting exorcisms, the words flowing smoothly off their tongue in the way John could never make them. The air is filled with smoke and steam and the smell of blood.
At the end of it (good god, it can't have been more than ten minutes), Sam and Dean are standing over a battlefield full of corpses, surveying their work.
John had barely moved.
Sam reaches for the nearest bottle and uncaps it, and the orb flits around them, throwing shadows over their faces, before going out the open door.
"Oh, screw it," Dean says, and runs his arm along the shelves. The bottles fall to the ground and shatter, and suddenly the air is thick with those strange little orbs, and John thinks he hears them whispering.
They all flit out, one by one, and the three of them are left alone in the darkness. None of them say a word.
"We know about Adam," Sam says suddenly.
John starts, and gets his head out of the fridge, fighting the urge to sigh. He should've waited before coming to the kitchen for a bite, preferably at a time when Sam wasn't there. "How is the kid?" he asks, trying for nonchalance.
"Worse than dead," Sam says, still in that completely dead voice. None of that famous anger, no.
"Did you kill him?" John asks, and that draws a reaction from Sam. John feels almost perversely pleased that he isn't on the backfoot in this discussion anymore. "Well?"
"Ghouls," Sam bites out. "They killed and… ate Kate and Adam. And Adam… he was brought back to life, for—" He huffs out a laugh. "It's a really long story."
"Yeah, I heard," John said, finally plucking a bottle of beer from the fridge and settling down on the chair across from Sam. "Lots of chatter in Heaven and Hell about it."
Now Sam's jaw actually drops. "You knew?"
"Kind of hard not to. You, starting the apocalypse, raising the devil… shook up a lot of things everywhere." He takes a measured sip of his beer, then says, "I wish I'd stayed around enough to protect you from that, Sam. I mean, I figured you were heading somewhere dark, but I never imagined—"
Sam swallows long and hard, like he's got jagged glass in his throat. "I also ended it," he says, and it comes out sounding strangled.
"Yeah. And the world's so much better for it, I'm sure." John doesn't really want to come off sounding this bitter, but there's Sam sitting there with his shining, defiant eyes, even now trying to pretend that the truth of what he is doesn't exist, and John can't help old memories being triggered one after the other, like dominoes. "You and your brother in this sterile hole in the ground, fighting a losing battle, and more demons infecting the world than ever. What did you end?"
Sam's grip on his own bottle is white-knuckled, but his voice comes out steady. "You have no idea what Dean and I have been through."
"Then enlighten me," John says.
"We hunted," Sam says simply. "We hunted till there was nothing of us left."
He gets up and leaves in the silence that follows.
John nurses a beer one quiet afternoon, and thinks about murdering his children in their sleep.
There's a moment when Sam and Dean take him to the Impala and John thinks this is home, this is home. He takes Dean in his arms and crushes him tight while Sam smiles and smiles in the background.
Dean hugs him back and says, "We're gonna take you to your legacy, Dad."
John can't wait.
Finis