A/N: Hello people of the angsty variety. If you cannot handle angst or would rather read a good humor fic or fluff, good on you, leave this page. Let me just get something out of the way first: I don't know much about writing fanfiction. I'm already a writer, but entering other peoples' worlds is somewhat new to me. If any details stray from canon, tell me. Constructive criticism wanted. Rated T for language in later chapters. Also, this is NOT SLASH. I like slash as much as the next person; this just isn't that kind of story.

Chapter 1: Morgue

John hears the sirens, crying and screaming in the night, but he doesn't listen to them. He just stares at the flames pawing at the windows, the smoke spiraling through the midnight sky. A starless night. A moonless night, blank as a motionless television screen except for the waltz of the flames and the shakes of Dean's sobs against his legs.

He wants to run back inside. He wants to go inside and hold Mary against his chest and tell her it's going to be all right and feel the tickle of her blond curls against his unshaven chin. He wants to save her, even though he knows she's dead already.

When the police cars and ambulances and fire trucks arrive, Sammy begins to cry. The flash of cerulean, white and red lights along with the patchwork of sounds are overwhelming to John, and must be even more so to his sons. Gently, he rocks Sam back and forth. Sammy quiets a bit, his squalls muting to slight cries. Firefighters spill out of the trucks in orange vests, racing into the house. He watches as they spray it with water and for a second he almost wants to preserve the flames, keep them burning forever along with the broken shred of hope that Mary might still be alive.

It's a hunting thing. John knows it because every time anyone close to him had lost anyone it had been because of hunting. That was the reason Mary had given him. "It's the thing that killed everything I cared about. That's what it is. It's just pain and suffering and death and it puts everything you love in danger. That's why I'm not letting you or Sammy or Dean get mixed up in it. I'll never let that happen."

"Daddy? Is Mommy going to come out too?" Dean's voice is tiny and shrunken, and he wants to bend down and embrace his older son and tell him that everything will always be okay, but the baby in his arms won't allow it.

"I don't know, buddy. I don't know where she is. But she's going to be fine. She's going to be all right. Just stay with me and help me take care of Sammy until she gets back, okay?" It's a lie that would be obvious to a casual observer, but it isn't to John or to the ears of a young child unfamiliar to lying. If John tries hard enough, maybe he can convince himself it's true and cradle her warm memory in his arms.

Mary's words still burn caustically in his memory when paramedics wrestle his children away from him. They check every inch of his sons, listening to their breathing for smoke inhalation, examining their skin. Sammy's crying permeates the air. When the boys have been confirmed safe, John's relief infuses his veins and he almost collapses. No need to lose more people he cares about, especially in one night. The paramedic hands baby Sammy back to him and mutters to him something that sounds like "I'm sorry."

Sorry about what? It isn't as if the paramedic is responsible for anything.

Dean wraps himself around his father's jeans. He stops crying and looks up with shining green eyes the color of grapevines and says, "Mommy isn't coming back, is she?"

John decides that it's better to tell Dean the truth when he's numb than when his son can see him crying. "No. She won't."

Dean doesn't cry, just says a little hurt, "Oh" as he stares into the flames.

The fire starts to fade now, its fingers dissipated into claws of smoke. The paramedics can't collect Mary's body, not until the fire is out. Mary's body. He has to keep reminding himself that it'll be a body, an empty husk, and not his wife that will be rolled out of the house.

Sammy's crying has blossomed again, loud enough to overlap with the disjointed radio signals and shouts of firefighters and policemen.

Dean's let go of John now. "Here. I'll take him."

Hesitantly, John hands the crying baby to Dean. "Fine. That's fine."

Dean holds Sam against his chest, rocking him back and forth. It's a strange sight, a child cradling what looked like a baby doll only slightly smaller than him in his arms. "Shh. Sammy. It's okay."

Sam stops crying and looks around at the shadows of people moving into the house. John's glad Sam is a baby and doesn't understand what's going on. Unfortunately, he can't say the same for Dean, who will suffocate in "adult" nightmares for months.

"You're good," he says to Dean, a small scrap of a sweet familial moment that John can almost pretend belongs to a different time. "You'd make a great dad. I can't even get him to calm down like you can."

"Thank you, Daddy," Dean lisps. The boy looks at the ground.

Then he sees the men carrying a stretcher out of the house and John runs and he's biting his tongue and the air is chalky with smoke and hard to breathe and he sees the charred and blackened body like a strip of coal and he smells burnt flesh and he screams her name, over and over again, as though doing that will make her be all right. He whispers to her body that everything is all right and that he saved Sam and Dean. He knows she can't hear him. He knows she's long gone. He doesn't care. He doesn't dare questioning his logic because it'll force him to face up to the truth.

When the ambulance doesn't turn on its sirens, John realizes.

The police rule out murder. In fact, they don't even consider it.

There's no reason to consider it. There's no reason they would, so John tries not to blame them. Mary's body is too broken and burnt to perform a proper autopsy. A room which may have been full of evidence has been ground to gray dust. They determine it a tragic gas leak. The story makes the papers, despite John's wishes for it to remain private. He hears people whispering too, about the tragic loss of a young life and how sad it must be and those poor boys living without a mother. He tries to swallow their whispers with alcohol, but they never disappear. Drinking amplifies his grief, but makes the ache in his chest a little more bearable, the bubbling of champagne in his bloodstream, the empty chemical taste living on his tongue. He decides he can't let himself become a full on drunk, because he has two boys he needs to look after and he can't even try to think about becoming a cruel, alcohol infected monster with no right to even have children.

The day after the fire, John drives his sons down to clear out the house.

When he arrives, it's quiet and empty. The smell of burning intoxicates John. He coughs away the smell, the chemical burning that reaches his nostrils despite the face mask he uses to avoid chemical poisoning. Dean wears one too. Sam isn't here. He hired a babysitter.

"Don't take your mask off," John says to Dean. "Don't breathe in anything here."

"Can I go into Sammy's room?" Dean's expression is filled with such exuberance it weighs on John to actually say no.

"No. It isn't safe in there."

"I want to look for Mommy." Dean looks up at him with eyes green and hopeful enough to make him look out of place in this barren wasteland that was once their home. "I want to see if she's in there."

"She isn't in there. They took her to the morgue."

"What's a morgue?"

Of all the things John doesn't know how to do without Mary, being a father is probably the most significant. Being a single father was something John never dreamed of becoming, but sometimes, our dreams don't determine the courses of our lives. He doesn't know how to answer this question. Last night he hoped that Dean had caught on to the concept of his mother's death. It didn't.

"It's where they keep bodies," says John. "Before the funeral."

"So Mommy's dead?"

"Yes."

John continues to walk through the house when he hears a tiny sniffle, barely audible. He spins around. Dean is crying, tears streaking down his face, little-kid snot trailing from his nose.

"Hey. Dean. It's okay. It's going to be okay," said John. "Did your Mom ever tell you about angels?"

"She said that they're watching over me."

"Yeah? Well, that's where your Mommy is now. She's with the angels, and she's looking after you like she always does. You just won't be able to see her anymore," said John. His voice fragments. He continues. "So don't worry about her being hurt or upset, because that's what she's doing right now."

"You're sure?"

"Absolutely." John gathers Dean in his arms and holds him close to his chest.

"What does 'absolutely' mean?"

"It means 'for sure'." John doesn't know if that's an exact definition, but it's the closest thing a four year old can understand, even if he doesn't believe "absolutely" is the case. "Come on. Put your things in that bag. If it can't fit into that trash bag, then don't bring it. Get anything you can find that's Sammy's, just not in his room or in the T.V. room."

"Why can't I bring everything?"

"Because we're moving," says John.

"Where?" asks Dean.

"I don't know yet. I'll figure something out."