Disclaimer: Not mine…don't own…definitely no money.
A/N: This is my second attempt at Supernatural fan fiction. I want to thank everyone who has been so nice about my first story. It was very encouraging!
WHAT YOU WISH FORHe sighed and shifted in his seat, bored beyond description. By this point, he did not even have a clue as to what the droning voice was saying. Even more, he did not give a damn and he had long since passed the point where he would even bother to pretend he did.
Unfortunately, being here served a purpose both social and corporate and so, there was no leaving. Instead, he just tuned out the annoying speech and let his mind wander. And it wandered, as usual, down night-shrouded roads that wound back through the years. To that day. Always, to that day.
They had caught up with It at last. Where it all began, in Lawrence. The battle had been epic and were this 1,000 years ago, someone would have written a grand Saga about it, like the ones that Dad had used to read to them in rundown motel rooms that were suddenly ancient castles amid fog-shrouded mountains.
No "Little Engine That Could" for the Winchester boys.
In the end, though It had been powerful and malicious and deceptive, they had chased it and cornered it and fought it and, as Dad has once vowed to do, killed it. No one else would ever find his mother, or girlfriend, dead and aflame on the ceiling of a bedroom.
Dad had been wounded—badly—and there was no question that, between the permanent damage from the injury and the quest's end, he would retire from hunting, after twenty-four years of single-minded pursuit of the beast. He would stay with Missouri for at least a while, before deciding whether to remain permanently in Lawrence. There were terrible memories connected with Lawrence, and yet the happiest years of John Winchester's life had also been there.
Then had come the moment he and his brother had both been dreading. The time to say goodbye to each other. Nothing had changed in the two years since the subject had been broached in Chicago. One of them still wanted nothing so much as to never hear the word "hunting" again, to go to law school and have his home in the suburbs and his 2.5 children. The other could never leave the dark trail, because "It will never be over."
They had both agreed family was forever and they would stay in touch. But they also both knew, while the words were truly meant, in the end it would be a lie. From that day forward, their paths would diverge so markedly that, though they would always love and worry about each other, the day would come, probably sooner than later, where they would no longer have anything to say to each other.
Which is what had happened. For a few of years, they had called each other on and off. After Dad's death, he had stopped calling. Finally, he had stopped taking any calls, because he simply couldn't pretend any longer that he and his brother had anything left in common other than their last names.
There had been one last text message on his cellphone.
I never was as smart as you, Sam, so it's taken me a little longer to get the point. You're right, though, baby brother. We've moved too far apart and it's time to stop pretending. It's been so long since I've seen you that when I remember you, all I can see is shaggy-haired Sammy, riding shotgun and complaining about my music. Jerk. You never appreciated the really good stuff! I know you're doing really well and I want you to know: I could never understand wanting the white picket fence life, but I'm really proud of you, Sam. And I love you—but if you tell anyone I said that, I'll bust your butt!
Goodbye, Sammy. I hope you get the life you want and deserve.
Dean may not have gotten the life he deserved, but he had gotten the death he deserved. On the last hunt, he had ended up saving a lot of people from one particularly nasty and pissed-off demon. It had cost him his life, but all those people had not let him die either alone or forgotten. Sam had watched the news story—which had sucker-punched him, since none of Dad's friends had known about it and he had not had any warning. He had felt numb, yet some part of him he had thought long-buried and silent had raised its head and howled in anguish.
And because whatever Powers There Be love irony, something amazing happened. It turned out that, even before Dean had gone against the dark forces that one last time, tales had started to spring up, mostly across the Internet, of the mystery man in the big black car who would arrive in the night, stand between the innocents against those things that lurk in the dark, and then move on. And they had not been showing up just on the I-Was-Really-Born-On-Altair4 sites, but from ordinary, solid citizens.
The last hunt, though, had brought everything into the light. Among those saved from demonic forces had been respected religious leaders and high-powered political figures. Pillars of the community, so to speak. And, suddenly, the hidden, the unseen, the previously-disparaged supernatural forces, were big news.
Dean had stayed locally and they had found the motel room where he had left his few personal possessions. It had hurt to think of Dean's last night being spent alone in another fleabag roadside motel—a little late to be concerned, wasn't it, Sam?—but it had only added to the mystique of the lone warrior, sacrificing everything to fight the dark things of this world.
In the room had been two books that had caused a sensation: Dad's journal—added to by Dean—and, to his shock, a personal journal that Dean had been keeping. Dean's journal had detailed hunts they had been on--and the maelstrom that was Dean Winchester's psyche--starting from a year or two before Sam had left for college and continuing up to that last day. Sam had been glad that the shapeshifter incident had been detailed in those pages: at long last, Dean Winchester had been able to reclaim his identity and he had been officially, if posthumously, cleared of all charges.
The journal had actually been published—he winced, knowing how Dean would have cringed to have his private thoughts made public—and suddenly the Winchester men had become legend, but especially Dean, who had soldiered on alone all those years. New tales began to spring up, that he was still out there, had been sighted here or there, saved this one or that and sometimes, the big black car rode in on flames with fiery headlights and the shotgun morphed into a sword with a blade of fire. Even in the new, more open age, when everyone was finding bogeymen under their beds, such stories were met with disbelief.
Sam wasn't quite so sure.
And Dad's journal? It had become the "How To Fight Things That Go Bump In the Night for Dummies". Everyone suddenly wanted to be a ghost hunter. None of them, he thought contemptuously, could have survived in the real Winchester world, when flying below the radar was the name of the game, when you took the cold and the pain and the blows and stitched yourself up and went on again.
They never found the other brother/son, Sam. When his contemporaries laughingly asked if it were he, he just shrugged them off with a joke. He had not shouldered the same burdens or walked the same lonely trail as Dean and Dad; he would not steal any of their glory.
It was perhaps the last unselfish gesture of his life.
When he and Dean had parted, he had picked up where he had left off. It took some heavy-duty tall-taling to get past the fact that, despite being admitted to law school, he had then taken off for two years. Death, lingering illness of family members, he had played every sympathy card he could. And it had worked.
In his second year of law school, he had met Donna. Smart, lively, funny. She was working her way through law school and against all common sense, they had moved in together. Aphorism be damned: two could not live as cheaply as one. But, despite the penny-pinching and rundown apartments, they had laughed a lot and loved a lot and had been very happy.
Oddly enough, the downfall of it all began on what should have been an incredible beginning. Donna had told him she was raised by a single mother. Her father, though she had never known his name, had been the scion of a wealthy, well-connected family, who had considered Donna's mother poor white trash. He could remember how Donna's eyes had turned stormy when she told him. Her mother had been hard-working and loving. She had never taken charity or pity in her life, and she had died much too young. Donna had dismissed her father's kin as elitist snobs.
Then they had received a letter, asking them to come to meet with the partner of one of the largest law firms in the area. He had dropped a bombshell on them. Donna's father had died without any other issue and his sister had been killed with her husband and children in a plane crash. Donna was the last surviving grandchild and her grandparents wanted to make her their heir and bring her into their world.
She had raged and stormed about the apartment, furious with them and determined to reject them as they had her and her mother. He had tried to be the voice of reason. What finally won her over was the idea that she would be taking their money and using for causes they would hate, helping people like her mother who always one step away from being on the streets.
He ran one finger around the edge of his wine glass, as another speaker, equally boring, took the place of the first. God, if he had only known then where it would end, he would have urged her to toss the offer back in her grandparents' faces.
At least, he hoped he would have.
After that, it was all downhill, though it happened so slowly he did not see it until it was too late. Right after graduation, they had both gone to work as corporate attorneys for her grandfather's vast conglomerate of businesses. Donna's grandmother had never really approved of her granddaughter working; in her opinion, Donna should be grooming herself to take Mariel Palmer's place as a doyen of society.
She got her wish when Donna got pregnant with their first child, Thomas John, named for her maternal grandfather and for his father. Donna fell seriously ill and had to stay home for the last four months of her pregnancy. By the time Thomas was born, she had been convinced to become a society matron instead of a corporate shark.
Not that it adversely affected their lifestyle. He had not needed to work at all, but back then, he couldn't bring himself to live completely off her grandparents' money. Today…well, money was money, wasn't it?
The first time he helped Palmer Enterprises to roll over some Mom-and-Pop outfit, he had winced, gotten drunk and wondered what the hell he was doing in this place. The day came, though, when all he did was light a cigarette and move on to the next acquisition. The "geeky college boy" who had argued with Dean that killing people who were unquestionably evil was wrong had, somewhere along the way, lost the fight with his own demons.
Ah, Dean, you said that nothing bad would happen to me. Then again, that was only "As long as I'm around", wasn't it? And I made damn sure you weren't around.
His white picket fences were really wrought iron, designed to keep the riffraff out and the Mercedes in. His quiet home in the suburbs was a palatial mansion, fit for the cover of Architectural Digest, stunning on the outside, empty on the inside.
And one day he woke to find a stranger with Donna's face sleeping beside him. She had become her grandmother, icy and correct. The laughing, raven-haired young woman who was always having trouble keeping her hair out her eyes had become a woman who closed off emotion so as not to mar her elegant perfection. Each day, the gulf between them grew greater until it seemed that the width of the entire United States stretched from one end of the bed to the other.
His children—they had decided on three instead of the perfect 2.5, as ½ a child was so very messy—were the offspring of plenty. It was all about them. The world owed them, for what he was never quite sure. They drifted rudderless, without a moral compass. He remembered the time when he had hated the idea of hunting; and when he had considered the endless parade of motel rooms, the hard road, the never-ending struggles against the dark to be a nightmare. Yet, looking at his children, he had finally realized that, hard and dangerous as it had been, his upbringing had put steel in his backbone. It had taught him to fight on, to take the blows and the punishment and to keep on going.
Somewhere along the way to his life of plenty, he had lost his soul. So slowly, a chip here and there, so that he did not realize it until he had crossed beyond any hope of return. Most days, he could convince himself that he did not care, that he was happy in his life. But on days like this, when he could turn his head and look past the glitterati at the various tables, with their plastic smiles, and see the blazing sunset through the floor-to-ceiling windows, he could remember what it was like when his life had purpose and passion. Then, the emptiness within seemed as vast as the Gobi and the pain was almost too much to bear.
And he would wish he had still been riding with Dean and that they had gone out together in a blaze of glory.
For one moment, he thought he could hear Dean's voice, wry, yet with barely suppressed emotion behind it, repeating the last line from the message.
Goodbye, Sammy. I hope you get the life you want and deserve.
And damned if he had not gotten both.