John's Weapons
by Whilom
Sometimes John looked at his sons like they were weapons: favorites, maybe, good in a pinch, always reliable. You cleaned and cared for them, kept them within reach, but after a particular hunt was over they were set aside for the next time.
Sam, as a baby, was about the length of a sawed-off shotgun when John cradled him in his arms. Dean's shoulders fit into his hand the same way a handgun molded itself to his fingers. Funny how the boys even fit the weapons they chose, Dean all wide blades and quick shots while Sam reached for rifles or machetes. Sometimes John had to wait a moment, reorient himself, when the two of them opened the trunk and started dividing the weapons. Sometimes he forgot that weapons could carry weapons too. Or maybe it was just that he forgot his boys were boys and not fellow hunters or backup.
Dean would tuck a gun in the waistband of his jeans and swipe his brother's head, and Sam would laugh and duck, either to dodge the jab or to make it easier for Dean to reach. It was hard to tell with Sam sometimes. Then the two of them would go off, a little past the tree line, standing straight and lethal and armed to the teeth.
They used to stop and turn, waiting, jittering with impatience as John finally creaked the door open and grabbed his own gear from the trunk. But that was before Stanford, before there were more arguments over pieces of paper with dollar amounts and seals on them than there were over which ritual to use or whether Sam wasted the holy water. After that, when there was a hunt, his boys never waited at the tree line anymore, because John wasn't in the car thinking. He was having a heart-to-heart with himself and maybe Providence, because he was hiding from them, listening to their messages but avoiding their calls, watching them just the same: two strangers he might not recognize if they were caught in a crowd.
It was strange that the moment the boys stopped riding around in the back of the car they became boys and not backup. Like the film was only lifted from his eyes after they stopped riding around with him like the weapons in the trunk. Like only after he was on the outside, really on the outside, watching as Dean hacked his way through a front door with an axe or as Sam tangled with ghouls in a futile effort to keep Dean from the fray, only then could he see those boys over there helping so many people, or those young hoodlums tangling in my roses but, no, the lamps in the house don't flicker anymore, instead of lithe strength and a quick draw.
It was like he had to meet his sons all over again. He reflected at night, cramped in his truck or in some moldy motel room, that this must be what stalkers felt like, knowing everything about their prey but not really knowing them. He wrestled with the feeling of entitlement—he was their father, he raised them, they had been through more than any other family he knew—and humility—how could he not know that Sam liked vanilla better than chocolate, always shifted his weight because he could rarely stand still, that Dean hated the smell of cigarettes, preferred ham on his sandwiches although he would eat most anything. He thought he had known the things that mattered. Dean preferred guns and straight punches. Sam liked the strategy of wrestling, although his awkward growth-spurts had left him too lanky to be better than Dean.
He'd close his eyes wherever he was and run through the facts he gathered from watching them. Vanilla ice cream, pistols, and sandwiches spun in his head, along with the changing images of those boys he wanted to call his. When he saw his sons like that, not as weapons but as men, he was startled by the pride he felt. It was different than the pride of a good hunt or in a fine gun or a sharp knife. This pride was warmth in his chest that threatened to burn him in its intensity, something that made him step back with an emotion close to awe on his face when he saw what his sons were capable of.
Sometimes, though, John finally could stop thinking of how to use them, of where he would place them in the woods, of whether he should split them up or let them guard each other's backs. Sometimes, John looked at his sons. Just looked.
But they never saw him there.