John Winchester was not a stupid man.
He knew good and well from the moment he laid Sammy in four-year-old Dean's arms and charged him with protecting his baby brother that he was fostering a bond that would go beyond that of any normal sibling relationship. That's the way he wanted it. The more Sam and Dean depended on each other, the safer they'd be.
John had seen things in his life, a lot of things, in every corner of the world, and there wasn't much that surprised him. He was hard, he supposed, even before Mary'd been killed, and he was damned hard on his boys, too. Toughen 'em up, teach them to wear the same carefully constructed armor he'd built for himself, and they just might survive to grow into men.
Maybe it was the hardness that did it. Maybe it was growing up without a mother, without a home, without anything but a hunk of metal and the open road to call their own. Maybe it was them; maybe there was a sickness, a disease inside them that infected their minds and bodies. Maybe it John who'd infected them.
Or maybe there was no one to blame. Maybe it just was.
Bullshit, John would think to himself, whenever he let his mind wander down those familiar, terrible paths. There was always someone to blame, always a finger to point, and always someone to point it at.
At first, he blamed Dean. It made sense, at least for a while. Dean was older, and Dean'd seen more in his young life than any boy had a call to. He was the instigator, during their childhood pranks, luring Sammy into sundry stunts at great risk to life and limb. Not that John ever for a moment thought Dean would let anything happen to his little brother. Dean looked after Sammy with a ferocity that scared John sometimes. It was big, what they had between them, bigger even than the love John had for Mary, and the nights he thought that were the nights he drank the most.
He saw the looks between them. It'd take a deaf-blind idiot not to notice the electricity that crackled in air when he brought Dean back from a hunt, when Sammy checked him over for injuries, clucking and fussing like a mother hen, all the while throwing John dirty looks like every scrape, every cut was his fault.
Dean couldn't have been more than 18 or 19 when he truly began to notice, though if he were brave enough to be honest with himself, he'd known for years before. He started renting a rollaway bed, but Sam complained it was lumpy and hurt his back, and Dean refused on the grounds of being the oldest.
He laughed it off, at the time. It wasn't that strange, was it? His boys sharing a bed? It was all they'd ever done, all they'd ever known. They'd never had the safety and security most children take for granted, and so if they found just a little piece of that wrapped up in each other on a sagging motel mattress, well, that wasn't anything worth getting bent out of shape over, was it?
To tell the truth, John nearly cried with relief when Sam announced he was going to Stanford. He railed and shouted and pounded his fist, and he put on one hell of a show, but that night he prayed, and that night he thanked the Lord and the angels and anyone else who might be listening. He told Dean to man up when he found him bleary-eyed and tearful in the bathroom of the old rented house, a bottle of Jack in one hand and one of Sam's t-shirts clutched in the other.
Dean looked at him, and there was hate in his eyes. Hate and blame and pain that cut so deep John could feel it in his own bones. He took the bottle away from Dean but left the t-shirt, and he pretended he couldn't see the hem of it peeking out from under Dean's pillow for weeks after.
John never told Dean about the post office box he kept in Sioux Falls. He told Sammy, just in case of an emergency, never dreaming he'd ever get more than an occasional text or email from his wayward son.
He didn't, but Dean did.
The letters piled up, in between visits to Bobby's, and John let them. It was the right thing to do, and he told himself that even as he watched Dean's eyes lose their shine, even as he watched him become withdrawn and silent, never saying more than a handful of words in any given day.
For two years, John kept the letters, and he didn't read them. He didn't want to read them, didn't want to know what Sam had to say. On the rare occasions he let himself imagine what the pages contained, he tried to convince himself they would be full of mundane anecdotes about college life: the pretty girls, the booze, the parties… shit Dean wouldn't care about anyway.
If it was a lie, he told himself he was only doing it for the good of his boys. If it was truth, then it didn't matter anyway.
The month after Sam started his junior year, the letters stopped. John waited, one month, two, and then he put them in an old trash can out in Bobby's salvage yard and he lit them up. He cried as he watched them burn, and he whispered an apology to someone, though he wasn't sure who.
Two weeks later, on a hunt in Tucson, Dean brought someone back to the motel room.
That in and of itself wasn't too unusual. John encouraged Dean to mingle with the local women in whatever town they happened to be passing through, and when Dean occasionally brought one of them back to the room, he turned a blind eye. He could sleep through most anything, and if Dean was out late, he'd down a few shots of whiskey before bed and wouldn't know anything had happened 'til the next morning, when Dean's neck was dotted with purple bruises, lips still swollen and eyes heavy-lidded.
Dean wore those marks proudly, almost defiantly, as if daring John to comment. He never did.
This night was different. This night, John couldn't sleep, adrenaline from the hunt coursing through his veins, making his blood leap and pulse just below the skin. He didn't react when Dean opened the door, just kept his eyes mostly closed and his breathing even.
Then he heard two voices. Two male voices. Something suddenly became very real to John in that moment, and he felt bile, terrible and bitter, rise in his throat.
The man - boy - was young, by his estimation. Tall and gangly, all knees and elbows and monstrously long limbs in between. John couldn't make out his face in the thin light of the streetlamp outside, but he could tell the boy was a brunette, hair floppy and too damn long, the way they wore it then.
He urged himself toward sleep, prayed, begged for blessed unconsciousness, but it didn't come. He shut his eyes, but he heard. He heard this boy, this stranger, fuck his son, his oldest boy, until he was whimpering and moaning and calling out a name, garbled and muffled into the pillow, but clear as a bell in John's mind.
Sammy.
John threw up all that next day, and so did Dean, sick with drink, and the two of them took turns in the bathroom. Dean met his eyes calmly every time they passed, a challenge evident in the set of his jaw, and every time, John turned his gaze away.
Dean never asked why John was sick, and John wouldn't have had an answer even if he had.
He didn't mean to disappear, at first. He convinced himself he was keeping Dean and Sam safe, going after the Yellow Eyed Demon on his own. And if it gave him a break, if it gave him time to think, or not think, as the case may be, well that was just an added bonus.
He never told anyone anything, though there were moments he wanted to. He nearly confessed all to Jim before he died, and once he'd gotten so drunk he almost told Bobby. But it was one thing to want, need, help, and another entirely to look a grown man in the eye and say, My boys are in love. With each other. What do I do?
And even then, even after he knew, John still told himself maybe he was wrong. Maybe he was misreading the signs, and maybe it was all in his head.
And maybe pigs fucking flew.
He'd gotten wind that the boys were back together from Bobby, and really, he should've known. He'd been hoping to force the distance between them, and instead he'd pushed them back together, right back into each other's fucking arms.
He stayed gone a long time. He knew Dean was looking for him, listened to every damned voicemail and cried almost every time. But he couldn't come back. He couldn't see them together, watch their smiles and see the happiness shining out of their eyes and know it was wrong. Know it had to end.
It had to happen sooner or later, and it did, not long after they were all three reunited. It felt good to be with his boys again, to be hunting by their sides, even if he knew it couldn't last.
He'd gone out drinking, alone, like he'd done every night for the last two weeks. Dean looked at him disapprovingly, and Sam's eyes went dark with hurt, but he walked out anyway, into the night, into the open air where he could breathe, where it didn't feel like there was a Mack truck crushing his chest with every inhale.
He was drunk when he came back, too drunk to look at the time, too drunk to know that it was at least half an hour before he usually stumbled in.
They probably didn't hear the card in the door, too caught up in what they were doing to be listening for his return. John himself didn't hear the tell-tale noises until it was too late to turn back.
He'd been prepared for this for a long time, and what he felt wasn't surprise, exactly, but it twisted in his gut like a knife, setting him on fire and turning him to ice all at the same time.
Dean was on his knees on the mattress, facing the wall, hands twined around the slats of the headboard. His head was thrown back onto Sam's shoulder, and Sam was… Sam was behind him, arms wrapped around Dean's torso, face buried in Dean's neck, another part of him buried in Dean's…
John turned around and walked out. He walked across the parking lot, then across the street, and then he walked to the other side of town. He found another bar, an after-hours dive that served the local homebrew from a brown ceramic jug, and he drank himself into oblivion.
He woke up in jail, a podunk little cell in a Mayberry town with a sheriff and two deputies, and they looked at him pityingly, the sad drunk fuck. He wanted to tell them, wanted to scream at him, My boys are in love. My boys are fucking each other. My boys are fucked…
But he didn't. He vomited in the stainless steel toilet until the poison was out of his system, and he wondered if there was any way to get the poison out of his boys. He signed the papers the officers gave him, and drank strong black coffee out of a Styrofoam cup.
Dean came to pick him up, and the disappointment, the judgment in his eyes was almost too much for John to bear. He wanted to say How dare you? How fucking dare you judge me?
But he didn't.
They wrapped up the hunt and moved on to the next, no closer to Yellow Eyes or Meg, no closer to the normal life John had wanted for them.
The original deal with Yellow Eyes wasn't for Dean's life, it was for his soul. They'd worked it out, John and Azazel, before the goddamned car crash. It had stung, telling that foul-minded creature his deepest, darkest secret, letting him and all of Hell's dominion laugh and mock and sneer. But the deal was sealed, and all that was left was for John to keep his end of the bargain. He died, Dean got to live, free from this sickness, and Sammy, too.
But then Yellow Eyes orchestrated the crash, and the deal was shot. It wasn't Dean's future, his eternity John was bargaining for; it was his life.
Funny how that was somehow a more difficult decision.
If Dean was gone, if he just… died…
No. John wouldn't let himself think of it, couldn't bear to think of it. And yet, those few nights, in the hospital, he wondered. He turned the options over in his head, and he imagined what it'd be like, just him and Sammy, hitting the road, no secrets, no lies between them.
It sounded like heaven, and it sounded like hell.
In the end, John couldn't let Dean die, no matter what it meant, no matter how it all ended. He made the deal, and he said his goodbyes.
When Azazel came to meet him, he wasn't scared. He looked into those yellow eyes, and there was no fear, no resentment or anger.
There was only relief.