Disclaimer: The show Supernatural and all things pertaining thereunto are the property of someone who is not me.
When Sam strode out of the motel room, his duffel bag and bulging backpack hooked over the same shoulder and his jaw set like he was expecting someone to slug him at any moment, John didn't say a word. He had already said everything there was to say, which was why his youngest was currently slamming the door behind him hard enough to make one of the cheap, orange-blobbed, nausea-inducing paintings spring off the wall like it had been shot. John didn't say a word, just kept scraping dried mud and other unidentifiable gunk out of the crevices of his third-favorite revolver, focusing on the battered metal and the pick in his hand and wondering if it would rust after the dunking it had gotten.
Unfortunately, the room was so small that no amount of concentration could keep him from seeing the way his other son was rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet, face twisted as if he wanted to swear but couldn't quite think of something strong enough, eyes darting between the window and the door. The closed door. The door Dean had been standing in front of while Sam stalked between the rumpled beds and the disturbingly malodorous bathroom, ramming books and clothing into his bags, very much not looking over to where John sat and cleaned his gun and pretended that his son wasn't five feet away packing up all his earthly possessions in order to leave and don't come back.
Probably Dean would still be standing in front of the door if Sam hadn't made for it as if he meant to go right through brother and door alike without the preliminary step of moving either of them. He'd stared down at Dean, angled so that John couldn't have seen his expression even if he hadbeen looking, which he certainly wasn't, and after a few seconds Dean had shifted to the side. The only noise, the gunshot-sharp slam of the door and the clatter of a picture frame bouncing off the top of the television. Neither of them had said anything – no see you later, no good-bye, not even a friendly get out of my way. In fact the only things said after John's furious ultimatum had been Dean's outraged, "What the hell, Sammy?" when his brother wheeled around and shoved the first book in his backpack, and Sam's whip-sharp retort.
"Shut up, Dean."
Which might be considered ironic (or at least mordantly amusing, as Mary had liked to call things that weren't technically ironic according to her aunt the anal English teacher), since Dean had kept his mouth shut during the whole fight. And it was still shut when he suddenly grabbed his jacket off the bed and shouldered out the door, letting it bang behind him almost as loud as Sam's final statement. John glanced reflexively up at the wall, but the other crappy motel-room excuses for art hung onto their nails.
He went back to his work, aware that he was listening closely for shouting from the parking lot outside, for yells and cuss words that Mary would have skinned him alive for teaching their boys even accidentally. Not that yelling was how the pattern went; usually after John had to tell Sam off, Dean spouted obnoxious jokes and tossed out distractions until Sam stopped glaring at the walls. Usually Dean didn't even bother to acknowledge the argument had happened. Usually John was just able to let it go and ignore Sam until Dean had him calmed down, resigned to whatever it was he hadn't wanted to do, wherever it was he hadn't wanted to go. But this time Dean was obviously mad as hell, and this time Sam had actually done it, had made up his mind and signed the forms and walked out the door. This time, John was listening for a second fight, and he had a feeling – heavy and sinking fast – that Dean was not going to win it. Sam was not going to come around no matter how loud his brother got. No matter how much his father might regret some of the words that had passed.
There was no shouting. But because he was listening so closely, there was also no way John could miss the rumble of the Impala's engine starting up. The feeling in his gut turned spiky and cold, and he spun around to glare out the smudged window. The car was nosing its way out onto the street already, two heads in the front. Even if he got to the window in one leap and the latch didn't stick, they would be too far away to hear him call them back.
When he finally looked back down at the gun, it seemed clean enough. And he wasn't thinking about his sons at all. The only thing in his mind was the wavering neon sign on the ratty little bar across the street.
Really, the bartender should have shelled out the money to get someone to fix that bloody sign. The red and green of the neon letters flickered through the windows like demented strobe lights, without even the common courtesy of keeping time with his headache. He'd filled the corner table with glasses and bottles, some empty and some full, some seriously alcoholic and others plain old beer, because who wanted to have to keep calling for more when you were trying to get gradually-but-thoroughly smashed, especially when all it took to get set up with a nice little personal bar of your own was shoving a fistful of twenties at the faded blonde behind the counter? No way was he carrying it all back to that empty room with its door-slamming echoes, which mean he now found himself trying to rearrange the array of colored glass so that it wouldn't catch the discordant flashes. So far, he wasn't having any luck.
Not surprising. He figured it was already pretty obvious that this wasn't his lucky day.
In fact, the way things were going, he more than half expected the guy who dropped onto the seat across from him to be a cop wondering if he was the owner of that truck parked at the motel across the way and oh, yes, how about those weapons in its trunk? But when he dragged his gaze away from the lights break-dancing in his drink, all he saw was his older son, looking back at him with one of those blank, wide-eyed stares that John had never understood, not even when they first showed up the year after Mary was gone.
"Hey," Dean said, gruffly but very softly, as if he thought John already had a hangover.
John meant to say something else – exactly what, he really wasn't sure – but the words that came out, hardly slurred at all, were, "Where's your brother?"
Dean broke eye contact instantly, turning his attention instead to the motley collection of bottles on the table. John almost protested when he dragged one of them toward himself – not because Dean wasn't old enough or competent enough to handle a bit of the heavy stuff, but because John had had every intention of working his way through the whole lot of them without any help. He waited instead, because the way Dean was gulping at it, he really needed to wet his throat before answering. And John wanted an answer, even if he was pretty sure he already knew what it was.
"Gave him a ride to the bus station," Dean finally said, eyes somewhere in the vicinity of where John's left elbow was planted on the rickety table. "Saw him off." He took another pull at the bottle, a shorter one, and coughed twice. "Gave him some money too." He had a credit card in his hand – where had that come from? – and he waved it through the haze and the queasy wavering lights. "Which means Mr. Howard Stone here is probably bankrupt."
"What the hell did you do that for," John muttered. Not a question, just a criticism. "He said he had a job lined up already. A job and a damned dorm room. Not like you didn't hear him – the whole motel probably heard him."
Dean shrugged. The card vanished somewhere, maybe down one of the ragged cuffs of his jacket, and he turned back to the bottles, twisting them around one by one so that he could read the labels. "Yeah, well. It's probably something lame-ass like shelving books in a library. I bet it pays crap. Probably has some stupid perk like being able to check out books for free." He sounded as tired as John felt. The wisecrack, buoyed by neither enthusiasm nor humor, fell onto the table and puddled with the beer that the booth's last occupant had spilled. John watched it melt for a moment, and thought about taking another drink, and then wondered whether Dean had parked here or at the motel on the other side of the little highway, because if he'd parked at the bar, one of them really ought to go move the Impala before he got completely wasted. Which wasn't going to be long, judging by the intent way Dean was studying the half-priced tequila imitation in front of him.
"Did he say anything else?" John asked, just a casual little question sandwiched in between polishing off his own drink and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
"Not much." Dean was looking at the windows now, all narrow-eyed like he thought the flashing sign might be possessed. "Pulling his sulky brooding shit, you know?" Which John most definitely did, but for once he didn't believe it. Those adjectives could describe Sam on any day of the last month – hell, the last year – but that afternoon, Sam had been neither sulky nor brooding. Angry, and thunderous and self-centered as hell, maybe, but sharp with determination and fire in spite of it. Sam was walking out on his family and his responsibilities, but for once aggressionwas massively outweighing angston Sammy's personal scale. Maybe John had screwed up with his younger son, but at least he'd raised him to be strong when he needed to be. Or at least when he wanted to be.
The fractional part of John's mind that wasn't seething with irritation kept saying scholarship and Stanford in a proud, wondering little voice that might have sounded like Mary's if it wasn't half-drowned under the alcohol.
"Surprised he didn't ask you to give him a ride all the way to California," John told the bottle in Dean's hand, and was distantly unshocked when his son's fingers clamped convulsively around it, white from the pressure.
"Yeah," said Dean, flat-voiced and looking anywhere but within a yard of John's face. "Well. I wasn't gonna do that." The way he tipped the bottle up afterward, the conversation was over. Over and done with, time for silence and some serious intoxication: Dean wasn't saying anything else tonight. God knew John had just wished the boys would shut up more often than not, but this was hardly the way he'd wanted it to happen.
But after all – not his lucky day. Things were not going to happen the way he wanted, whatever way that might be. Oh, sure, he knew exactly what he really wanted to happen, but since it involved Sam looming up at his elbow and apologizing and taking back every damn thing he'd said that day and a hundred or so other things that had come out of his mouth over the past four years – well. John might not be as smart as his college-bound son, but he wasn't stupid enough to think that could happen. Even if it was obvious that he didn't know Sam nearly as well as he'd thought, he was still pretty damn sure that his younger son was just as stubborn as he was. Maybe even more.
So what did he want to happen? John closed his eyes (because of those damn flashing lights, nothing to do with the expression on Dean's face across from him) and tried to think straight for the first time since the door had slammed. He pushed past the seething anger, the frustration and the shock, and struggled to think it through. He had to get a handle on this. He had to get it under control.
Kids grew up, and then they left home, left their parents. That was just the way it worked. Some parents were probably pretty happy about it, others got teary-eyed and demanded daily phone calls, but all of them dealt. Of course, most parents worried about their kids getting in car accidents or getting in debt or getting pregnant or getting divorced instead of about their kids getting cut open and set on fire.
Yeah, that was a big part of the problem. He was scared. John Winchester, big bad hunter, was so terrified he couldn't even admit it to himself until he was well along the road to the town of Totally Wasted, State of Utter Inebriation, USA.
Sure, there was disappointment, too. They were meant to be a team, him and his boys, the Winchesters, the Winchester men. He'd been looking forward to it, Sam being done with school and distractions, able to join in the hunt full-time. With his boys at his back, John could take on the thing that destroyed their home, could end it. He had never thought much about what came after that – and now he wasn't too sure what would come before it, either.
Yet the disappointment was vanishingly insignificant compared to the fear. That went deep enough to be bone-deep dread, the thought that if he wasn't there his son, his little boy, Mary's baby, would wake up some night to fire and smoke and blood, would die alone wrapped in too much horror to even scream. It came to Sammy's nursery, killed his Mary over Sammy's crib, and what if, what if, what if …
He'd learned a lot in the hunting business. A hell of a lot about what was out there, how to kill it, how to protect himself and his boys. But he'd also learned that monsters had reasons for the things they did, even if they were reasons as pathetic and twisted as liking the taste of blood or getting off on the smell of fear. So it had a reason too, and someday he would know what it was. But until then, he had to allow for the possibility that it wasn't done, that it would come back for seconds … come back to finish the job. And if John was not there, then what?
Sammy was good at the hunt, good at fighting, careful more often than not. But leave him with his books long enough, with the friends he always seemed to make no matter how short a time they spent in town, and he got careless. John had noticed, even if it was never obvious, even with Dean always there to remind Sam – ah, hell. Sammy wouldn't have Dean there to protect him any more. He wouldn't have anything.
It was all John could do not to slam his chair back, drive like hell for California, and drag his errant son back by the scruff of his neck. Anger helped him stay put – deep, burning anger that almost nullified the cold tendrils of fear tangling around his guts. Sam had turned his back on his family, spit on what they did, what they believed in, as good as said that he didn't care about vengeance for his own mother. Ungrateful, selfish little brat, saying things John could hardly stand to hear, why don't you tell me what you REALLY think, Sammy, why had he said that? He didn't want to know. Damn the boy, he thought, and then took it back so fast maybe God didn't even hear it. He wanted to kick Sam's ungrateful ass, but he wasn't going to slam his chair back, drive like hell for California, and do just that. Because, hell, if the boy was so eager to have a normal life –
That. Right there. That was a problem too. Between fear and anger and guilt – yes, guilt, okay, he knew he'd made mistakes, even before Sam so generously pointed them all out – and the worry that was going to turn his head gray before Sammy was anywhere near done with college, mixed in there was the voice that said he wants this. Let him have what he wants. Because when it came right down to it, he loved Sammy. Wanted to keep him safe more than he wanted to keep him happy, hell yeah, but … Sam wanted this. And that made John reluctant to take it away from him.
Still, he almost did it, even in spite of the voice of reason that told him it would hardly be keeping Sam safe to drag him back and keep him there by brute force. John wasn't quite arrogant enough to believe he could keep Sam from running away indefinitely, and he could hardly make the boy help with hunting – guilt him into it, maybe, but that might not work forever, and what about the day when John said You don't want to hunt? Fine, well, write something nice on our tombstones, if you can find the time in your busy schedule, and Sammy said Sure, how about Rest in Peace, Asshole? and went back to his book?
So he sat in a shabby bar and drank and didn't drive, afraid that Sammy would die if he went to school, more afraid that Sammy would hate him if he was forced to stay.
Because walking away said I hate you, Dad, but at least it didn't say it out loud. And that was going to have to be enough.
That, and the hunt, and Dean.
Who was still hunched up silently on the seat across from him when John opened his eyes, staring out the window into the half-lit parking lot like he expected Sam to loom up out of the night, and apologize, and take back every damn thing he'd said that day, and –
"Damnit," John mumbled, and let his head fall heavily into his hands. The twitching neon lights burrowed their way through his fingers and behind his eyelids, and every drumbeat from the crap song playing in the background crashed like a slamming door.
The table under his elbows vibrated a little as Dean leaned into it, reaching for another drink. In the muddled space between the annoyance at the jolt to his aching brain and the comforting sense that at least he wasn't drinking alone, John finally admitted to himself that he hadn't really expected Dean to come back either.
Somehow, that hurt his head more than the light and the drink and the noise combined, so he stopped thinking altogether.