Warnings: Kind of strange.
Spoilers: General, with specific references to Bad Day at Black Rock and All Hell Breaks Loose parts 1 & 2
Author's note: Inspired by The Decemberists' song "The Crane Wife Parts 1 and 2" (mostly part 1). I've only done a very small amount of research regarding the time line and location of the majority of this fic. Any differences between reality and this can be blamed on, um, my own laziness. Relies heavily on oral storytelling traditions.
This is the story that John Winchester never told his sons.
* * *
Dean Winchester had always assumed he was born in Lawrence, Kansas, and this was a natural enough thing to assume as he'd never once been told differently. He assumed a few things, this way, and his father was more than willing to let him do it. John always promised himself that if Dean ever asked, he'd tell him the truth.
But that was an easy promise to make. He knew Dean would never ask.
* * *
It goes like this:
John Winchester never knew his family. He was a ward of the state of Kansas, and enlisted the moment he turned 18. After the war ended, he had nowhere to return "home" to, so he pledged his life to his country and the marines and went wherever they sent him, shot whomever they told him to shoot, and cared about whatever they told him to care about. He was a model soldier, an excellent fighter, and he rose through the ranks quickly. He was well known not just for his seriousness in maneuvers but also his playful demeanor in the off hours.
He was a desperately lonely man.
But he did what he was told and went where he was sent, and in 1978 he was transferred to Okinawa, Japan.
He knew her real name only through official records. She was a girl he met while on leave in Tokyo, an American ex-patriot who'd roamed the world with little more than a backpack to her name. They had only one night together, and he expected nothing to come of it.
A year after that single night, she showed up at the base with a bundle in her arms, handed it to him and said "His name is Dean."
She left again without saying goodbye, and John was suddenly a single soldier with a three-month-old son.
It was immediately suggested that he put the child up for adoption, but John refused. He wouldn't allow his son -- and the boy was his son, of that he was sure, though he had only the boy's mother's word to go on -- to grow up without his family. Still, life on a base with an infant wasn't easy, and John grew more despondent and desperate with each passing month.
For the first time in a decade, he considered leaving the marines.
It was in December, 1979 that he left Dean with his CO and his wife and took to the fields, hoping to clear his head and figure out what to do.
It had snowed, that day, and John's boots left deep prints as he walked. He went three miles before he heard it, the soft, keening cry of an injured creature. He walked another mile before he found it, a white crane lying in a pool of blood, its wing pierced through by a long, straight branch, the leaves resembling nothing less than fletching on a primitive arrow.
John knew very little about birds, and even less about Japanese folktales. But he was a good man, and a compassionate one, though not many knew that side of him, and he couldn't leave the crane to just lie there and die in the snow. The creature stilled when he approached, watching him warily, and nearly bit off one of his fingers with its sharp beak when he pulled the branch free from its feathers, but it held still after, and let him bandage its wing with strips of his shirt. The green turned black in the moonlight as it soaked up the blood, glistening faintly, and when he finished he sat back, unmindful of the snow soaking into the seat of his pants, and wondered if he should try to take the thing somewhere, or if it might not have been more humane to simply snap that long, graceful neck so that it might at least die quickly.
But the crane stood, stretching and folding its wings carefully, as though to fly. It looked at him for a long moment, then dipped its head and turned to make a slow, halting journey into the nearby trees.
It was a moment that John held in his memory forever, though he never spoke of it to anyone.
Two days later, he met Mary. Two weeks after that, Mary met Dean, and the two immediately got along. Two months after that, John and Mary were married in the base chapel, and a week after that, John was honorably discharged from service and the three returned to Kansas to be a family.
* * *
This is the story that Mary Winchester never told John.
* * *
John Winchester always assumed that Mary was an English teacher living in Ishikawa, Okinawa when he met her, and this was a natural enough thing to assume because that's what Mary always told him. He assumed many things, this way, and his wife was always more than willing to let him do it. Mary always promised herself that if John ever questioned, she'd tell him the truth.
But that was an easy promise to make. She knew that John would never question.
* * *
It goes like this:
Mary was the treasured youngest daughter of a good, Christian family in Lawrence, Kansas. She was a cheerful girl with a love of fairy tales who grew into a cheerful woman with a love of folklore of every sort, and when the opportunity rose to travel to Japan to teach English, she jumped at it. She was an excellent teacher, loved by all her students, and an even more avid student, taking advantage of her time off to travel around the country, especially to any smaller villages and shrines, to learn more about the culture and stories than she could from her books.
She especially loved the stories of doomed lovers and demons.
Unfortunately, not all the people she met were so happy about a foreigner wandering about asking questions.
She never knew the name of the man who cursed her. He was a drifter she met at a crossroads on the edge of a small forest, a man driving an old, rattling truck filled with wooden furniture and toys. He offered her a lift back into town -- the teacher's stipend wasn't enough to cover most of her travel expenses -- and expected more in return than she was willing to give. He left her angrily by the side of the road in the middle of a rice field, uttering curses that trailed behind the truck like they'd exploded from the muffler, and she'd set off walking without much more than a mild curse of her own.
She stopped the night in small roadside shrine.
She never made it to another class in Ishikawa.
The next morning, she woke to find herself transformed, her blond hair and pale skin turned to white feathers, her long legs turned to hopelessly narrow things that bent the wrong way. She thought she was dreaming. Then she thought she was crazy. Then she realized that neither mattered, because she was stuck. Learning to live with a new body wasn't easy, learning what she could eat and what would turn her stomach, figuring out how to find shelter and how to avoid danger. The natural creatures distrusted her and the humans ignored her, and over the months, she grew despondent and fiercely lonely.
For the first time in her life, she hated fairy tales with a hot passion, and wished she'd never left America.
It was when it snowed that she first began to really believe she was going to die.
Flying had never been an easy prospect for her, lacking the instincts to follow the drafts and ride the currents of the air, and so when a sudden gusting crosswind hit her on the edge of the woods, it sent her careening sideways, completely out of control. She flew directly into a fallen tree, one of its broken branches plunging into her wing like an arrow, and she walked several yards before she collapsed to the glittering ground.
She knew it then. She was going to die, bleeding out slowly in an unknown field on the wrong side of the world. Never seeing her family again. Never raising a family of her own. And she began to cry, her sobs turned into a strange, unnatural call by her long beak.
A man appeared then, suddenly crouching next to her. He was handsome and he looked at her with great interest, reaching out to touch the branch still stuck in her wing.
His eyes glinted a sickening yellow in the moonlight.
"Mary, Mary," he said. "Quite contrary. You're looking a little lost."
He spoke English, and was the only one in months who'd known her. He wasn't natural, she knew that easily enough. But she wanted to trust him. Wanted to beg him to save her.
She wasn't ready to die.
"I can save you," he said, smiling a too-white smile. "I can give you everything you want. But I'll be needing something in return."
Anything. She'd do anything. She couldn't die like this. She wanted love and family. She wanted her arms back.
The man's grin widened. "There's a man coming over the fields. He will tend to you, and when he leaves, you'll return to your natural form. Find him again, and you'll have everything you're asking for. And in return. . . ." The yellow eyes flashed and Mary winced. "Your first born son."
And then he was gone, and the other man came, a man with tender eyes and kindness who bound her wing and let her try to fly away. And the next morning, she was Mary again.
Two days later she found him again, and everything the man with the yellow eyes said was true. With John she had love, and with Dean she had a family, and though she loved Dean as though he was her own, the man with the yellow eyes couldn't take him.
And over the next few years, she came to believe it was all no more than a dream.
* * *
This is the story that Dean Winchester never told his brother.
It goes like this:
Dean went back to the storage facility that his father had kept, and in looking through John's old things, he found his birth certificate. It listed his birth place as Ishikawa, Okinawa, Japan, and his parents as John Winchester and Angela Bancroft. He found the records of John and Mary's wedding at the base chapel, a full year after his birth.
He salted and burned it all. Sam was his brother and Mary was his mother and he would let no one and nothing tell him differently.
* * *
This is the story that Sam Winchester never told his brother.
It goes like this:
In the moments of his death, Sam dreamed he could fly. He had white feathers and long, thin legs that bent in the wrong direction and an arrow through his back, and a man with yellow eyes spoke of fairy tales and deals, of lies his parents had told him and brothers who weren't what he thought. He told him he could have everything he wanted if he just gave up the one thing he needed.
Sam told him to fuck off.
* * *
These are the stories that the Winchesters never told. They never told them because they were afraid. They never told them because they didn't believe them. They never told them because they weren't important, and they never told them because they didn't remember them.
And in the end, they never really mattered.