Used to be, folk only talked about Sam and Dean Winchester when they were talking about their daddy. Damn, but that was a long time ago. That's when you first heard of them, slumped over a whiskey on the rocks at the Roadhouse bar.
That John Winchester, they'd say. Good man. Good hunter. They'd pause a moment, then add, an afterthought, a footnote, Got those two boys, too.
John himself stopped by, every once in a while, pulling up in a big black snarling Impala, two small heads in the backseat. He wasn't a social type, just left the boys on the car and came in to find a case or a beer, off again before the children started to cry.
Bill Harvelle dies on a hunt with John. John doesn't stop by the Roadhouse anymore and Ellen doesn't laugh as much.
It wasn't ever Sam and Dean in those days, not yet. It was always Sam and Dean and John.
Bobby Singer done held a shotgun loaded with buckshot on John Winchester, told him to never come back or else, you son of a bitch.
Sometimes you'd hear of a particularly tough case the Winchesters had taken done, but most of the time they stayed out of the spotlight, and over the course of twenty years you forget about them, more or less.
You barely take notice when one of John's boys runs off for college, in search of a wife and a home and a better life. It won't last, everyone said, he's fooling himself, no one ever leaves the life.
John Winchester ain't been heard from for a while, and his boys have hit the road looking for him. Sam and Dean.
Someday, when hunters wonder to themselves when did it all start, someone'll point to the day a big black Impala pulled up in the middle of the night next to the apartment Sam Winchester shared with his girlfriend/fiancée/wife/does it matter? on the campus of Stanford in Palo Alto, Cali. They'll point to the day Dean told Sammy (Sam now) about a woman in white down by Jericho. They'll point to the day Constance Welch looked up to see her children standing at the top of the stairs and they'll point to the day Sam came home to find his love burning burning burning.
No one knows any of this, though, not yet. All you know is that John Winchester's boys are hunting together again, the way it was always going to be.
Sam and Dean hunt down a wendigo in Colorado, a demon in Pennsylvania, a shifter in Missouri.
Dean Winchester dies in St. Louis and turns up hale and healthy the next week in Iowa and no one who knows enough is remotely surprised.
Sam and Dean hunt down a poltergeist in Kansas, a pagan god in Indiana, a reaper in Nebraska.
No one's heard from John in months now. His boys are starting to make a name for themselves in hunter circles, not that they know it, not yet.
A man matching John Winchester's description is found dead in a hospital in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Bobby Singer steps into his shoes. Sam and Dean are seen for the first time in the Roadhouse and Ellen welcomes them with open arms because any ill will she might have borne for their daddy don't extend to his boys, and much as Ellen is a hunter she's a mother first and those two boys need a momma.
Gordon Walker has a bit too much to drink one night when he announces Sam Winchester is a monster. Sam Winchester, he says, is an abomination.
Ellen throws him out on his ass and tells him if he ever comes back, her shotgun sure as hell won't be loaded with rock salt, but as Gordon slinks away with his tail between his legs and hatred in his eyes some people exchange glances and start to wonder because it doesn't take all that much to plant doubt in the mind of a certain kind of person.
And then the Roadhouse burns down and the gates of Hell swing open and demons flood out into the world and Sam and Dean are there at the center of it all.
It's madness for a while, twenty-four seven damage control as the demons spread across the globe like a disease, like a parasite, like an invasive species, hunters scattered to the wind, and it's easy to forget about the Winchesters for a while. It's only when everything has settled down and a new meet up point is chosen that the news starts circulating.
Dean Winchester killed the King of Hell and sold his soul to save his brother and he's got a year to live.
Tamara meets 'em in person not long after the Gates swing open and she lost her husband and there's a hardness to her demeanor that wasn't there before when she says the Winchester boys are real hunters now.
There's dark circles under her eyes when she says it. She hasn't been sleeping well, and neither have you. No one has. It's hard when your nightmares extend into your waking life, lurking in shadows and under beds and in the corner of your eyes, and the gun on your hip and the cross around your neck are too heavy to bear alone.
Gordon Walker dies, his neck ripped to shreds by razor wire after turning into the thing he hated most and nobody talks about it but everybody knows who did it.
Some folk say Sam and Dean have started hanging around with a demon, a blonde-haired black-eyed bitch, and most don't believe it but some can't help but wonder.
Dean Winchester is ripped into bloody shreds by hellhounds, and Sam collapses, drops out of the community entirely, running on his own away from guilt and loss and the ghosts of his mother and his father and his brother down a dangerous road that only leads to destruction and wreckage and ruin and revenge.
He's fucking a demon, people say.
He's not human, they whisper. Not anymore.
And then an angel raised Dean Winchester from Perdition and nothing was ever the same again. There was a secret war ripping the world apart, angels and demons and hunters and the Winchesters in the center of it all, fighting and hunting because it was all that they could do, all they'd ever been raised to do, except Sam was running with demons and Dean had been tortured in hell for god knows how long and people started to wonder, in earnest, if the Winchesters were really human anymore.
Bobby Singer made a fascinating argument to the contrary with the barrel of a shotgun.
And then Sam Winchester started the apocalypse, and nothing anybody said made a lick of difference because the Winchesters were monsters, inhuman, and maybe once they'd been good hunters but now they held tea parties with angels and demons and everybody agreed they had to be stopped, maybe if Sam Winchester died then the world would be saved (could they even die?), and you sat there and drank your whiskey and felt the weight of years on your shoulders as you laced worn and callused fingers together and prayed.
Ellen and Jo Harvelle died, went out with a bang and took a horde of hellhounds with them, went to meet Bill up in Heaven and join him as Good Folk Who'd Died Because of the Winchesters.
Two green hunters, cousins named Roy and Walt, came in one day swearing up and down and left and right that they'd killed the Winchesters, dead as a doornail both of 'em, and someone snorted and said, You boys mad? The Winchester's can't die. They ain't even human, not anymore. Y'ask me, you better start running till you reach a place you don't know the language and stay there.
Roy and Walt laughed with a hint of unease and shook their heads and everyone else, you included, wondered what sort of flowers to lay on their graves.
They were found two weeks later. Hunter's burial. No one was surprised.
And then Sam Winchester threw himself into Lucifer's Cage with the devil trapped inside him and this time he didn't come back, and all those hunters who'd condemned him as a monster were raising toasts and cheering for the brothers who'd saved the world, and you just smiled to yourself and drank your whiskey and thanked God for the Winchesters.