The Price of the Future

Indus

For Juli, who got me hooked on this fandom...

Warning: angst abound.

Gen, het. Future fic, deathfic.

Pairing: Dean/Jo (UST implied) Sam/Sarah

Summary: The future for Sam and the present for Dean.

Disclaimers: Own nothing. It's all CW and Kripke, except for my original characters.

Inspired by Shadow and Provenance

Spoilers through Born Under a Bad Sign

Sam never knew exactly when Dean would show up. He was grateful, always, to be married to an excellent partner who loved his brother almost as much as he did, and brought up their kids to be as flexible as she was. Hell, if it weren't for the kids, and their determination not to orphan them, she would probably have joined Sam when he accompanied Dean on a hunt. Not that it happened often- Sam had been glad to leave the old life behind after the demon was dead, not exorcised, but stone-cold fucking dead, and his soul, and that of his father, were safe and sound.

He'd been determined though, that walking away from the hunt would not mean walking away from his family. Not this time. So he'd wrangled a promise from Dean to not be a stranger, to not be their father. And he made certain to call at least once a week. It was often more frequent- Sam had the urge to pick up the phone every time something happened. Dean was the first person they told when the pregnancy test was positive, when they saw the ultrasound and knew it was Mary Ellen, named for her grandmothers, on her way. And then the second time, when they found out it was a boy, Sarah left a message on Dean's phone asking if he liked John Daniel as a name for his nephew. Dean had returned the message with a brief comment about how the child would never be known as anything other than JD, but they'd heard the emotion in his voice.

He was right about the name, but it had been somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy seeing as how Dean had been the first to call the baby that, and it had stuck. And Sam was grateful. JD had the look of the grandfather he'd never met, and sometimes that reminder was painful. Besides, his other grandfather Daniel Blake was not one of Sam's favorite people, and if he weren't his father-in-law, the young ex-hunter wouldn't associate with him at all.

Despite the regular phone calls, Sam missed his brother. He could count on seeing Dean every couple of months, especially around the time of the kids' birthdays. Dean, being Dean, never remembered the exact dates so they knew to expect him to show up, out of the blue, within a few weeks. And even though he missed the parties, he brought presents. No weapons, both Sam and Sarah had insisted on that, but other things.

And he taught the kids about their heritage. He told them stories. Not scary ones, but lessons of what helped with what. Sarah laid down the law that her kids wouldn't touch guns until they were in their teens, and the only weapon in the house, loaded with rock salt, had to be locked up in the bedroom safe. So Dean taught them to throw spears and holy water, and to fight back against the supernatural and the more human kind of evil. He'd been a teacher to Sam, once upon a time, so he knew how to do it.

Thinking about that, Sam laughed out loud. Sarah turned to him and smiled as she wrapped the last present. "What is it? What's so funny?"

He explained what he'd been thinking about. "And whenever I think of him teaching, I remember those couple of weeks he spent with us when Mel was born."

Her eyes crinkled up as she remembered too. "God, we were so stupid. All those Lamaze classes, and we knew how to feed her, burp her, bathe her, but not how to stop her from crying when there was nothing wrong, or how to dress her in things that had too many buttons, or the best way to keep her from falling off the table while we changed her diaper… And then your brother shows up, and in two weeks makes up for all the stuff they neglected to teach us."

"Well, he had me to practice on," Sam grinned.

"He'd make such a great father," Sarah mused, not for the first time.

Oh God, Sam made a mental note to warn Dean. His wife was an amazing woman, but she kept trying to fix Dean up with her friends, and that was a mistake. Sarah was fiery and strong, and didn't scare easily, and she could keep up with the Winchesters, but she and the people she hung out with found it easier to relate to the softer, elegant younger sibling. Jo had been one of the few women who had had a chance at taming the older man, but a vampire and a very bad hunt in Virginia had ended that.

It still pained Sam to remember the beautiful blond spit-fire who had managed to knock Dean around a little at their first meeting. The only comfort he'd had upon hearing the news about her was that a possessed hunter had ended her mother's life in the roadhouse diner a few hours before, so both died unaware of the other's fate.

Dean, however, had not shown any reaction. Although he had yet to take his relationship with Jo much farther than a few rolls in the hay to relieve stress, it was painfully obvious that there were feelings on both sides. Still, he calmly exorcised Ellen's killer and sent it to hell, then proceeded to Virginia and hunted the vampires until every last one of them was dead. But any hopes of a future beyond the hunt had died.

"So, are we ready for the party tomorrow?" Sarah asked, drawing him back to the present.

He thought for a moment, then nodded. "Checked on the food, decorations and weird bouncing thing." Kids parties seemed like such a production. He preferred the way they'd done it, just his father, Dean and he in a restaurant, singing Happy birthday (Dean would naturally sing the monkey version). And to think that back then all he'd wanted was a party like the cool kids had.

"Everything's ready?" She asked, her face dimpling at the uncomfortable expression on his face.

He nodded again, and she sobered. "Sam, I know we're doing this the conventional way, and you're not a conventional person. We can raise her different."

"I don't want different. I want normal," he said, desperation leaking from his voice. "I want my kids to grow up doing what normal kids do, and not the way I did. I get that they have to know about the monsters for their own protection, I do. And I'm glad Dean teaches that stuff to them, but in a fun, cool way so that they know what to do if they're ever in a scary situation, but they don't have to be scared all the time. Sarah, I grew up scared all the time…"

She hushed him softly. "I know that. And I'm not saying we pack them up and go hunting tomorrow. But I do want them to have some of the traits of the Winchester boys. I want them to see evil and good as clearly as you do. I want them to make mistakes sometimes and really regret them, let the big ones haunt them, the way they haunt you two, and not dismiss the consequences of their actions the way so many others do. And God, most of all, I want my kids to love each other and their family as much as you loved yours, as much as you and Dean love one another."

He looked down, ashamed. "They might learn that better from Dean." When she tried to argue, he held a finger over her lips and smiled slightly. "I'm not saying I don't love them, that losing Dad and Mom isn't still this ache in my heart, and when I lose Dean I'm not going to have lost the best part of myself, but I swear, no one has ever loved family the way my older brother has. If there's anything I regret aside from the fact that I fought with my dad the last time I saw him, it's that I didn't see that all along."

She held him close for long minutes, and it wasn't until they were getting ready for bed that night that she brought the conversation up again, very tentatively. "Sam, when we were talking earlier you said something like- 'when I lose Dean.' What did that mean? Sam," she added raising herself up on her elbows and looking at him, fear in her eyes. "Sam, did you see Dean die?"

He sighed, and closed his eyes, letting himself return to the vision that still had the power to hurt him. It was like all those punches of Dean, wrapped up in one vicious but accurate fist. "I saw it for the first time the day JD was born. I was standing and looking into the nursery, wishing Dean was there to see Dad's scowl as our son objected to the world at large, and then I saw myself salting and burning Dean's bones. It wasn't clear, and there were no details like there usually are, which makes me think that this is not something I'm supposed to stop. I don't know how old Dean is in the vision, if this is decades or weeks or minutes from now. All I know is that at some point or another Dean will go down, and taking care of him will be my last hunt." He turned and dug his face into his wife's shoulders at the memory of the vision. She held him there, letting her tears fall as she thought of a life where Dean wasn't somewhere on the edges of their suburban lives, ready to blow in and shake everything with a healthy dose of adrenaline and endorphins. She and Sam never had sex the way they did after a visit from his brother, when both of them remembered the time they first met.

"So, how was the party?" Dean leaned back in his chair and smiled lazily at his younger brother. His hair was starting to gray at the temples, which added a distinguished charm to his face. Sam didn't doubt that the older Winchester, the oldest Winchester, was still getting every woman he set his eyes on.

The young Professor shrugged. "Like they all go, I suppose. The kids loved the presents part, though they seem most excited by what you brought.

Dean looked a little embarrassed, and was quick to dismiss the praise. "Well, that doesn't come as much of a shock. I'm cool Uncle Dean."

"Yes, you are. And what has cool Uncle Dean been up to in the… oh, six weeks since his last visit? Aside from missing his niece's birthday?"

"Yeah, sorry about that," Dean didn't sound very apologetic. Mel and J.D. had to be used to his schedule by that time. "There was this ghost in New Mexico that was a bitch to hunt down. But hey, I made it here soon enough, and bringing cool gifts for all."

"You didn't get me jack," Sam pointed out, then continued before his brother could open his mouth," And a half-finished can of Frito-Lay Jalapeno and Cheese dip doesn't count."

Dean spread out his arms in assumed outrage. "Isn't my presence present enough?"

Oddly enough, his quip caused Sam to sober and look entirely too serious, much to Dean's chagrin. "It is, but it would be better if I got that present a little more often."

"You know what they say… Absence makes the heart grow fonder. It's the way I keep my value so high, Sam. I mean, if I was around all the time, you might actually start taking me for granted."

Yeah, because we did that a lot, didn't we? Dad and I… We took you for granted, Sam thought, and perhaps his feelings were visible on his face because Dean suddenly looked away and made to get up. "No, wait, I'm serious Dean. Why don't you stay here a little longer?"

"Sam," Dean didn't hide his exasperation. "Sam, I'm not giving up the hunt."

To his credit, the risk to his own family didn't occur to his brother. "Yeah, but you can make this a base. You're a little old to be playing the motel game, aren't you?"

"Dude, I'm not even forty yet. Dad did it for a lot longer."

Maybe it was because his brother brought him up, or Sam's desperation at the memory of the conversation he'd had with his wife a few days before that pushed him to use the one person they never, ever, used on each other. "Dad wanted more for you."

"Sam, shut up."

"No, remember that conversation we had with him, the one before we split up and he was captured by Meg and her brother? He said he wanted me to go to school, and for you to have a home." It was killing him to remember that last time they'd actually talked before things had gotten so fucked up and John had chosen a path they'd managed to redeem his soul from but not his life.

It wasn't an easier memory for Dean, who would never forgive himself for being the reason his father was dead. They'd saved his soul, but John had never, would never, meet his grandchildren. Pushing that away, Dean pointed out, "Dad also said he wanted this to be over. It isn't. It'll never be over for me, Sam, as long as there's evil out there."

Sam knew it was a waste of time to convince his brother that he'd done his part, that the demon that had been his father's obsession was dead and that meant it was over for them. Instead, he argued, "I'm not asking you to give up the hunt, Dean. I'm just asking you to make this your home."

"Sammy, I'm touched, I really am," Dean said, allowing a bit of the asshole to come out to lighten the situation. "But man, I'm not bringing this crap here any more than I already do."

"I've seen you die," Sam blurted out. He hadn't meant to say anything, because without details it wouldn't mean much anyway. But, "I don't know how or when, but I saw myself salt and burn your bones."

Dean swallowed that, paling a little but otherwise keeping his composure. He'd faced his own mortality before, welcomed death from time to time, but in recent years he'd finally found his way to liking life. Maybe it was Mel's smile when she saw him, the way J.D.'s eyes widened at each new discovery, much as the toddler's father's had at that age. "How?"

"I don't know!" Sam exploded. "I've seen it a few times, but there are never any details. I can't even make out how old we are. If anything, we look really young- like in our twenties."

"Twenties?" Dean mused, arching his eyebrow and smiling a little. "When I should have died. Around the time not one but two people gave their lives so that I could breathe for a few more years. Interesting."

He hated that. He detested it when Dean felt guilty over decisions he hadn't made, choices that hadn't been his, and years that he had devoted to saving other people's lives. "It wasn't like that. Look, you're my brother and I need you in my life."

"No, you don't." Dean looked around. "You don't, not anymore. Now you need this home, Sarah and the kids, and they need you too. Look, whatever happens, it happens. I'm going to be forty soon, and that's a hell of a lot longer than most people in our lives had- Mom, Jo, Jo's Dad, Jess… It isn't a short life, and it's been a full one, and I have little to regret about the things I've done. A lot of regrets over what I've caused, but I've been where I've wanted to be, okay?"

At our backs. Always, at our backs. "Yeah," Sam said hoarsely. "But for the record, you've caused a hell of a lot of good things, Dean. Including allowing kids to reach adulthood, people to die natural deaths, supernatural stuff to stop killing… And maybe it's selfish, but most of all, you've made sure Mel and J.D. came into this world because there were a million times when I could have died before that happened, and you saved me."

Dean looked away, fighting back tears as he hoped that the balance sheet worked out that way, that the lives he'd saved somehow evened out the ones he'd taken or had been taken in his name.

In the end, Sam got the call from Bobby. Dear Bobby, who was still alive and would probably survive them all. He'd gone alone, despite Sarah's insistence on accompanying him. "Stay with the kids, honey," he'd murmured into her hair, seeking comfort in the familiar aroma of coconuts and pineapple that for once reminded him of home and not their honeymoon in the Caribbean. "I don't know the details and it'll be safer. We'll do something when I get back." He'd left immediately, at shortly before four in the morning. Things usually happened in the dark, he mused as he drove, in the hours before dawn when hope was dead as light.

Despite himself, he glanced up at the small picture he left tucked in the side of the mirror in the flap over his head. It was taken a couple of years ago, at J.D.'s tenth birthday, and showed the four of them and Dean, who had actually managed to get there on time for the party, smiling widely at the camera. Then he looked away and blinked back tears at the realization that soon the kids would be waking up for school, and Sarah would have to sit them down and tell them. Tell them the uncle they adored would never visit again, that he'd never see his teenage niece get married, or his brother become a grandfather… He'd never teach J.D. how to drive or what to tell the ladies.

There were things to be grateful for, he told himself. Dean had come as soon as Sam called to tell him that Mel was going on her first date, and brought his guns so the two of them could do the stereotypical cleaning and oiling protective father routine. He'd given J.D. his first skate-board and taught him how to use it. Dean had seen a lot more than Sam had thought he would.

It was just like his dream. He salted and burned his brother's still fit, handsome body, not yet fifty but bearing a thousand years' worth of the average man's scars. But Bobby was beside him, silent, standing straight and speaking little. They moved with the ease of men who had done what they were doing a hundred times, but with a gentleness that spoke of the love and respect they held for the soul inside the body.

Finally, Bobby broke the silence. "Do you want some kind of memorial?" he rasped, staring at the flames.

Sam had to clear his throat. "No, but I'm going to put this in mom's grave, where I buried Dad's dog tags." He opened his palm to show the amulet his brother had never taken off.

Bobby smiled at the sight. "Sam, do you know where that's from?"

"Yeah, I remember. Dad and Mom were on their first date, and they passed the window where it was displayed. Apparently it was some kind of Wicca store. She fell in love with it, and he bought it for her. It was the first thing he bought her." Sam felt his throat close. They were all gone. All gone.

"There's powerful magic in it. Protective spells, and the like."

"Didn't do Dean a lot of good, did they?" Sam's voice ached with bitterness.

Bobby scoffed. "Hell they didn't. You know your brother. Could have died a million times with his recklessness. It's a miracle he lived this long. It was a good life, Sam. You should be proud, not angry."

"It wasn't a life!" Sam yelled, feeling the fire within him that his father and the demon had only inspired in him till then. He'd always calmed down with Dean, or quietly stewed until a time when they'd find some weird, short-hand way of talking that had made them both uncomfortable. But it appeared that he could, and did, get that mad at his brother too. "He never had a place to call home, or made a family…"

Bobby looked around him. "Family's not for all of us, Sam."

Sam glanced away from the burning body and examined his surroundings. "No, I suppose it isn't," he said more calmly, but raising his voice as he continued. "But at least you have a home, and a business, and all the normal things that Dean never let himself have. I'll never get it, Bobby. I'll never get why he had to go on."

"You don't," the older man said bitterly. "Sam, when your mother died, your Dad left a lot of responsibility on Dean's shoulders, and that was nothing compared to the burden he put on him when he died. It's a credit to both of you that you were able to walk away from the hunt, most of us can't. But even more than he wanted to keep you together, that boy needed to see you have a life, so he made sure you guys would run into Sarah once the demon was dead and you were safe. But just because you were able to walk away doesn't mean he could."

"Why not? I mean, I get that he loved the adventure of the hunt, but he's the one who was old enough to remember a life before this, not me. Why was it that I could walk away and go to Stanford, that I could build a home, and love Jess and then Sarah, and make a family? And he couldn't?"

Bobby couldn't answer. He wasn't a psychologist or a therapist, and he didn't know how. If he did, he might have said that if Dean had left at eighteen, Sam would have been alone at fourteen, and the older sibling loved his brother too much to do that to him. John was leaving them more and more often, and he and Sam were at each other's throats when they were together anyway. And by the time the demon was dead, Dean was about thirty, without any idea how to live any life but his own. He hadn't ever thought of himself beyond what he had, so what could he have done? What would he have studied if he was even the college type? And if you're thirty with the barest of memories, ruined by the trauma of how they'd ended, of living in one place, how do you settle down? Especially when there's no one to settle down with?

The sun was setting on the second day without Dean when Sam walked in from the garage. Sarah looked up from the proposed gallery budget and searched his face. Whatever she saw had her up and crossing the room to hug him before he had taken three steps. Over her shoulder he saw Mel stirring something on the stove, eyes tearing up, while J.D. bent his head and pretended to be engrossed in his homework. There was a lot of his uncle in him.

"Hey," Sarah whispered softly.

"Hey," Sam said back, burying his nose in her hair and smelling home all over again. "Hey," he said again, wanting to tell them that he was all right, to ask them to accompany him to his mother's grave to bury the amulet and say a few words.

There would be time for that later. Time to show them the number of missed calls on Dean's phone in the past two days because even after burning his brother's body Sam still couldn't think of anyone else to call when he needed reassurance that the world still turned the way it was supposed to. Time to hold them and let them know that they were all he had, and that he was diminished so much by what he'd lost he was afraid he'd never be enough for them. Time to give his children a future that Dean had been denied both by his own self-sacrifice and the sometimes selfish needs of the people he'd loved.

Yes, there would be time. And for now, it was enough to hold the woman he loved, as his son and daughter left behind their hard-won dignity and joined him in a family embrace that Dean would certainly have called a "chick-flick moment." Enough to breathe in the life he'd always wanted and be thankful for the father and brother who had wanted it for him almost as much as they'd wanted him alive to enjoy it. Almost as much as they'd wanted him.

And despite the darkness, Sam felt the young spirits, so full of promise, of his children in his mind like the burgeoning of light, the beginning of hope. Because his family hadn't just bought a future for him, they'd bought it for all of them in the shape of a new generation of Winchesters who would have the one thing two previous generations had lost or never known- choice.

Goodbye, guys, he thought, hugging his family, goodbye. Take care of each other. Find peace with one another. You deserve it. Death was never what you wanted for each other, but I'm so grateful and guilty that you wanted life this much for me.

THE END