Hunters were marked by certain mentality, something that took hold in the aftermath of a tragedy that kept their frayed edges from ever really healing. "Survivor's guilt" was too small a term to cover it, and inaccurate besides, because in many ways the hunter coming out of the tragedy hadn't survived their coining moment. John hadn't certainly hadn't survived his. When he was younger, he'd had the idea planted in his head (initially by a school guidance counselor following his father's disappearance) that his life would be split by a defining event. There had been countless times that he wondered what form it would take in the grand scheme of things, whether it would be the day he went to war, the day he came home, the day he and his mother made the move from their home in Normal, Illinois to his grandparents' guest room in Lawrence, Kansas, or the day he married Mary Campbell. Innumerable instances he had considered in the moment of their occurrence, unwaveringly determined that anything could make that pivotal before and after, so long as that bleak stretch of waiting that preceded the departure from Illinois didn't make the list. He knew better now, of course.
In a storage unit so far off the reservation that Sam and Dean would never find it amid the fanatical notes in his journal, in Coldwater, Kansas, half a state away from the town where he'd grown up, three hundred miles and an entire plane of existence from where his life burned away on his son's ceiling, John Winchester's spirit loitered. He had to have at least thirty different storage units scattered across the country. Most his boys had been to, but not this one. There were no weapons lining the shelves here. The closest thing to a religious relic was a criminally ugly statue of an angel siting on one shelf, bought by Mary for a nickel at a garage sale two life times ago. Even silver would have been found lacking, the ragged cardboard boxes strewn haphazardly around the room all being open topped and tussled from two decades of occasional ransacking for pieces to melt down. What remained in this room was in useless in every way, and had been since November 2, 1983.
Most hunters started out with spirits. There had been a few exceptions that John met in his time, vampire slayers and werewolf chasers, but for the most part the rule was nearly universal. And he knew every kind. The black dog, the woman in white, the poltergeist, the indentured servant, and more. Polarized essences of a human being tethered to the earthly plane by a link to the remains of who they once were. He'd torched so many in his early years that he couldn't even remember Sam ever having to ask if ghosts were real as a child. It wasn't an unheard of irony for a hunter to become one after his card was punched. Violent deaths were a long way from rare in their line of work. But there hadn't been anything violent about John's. To be fair, he might have been as likely to have taken a swing at a reaper as anything else, but in his case, he had never gotten the chance. For him, there had been no angel of death, no hellhound. He had been cut from his life so painlessly, it had bordered on respectful until he arrived on the other side. Now what made him cackle or curse whenever he reached the far ends of the emotional spectrum his new existence limited him to, was the thought that now, when he found himself so belatedly turned ghost after all, he had no idea where he fit in the catalog. He couldn't be a vengeful spirit—he had seen his Dean gun Azazael down himself—nor did he fit the M.O of an omen, and if there was an object here that bound him, it remained an anonymity after all this time. Yet, he had come here in the aftermath of the Hell's gate, opposed to any favorite weapon or flask, his journal, or the car where his kids were raised. Without a thought. As if pulled. He'd drifted through every box and paced the length of the unit until he lost awareness of what he was doing, but every time came up empty handed. He supposed he could be linked to the location in general, but nothing significant had ever happened to him here. He was simply stuck.
The only light that allayed the darkness of the unit came in the amount that seeped in around the shape of the door. John didn't need it as he was, but he could still see how it dully reflected off the curves of a motorcycle shaped alarm clock that sat on the shelf nearest the entrance, a Father's Day gift from his youngest son that had most certainly been purchased on the fly when he unexpectedly found himself in Minnesota over the day in 2004. It not being made of silver, and John not knowing what to do with it, he had stowed it away here the last time he passed through town. He had no idea how much time had passed, but dust had since settled heavily enough over the clock that it no longer stood out next to Dean's baby book and the dissembled pieces of a toddler race care bed leaning against one wall.
John couldn't say why he had kept these things here. If he had been thinking more clearly in the early days, he would have just left everything in the house when he left Lawrence. In the back of his mind, he always meant to take this unit off the list of places his credit card scams paid for, let the facility's manager throw it all out, but somehow he never remembered to pull the trigger on the idea.
In a far corner, a car seat lay over turned from a past manifestation of ethereal rage that might have taken place anywhere from a couple months to a couple years ago, for all John knew. It was covered with dust with several dented light patches in the plastic from where battery had left the surface strained. A part of John was surprised that no one had come for him yet, even if not his own sons. When he first came here, he had seethed and raged, throwing himself against the incorporeal barriers fencing him in, until it seemed ridiculous that no hunters came to investigate the sounds. Until a spike in his mood saw one box overturned, and a particular picture tumble out on to the floor amid the mess.
Now his wife's smile glinted up at him from beneath a sheet of cracked glass. Mary Campbell, the day she became Mary Winchester. Held in a frame bought in a secondhand store a few blocks from the courthouse they chose when they eloped. Made of an alloy metal, obviously. He could still hear the urgency in her voice when she asked him to take her away with a tremor that mimicked the way the hairs on the back of his neck had stood up when she laid her head on his shoulder and told him she didn't want him to take her home. It had been in his mind to say no, because the timing was wrong. They had just spent half the night in police questioning over her father's death, and the officer who showed them out gave the distinct impression that Mary's mother wasn't answering the phone at home. He knew that Mary had had issues with her family that he wanted to understand, but he had never thought that she would really just want to run away, and in the midst of a possible murder investigation was not the right time—it had jolted him when he felt the idea hit, bursting into his brain like a bullet hitting the mark, that he wanted to marry her so badly that he didn't care.
John was well aware of the corroding effect time had on the mind of a ghost. Spirits were like a image of raw emotion that grew more contrasted as the days passed, the nuances of rational thought that bridged one vivid memory to another decaying until there was nothing but the harsh shapes remaining. Feelings couldn't be reasoned with or set aside. Ghosts didn't have the same luxuries that humans did. John could feel himself fading a little more every time he rode the wave of rage and regret. The pull toward that maddening track would become stronger the longer he was dead, and he suspected he had been dead for awhile. The word poltergeist flashed through his head from time to time, though he refused to apply it to himself. More than half of the boxes in his unit had been tussled since before Dean could hold a double barrel. He could admit that some had become more tattered since his time here, but it would be just as truthful to say that his visits in life had been too hasty and spread out to have had the original condition of the room memorized. He had heard people murmur amongst themselves when passing his unit on occasion. At one point, the facilities manager had even unlocked the door and peered in at the mess of cast offs and abused cardboard—he'd stared right through John, frowned, and gone away shaking his head as if he'd just humored some farfetched thought, and left John striving to remember what recent fit could have prompted the visit.
If John looked down at Mary's picture long enough, above the ardent smile plastered over the lower half of her face, he could see the old familiar wall just behind her eyes. It had been there on the day they wed, just like it had been on the day they met, and every day after. What he had taken for feminine mystery in a more innocent lifetime, now brought to mind a jarhead's thousand mile stare. The kind of underlying weight that hinted at something unimaginable hiding just behind her expression would be a dividing line that ten years of marriage and two kids would never manage to get him across. His old adversary. He used to hate that wall. He'd rail against it, drive himself out of their home over and over again from the sheer exhaustion of living with it. But every time, like a bolt of lightning striking, the familiar burst of sentimentality hit, and he found himself running back with the unmovable conviction that he didn't want his life divided into the day before and the day after he gave up on Mary Campbell.
He remembered being amused by it, not the first time he saw her, but the first time they spoke. When the girl who may have checked out every book in the local library, but never graduated high school because she missed more days than she attended, walked into the Piggly Wiggly at two o'clock in the morning and tipped an entire shelf's worth of packaged salt into her shopping basket like it was the most normal thing in the world.
"You know that stuff doesn't go bad."
Mary's head had turned up with an expression that conveyed the thought 'I'm too busy for your shit' but that didn't stop John from grinning when she finally spotted him at the checkout counter.
He had only been back from the war a few months at the time. He had been in buying a cup of coffee for a friend he'd left slouched against a bench outside the store. Later, he would find out that Mary didn't approve of drinking in excess. That night John's own sobriety only looked convincing when set next to his friend's—who, he would find sprawled and snoring on the bench by the time he finally walked out. At the time that he was buying his coffee though, John was besotted by the fact that every time he looked up at his reflection in the storefront window, Mary seemed to be looking at him, to the point where he took much longer than needed tampering with the sugar and cream in his coffee—which he normally took black.
And when he walked outside and spotted Mary siting alone at the bus stop, he couldn't help himself. He walked up and leaned over the back of the seat next to her.
"John," he said.
"What?"
"John Winchester. Seemed like you were trying to place me."
"Oh, did it?" Mary's head didn't immediately turn when her eyes slid to look back at him. She had set her shopping bags on the seat next to her. The plastic of the one closest to her rustled under her fingers as she absently tapped them against it. John was just about to straighten back up and walk away, when she said, "I'm Mary Campbell."
"Oh, I know who you are." Mary's head finally whipped around to face him, and he found himself grinning at her again. "We had history together senior year, and Latin in junior year, and biology in. . ." Mary's eyebrow raised. John's head dipped. "I, uh, I know who you are."
"So it seems."
"Do you need a ride?"
Mary's eyebrow remained quirked, but a small smile joined it on her face. "I'm fine, but thank you."
"You do know the buses stop running around eight? You know, in case you've never been in town long enough to notice." Mary's eyebrow arched a little higher. John had felt the temperature of his face rise slightly. "I promise I'm less creepy than I'm coming off."
Mary's smile got bigger. The gold-yellow light from the street lamps was lighting up her hair and casting shadows over half her face. He got the fleeting sense that he was being sized up for a moment, though nothing in her body language suggested she was uneasy or scared.
"I have a cab coming. You should take it," he said.
"Sweet of you to offer, but I'd say you and your friend need it more than I do."
"We can call another. This area can get hairy when you're out alone this late."
Something enigmatic passed over Mary's face at that. Not quite a grimace, not quite anything he knew to recognize then. But she had looked singularly amused. "I'll be fine, really. Someone's coming for me."
"Someone who needs a lifetime supply of salt?"
The smile dimmed. "It goes faster than you think."
Even then, John was already familiar with the ways that people who had gone to war dealt with the baggage that came home with them. Some wore it openly, some grew callous, and some buried it so deep under an unscathed façade that others could only catch a glimpse of it around the eyes when they were caught off guard. Those were the eyes Mary Campbell had, if only he'd recognized it before a car rumbled up to the curb, and Samuel Campbell bestowed the first in a long series of stern glares that John would receive in the coming months. He could have seen it, also, peering out in the look she sent him over her shoulder when she sauntered into Stull Cemetery ahead of him on their first date. With her family taking her out of town so often, they'd settled on a late night picnic between road trips. Rumor had it the place was haunted, but when asked if she believed in ghosts, Mary would only give him coy little smile that seemed to say she thought he was being cute and lead him in by the hand.
He would never stop to ask what she found so amusing in times like that, when they first started dating. He really should have asked.
The weeks following Mary's death were a blur, and the blur became less a figure of speech the longer John's spirit eroded amid the debris of his former lives. He knew he met Missouri around that time, although the specifics had started to fade. He remembered as facts set in his mind rather than as real memories, that there had been drinking, and a slew of blathering, sad eyed neighbors volunteering to babysit the kids. He could vaguely recall the motel room where they stayed when the house was being rebuilt, and the sound the phone made when it rang, on and on, with questions from the insurance company and complaints about missed work. A tombstone arrived at the cemetery one point, payment enclosed with Mary's information already engraved and clear instructions to be laid in a plot John would later find out had been purchased with a false name. He'd get a phone call from an attendant assuming he'd know the sender and whether they intended there to be a service, and John would spend the next two weeks frantically try to unravel the stone's origin before he'd finally accept the dead end. Eventually he would go back to Stull Commentary for an entirely different reason, slipping in after midnight, feeling like an idiot, and coming home smeared in grave dirt, cut up and smelling of gasoline in ways he couldn't explain when the local vet patched him up. It had never been Missouri's intention to start him on a new life when she agreed to show him what was hiding in the dark, but he didn't believe she really expected their one venture to scare him back to work and the white fence life. Neighbor condolences slowly trickled to a stop, and the looks he received when he picked up the boys became less sympathetic the later he stayed out. He didn't remember any backlash when he put the house on the market and haphazardly stuffed their belongings into boxes, though the hazy image of a sour faced Missouri drifted wordlessly to mind alongside the recollection having pulled Dean from what was supposed to be a highly sought after preschool.
The only thing that still held firm from that obscure time, was the thought that had gradually weighed on him to a greater degree with every step he took. This was no life for children.
He must have sat close to three hours in front of that police station.
It was December 2, 1983. He had cleaned out the house in Lawrence, up and left his job at the garage he'd helped to open, rented out a storage unit with the first of countless false names he'd pick up over the decades ahead, and then he'd gone to the police station in Coldwater, Kansas, where the single longest night of his life stretched out in the absolute silence of a small town after two o'clock in the morning.
His face had still been scratched up from his last trip to Stull Cemetery. A trail of stitches trailed along one of his eyebrows, stretching and contracting any time his eyes moved too quickly. The scar it would leave afterward would take over a year in fading. His eyes in the rearview mirror looked red and sunken into his face. There were so many nights when he couldn't convince himself to lay down, he wasn't sure when he'd last gone to bed. Mary wouldn't have approved at all. And in the backseat of the impala, his children were fast asleep.
Over the entire course of their marriage, John had never gotten to know the expansive family Mary's parents had supposedly been so keen on visiting every few weeks when they'd pull her from school to go on road trips. She hardly ever told any stories from her childhood, and she hated any questions about the people mentioned when she did. She had never kept an address book listing distant aunts and uncles that he could have called on, not a single relative that he could have turned to with his boys, but. . .
But this would be no life for children.
The sky was starting to get light by the time he finally reached for the latch on his door. It was unnervingly easy after the first step, like running off an automated track that took him around the car to the backseat passenger door. Sam was in his carrier. The seatbelt came undone with no difficulty at all, soundlessly retracting from the plastic tunnels that it was threaded through to keep the car seat in place. Sam hardly even moved while the entire thing was lifted out of the car. There were three concrete steps leading up from the sidewalk to the station. The grind of John's footsteps landing on each one were the only sounds to be heard as he made his way up and placed the carrier just outside the door, Sam tucked in snuggly under Mary's favorite baby blanket, one with a woodland theme decorated with squirrels and baby deer. It was all so quiet. In a larger city, there would have been light bleeding through from the other side, and he would have had the option to go in, but not here.
John's breath drained out him in one strenuous exhale when he reached the bottom of the stairs and started back to the car. His steps were still steady, but had begun buzzing under the skin before he reached the car. He kept expecting his hands to shake from the woolly energy coiling under his skin.
Dean was harder to get out. He was sleeping curled against his door, his head just barely high enough to press against the glass of the window. John had to open the door slowly to make sure he didn't tumble out. But Dean was already becoming use to being hauled from one unknown location to another at strange hours. John had a moment of panic when Dean stirred long enough to pull his weight away from the door, but his eyelids fluttered back down a second after he resettled against the backseat. His arms absently snaked around John's neck when he gathered Dean up, one small hand clutching at John's shirt collar as Dean's body trustingly roached against his side, and as John turned around to make the short trip back up the police station steps, he caught his own reflection in the doors.
John Winchester, in the act of abandoning his children. John Winchester, battered and drained, staring down a path that he was already sold to completely, though he had only just begun. Like the next stage in a sickness, past the breaking point, a dead man still swinging. . .and John's legs stilled.
Mary had wanted children so badly. He'd wanted children. Dean's forehead was a warm, gentle press against his collar bone, his breaths gently fanning against his skin. He was hardly any effort to hold, but John's arms clenched around Dean as if his son might fall at any moment, staring at his reflection next to the shape of Sammy's car seat. So many defining moments had come and gone, gaping wounds he'd soldiered past. Looking back, John knew that he had been broken for years, though his throat would swell shut before he would acknowledge the shape left by that first lonely morning Henry Winchester never came home. From the deepest part of John came the knowledge that this wasn't right, no matter what else he chose, but it sat boiling and flustered in his gut, because this would be no life for children.
A light suddenly went on down the hallway visible through the police station doors, someone inside bringing the station to life for the new day. On John, the light had the same effect as being touched with a cattle prod. He jumped to drop Dean back into place in the backseat of the car, slamming the door shut even as he sprinted for the stairs. Through the front doors, he could see a human figure trudging down the hall toward the front desk, feeling a thrill of alarm that at any moment, it might stop and notice the strange shape siting just outside the front door. Whoever they were, if they failed to see Sammy, there was no way they could have missed seeing John charging up the steps. He grabbed Sammy's baby carrier and darted back down toward the car without looking to see if they were noticed. In contrast to the calmness in abandoning him, in snatching him back, John jostled the carrier enough to shake Sammy awake, and he began to cry.
The wailing that followed effectively shattered the morning as far as John was concerned. The sky might have cracked, the sun might have gone out, and he couldn't have stopped to notice. He couldn't slow down, he couldn't look back. He had ducked under fire in war zones and seen his hands shake less. John wasn't sure if someone was shouting after him when he got to the impala. He could have looked like a madman kidnapping a foundling or a father in a rush, and a self-loathing voice in his head whispered he was technically both. If Dean had managed to sleep through John tossing him back into the car earlier, he bolted awake when John tore open the door across from him. He only gave himself time to glance up for a second while strapping Sammy back in, and issued the order, "Diaper bag, Dean. Pacifier."
In his head, he only had the thought hurry, hurry, hurry!
The car shrieked when he floored it out of the parking lot, hands shaking on the wheel. He was sure he saw an officer running across the lot toward his car, but by the time he stopped to consider it, John, Sam, and Dean were already speeding past the state border into Oklahoma, for better or for worst. Sammy continued wailing for upwards of an hour, while Dean fumbled through the diaper bag looking for toys to calm him down. John periodically looked at his own eyes in the rearview mirror, and wondered how long it would take to develop a wall of his own.
His body, John was sure, his boys had seen burned a long time ago. It should have been the obvious course of action, and he could see no reason why Sam or Dean would stray from it. He wasn't sure what would happen the day that the storage unit was finally emptied out, whether it was when the payments finally dried up or someone broke in. Perhaps his mysterious tether would finally be revealed, and he would find himself trailing along after a box of old clothes, or maybe the baseball mitt he'd kept since he was five. Or, sometimes he wondered if he would walk free, if his creeping suspicion proved true. Poltergeists weren't always tethered in the same way as other spirits, some were known to drift from one location to another, attracted to the signature left in the wake of demonic influence. In his lucid moments, he sometimes could have sworn the car seat had moved on the floor, tumbled over from one side to the other, and wondered how often he might be losing himself in violent fits he couldn't remember. Did the cardboard of the boxes just happen to decay, or was something helping them to fall apart? Either way, endless as this time felt, he knew it wasn't the final stage.
There had been a handful of times, when he heard of vengeful spirits starting fires on their own. The idea threaded in and out of his eroding self awareness. He'd never heard of a ghost torching itself though, had no reason to think that it would work. . .
Watching Mary's enigmatic smile like it could ever change, a fatigue he would have once called bone deep settled over him. He used to think only the living could feel so exhausted. But the dead weren't meant to cope with the baggage they racked up in life. At times, this storage unit could have been another level of Hell, less bloodied, less baiting, where the demons that tortured him twisted the unchanging memories of a lifetime's defining moments in him deeper than any knife, feeding him into those fits of rage and regret that would eventually consume him, while Mary Campbell's smile glared up at him in the dark.
He'd driven straight through two states the day after nearly abandoning Sam and Dead in Coldwater, until the Impala's tank ran low and Sammy's diaper bag came up empty on things to feed the boys, before he finally allowed himself to pull over at a Gas n' Sip on the outskirts of nowhere. He had untangled Sammy from his car seat and walked Dean to the men's room, changed Sam's overdue diaper while Dean chattered away from one of the stalls, and then took them inside to buy supplies. Dean was allowed to pick out one snack and one toy to keep him entertained for the drive, while John awkwardly carried both shopping basket and baby down the aisles. He probably should have kept Sammy in the baby carrier, but he'd wanted to feel the weight of carrying him. He set the basket on the ground and gingerly placed each time he chose into it, occasionally calling Dean over to grab something for him when Sam became restless.
When he came to the salt, he paused, staring at the containers for a long moment before kicking the basket into place directly under the shelf and one buy one toppling the entire front row of the display in with their amenities.
The teenager at the register had given him a strange look.
"You know it doesn't go bad, right?"
John rearranged Sammy on his hip so he could bend down at the knees, back straight, Sammy's head laid against his shoulder, to gather the basket's metal handles into his free hand. He hardly looked at the teenager when he got to the counter and dully handed over his credit card.
"It goes faster than you think."
~ K ~
A/N:
Another Supernatural fic inspired by country music. This one came from "Break Down Here" by Julie Roberts and "Does My Ring Burn Your Finger" by Lee Ann Womack. I know that John doesn't get painted in the best light in fanfiction, especially by Destiel shippers (who write most of the fics I enjoy), but my heart kind of goes out to the guy a little bit. Like Dean said to Henry, the guy got a raw deal. All he wanted was to raise a little family and play baseball with his kids. Sucker had no idea what he would walk into. . .
I feel like the thing I am most nervous about in this fic is the fact that Coldwater, Kansas is an actual place, and I wrote their police station as having office hours based entirely off an old romance novel from the 80s, that was just set in a small town that the author may or may not have made up. I do not know if all small town police stations close their doors after a certain time. Hopefully no officers from Coldwater read this and get annoyed at my possible inaccuracy.
Anyway, if you made it to the end of the fic, thank you so much for reading!