AN: What better way to celebrate Bobby's guest appearance on Supernatural tonight than a Bobby Interlude?
interlude
If Bobby Singer could take back just one decision—one single decision—that he'd made in his entire life, all sixty years of it, he would go back and tell Karen that he wanted kids too. Had he known that awful, terrible fight, that ended with her cut and drunk and crying would be the last one they ever had, he never would've had it. He would've hugged her and kissed her and said "Of course, beautiful, I've always wanted to be a father" and whatever other lies spilled past his lips just to keep her happy and laughing so she wouldn't have had to spend her last three days absolutely miserable.
In the end, she still died for nothing. Because Bobby Singer did end up becoming a father. Johnathon Winchester had been a friend only in the most basic of terms, but God if Bobby didn't try not to become attached to that little snot nosed brat and his dopey eyed baby brother that trailed behind John Winchester's coat tails. Bobby could see so much of himself in Dean and so much of his own father in John Winchester. Bobby still recalled a six year old Dean sitting on his kitchen floor polishing off his father's guns, stopping every couple of minutes to shove a spoonful of oatmeal into Sam's mouth. Bobby didn't consider himself cultured by any means, but that was probably the most poetic thing he'd ever seen in his life.
He wasn't sure how he somehow became Designated Winchester Babysitter, but he soon discovered that he didn't mind having the boys over. In his mind, they were safest with him, away from their deranged, grieving father who expected too much out of one son would couldn't even spell his last name yet and the other who could still only barely walk and still said Bean instead of Dean. They weren't even children yet, they were still babies and Dean should've been in school not traveling around in their father's death trap of car all around the country hunting monsters. Bobby knew things had gone too far when, once while he was making up the bed Dean always slept in, he found a loaded pistol tucked underneath the boy's pillow. A six year old was packing heat underneath his pillow and when Bobby had asked him about it, Dean had only looked up at him and said "Daddy says you can never let your guard down, 'specially when you're sleeping 'cause otherwise the monsters will eat you!" He said it so matter of factly too, with an eye roll added just for extra flavor, like Bobby was the crazy one because he didn't keep a loaded pistol with him twenty four seven.
The scariest part was that when Bobby looked at John Winchester, he saw the man he could've become. Maybe the man he should've become. Because Karen's death had been so horrifically, horrendously, terribly awful and it ripped out a part of him and ate it right there in front of him. It was scary to see that Bobby could have just as easily become that angry, dunked himself into that much self-loathing and drank himself that far to the edge of insanity. It was only the memories of his own father that held him back by just a thread. The desire to be something better. He killed his first monster when he was just twelve years old to protect his mother and until Karen's death he hadn't needed to ever protect anyone else.
But then all of a sudden he had two little boys and a monster that was all too familiar, but what could he do about it? Who was he to tell John Winchester how to raise his boys?
Bobby savored the weeks when John Winchester would drop off Sam and Dean with him because then the boys were within his sight and he knew for sure that they got at least two meals a day and had a bed to sleep in and someone to teach Dean how to read and write and calm him down if he had a nightmare and to comfort him if he wet the bed instead of screaming at him and hitting him like he knew John Winchester did. Sam, he discovered, he didn't even have to worry about because Dean took care of Sam like he was his own kid and that twisted Bobby's stomach onto a tight knot. Dean got the short end of the stick—it wasn't fair to put a little kid through all the shit John Winchester drug his sons through, but it especially wasn't fair to expect Dean to be a parent to his own brother.
But Bobby watched as Dean grew into a man. A damn decent man and he'd meant it when he had told Dean he was a better man than his daddy ever was. At the news of John Winchester's death, Bobby hadn't been able to make himself shed a single tear. Not for John at least. He had cried, of joy, when he learned that Sam and Dean were okay. Because goddamnit they were his kids. He raised them all on his own and it was in his home where they had their birthdays and Christmases and it was his photo albums that were overflowed and he was the one to talk Dean through his first crush and when Sam couldn't go to Dean for something, he went to Bobby.
Bobby didn't doubt that John Winchester loved his sons, the man just didn't know how to show affection and kindness. But that didn't excuse any of his actions.
Because Dean is his son, Bobby's heart breaks with Dean's. It wasn't fair for them to still lose so much. He lost Karen, the love of his life, and he knew that Sam's girlfriend had been killed too and that Sam had been about to ask that girl to marry him and he had hoped that Dean would be spared that fate but he wasn't and it just was not fair.
Sure, Bobby had been wary of Castiel at first, but who wouldn't be? Not only was he not human, he was an angel, something Bobby hadn't even known existed until Castiel appeared in his barn that bitter night. But even if he was wary, Bobby was still damn grateful, grateful beyond anything he can ever enunciate because "thanks" just didn't seem enough to cover pulling his kid outta Hell.
And over time Bobby found himself growing fond of Castiel. The poor kid was in the same boat Sam and Dean had been in for years, a Father who was distant and expected too much and he was a son more than eager to please, to just hear someone say 'I'm damn proud of ya'. He didn't know the extent of Dean's relationship with Castiel—Lord knows the eye sex alone was enough to make even the most romantic of teenage girls puke her stomach out—but other than that they always seemed to just dance around each other.
In the end, it doesn't matter, Bobby decides. Because Dean had loved Castiel and now Castiel was dead. Dead like his mother and father and Pamela and Ash and Ellen and Jo. Dead like Karen. Dead like Jess.
And when Bobby walks down his staircase that morning, woken up by Sam's yelling and Dean's laughter as they fight over a bloodied angel blade, he stares in the living room and sees not his boys, but the ever present ghost of John Winchester.
end interlude
