Five

Dean sat on the trunk of the Impala, bare toes curled over the bumper and knuckles pressed to his lips. Hot breath hissed between his curled fingers, forming thin wisps of condensation in the cool night air. After Dean had skimmed through his father's precious notebook too many times to reasonably count and remember, the journal now sat on the trunk next to him. Abandoning his reading, he now played idly with a black pistol, flipping the deadly instrument around his fingers as he stared off into the night.

"Dean." It was his father's voice behind him, thick and filled with the life that had been taken from him when his wife burned on his infant's son ceiling. Even though only John spoke, Dean could still smell his mother's fragrance lingering in the silent air around her and knew that she was there. Hesitating like a reluctant teenager, Dean slowly looked over his shoulder to view his parents standing behind him alongside the car.

John had his arm wrapped protectively around Mary's waist, never willing to let her leave him again. He seemed to have grown younger in a matter of minutes, finally allowing the taxation of years of stress slip off him with that one kiss to the only woman who ever mattered in his life. On the other hand, Mary was aged slightly with small lines around her eyes and mouth, so that she was closer to John's age instead of Dean's young years. Although John did not appear to notice the aging in his wife, Dean immediately did, and he wondered if this was all just part of the plan to fully meld his mother back into the real world, while abolishing all traces of Sam.

"Dean, what are you doing out here by yourself?" Mary asked, moving next to the trunk so she could stand beside Dean. Her hand lingered for a moment next to Dean's leg on the metal, and when she removed her fingers, a fogged outline remained on the Impala's paint. Having wrapped herself in John's bulky coat to prevent the night chill in her nightgown, she looked oddly out of place.

Dean ignored his mother's question and picked up the leather bound notebook next to him, holding it out as an offering. "You might want this back," he said to his father, who looked down at it in a mix of confusion and surprise, as if he had forgotten it existed entirely.

"No, no," John said, pushing the journal back at Dean. "Those days are over. Your mother is back," he replied with a smile down at the radiant Mary. "There is no reason to keep hunting."

"What about those who are in trouble?" Dean asked. "Will you still help them?"

"Well, yes, but I'm not going to go looking for trouble anymore. If they need me, I'll be there, but Dean…we don't have run anymore."

Looking down at the notebook in his lap, Dean ran his sore fingers on the smooth, aged leather edges. Every secret his father had ever had was in the tattered pages, and everything his father had ever stood for was tied behind leather bonds. Now the journal, the very symbolic representation of John Winchester, had been reduced to paper and ink.

"Come inside," Mary said to Dean. "It's getting cold out here and you don't have anything on your feet."

"Mom, I'm fine."

"Then why in the world are you sitting out here by yourself in the dark? Like it or not, Dean, I'm still your mother."

Dean smiled faintly at those words, reminiscent of the moment when he had wet his pants as a child and tried to hide it from his mother. Of course, Mary knew anyway, and had told him very firmly that she was there to take care of him because "like it or not, Dean, I'm your mother."

Finally, John spoke: "It's about Sam."

Dean merely nodded in response.

"Dean, what your brother did was very noble, and no one is ever going to say otherwise, but you and I both know that there's no way to get him back."

"Are you sure?" Dean asked, finally lifting his head for the first time to meet his parents' eyes.

"As sure as I'm ever going to be," John responded. "There have been rumors of people crossing between life and death, but Dean…"

"But what? Dad," Dean said, hopping down off the trunk, "our whole life has been about the rumors nobody thinks is true."

"You could spend years working on this and get nowhere. You may never stop searching and looking, and Dean…it could destroy you."

"Like the hunt for Mom destroyed you."

"Sam went because he wanted to," John replied, showing no indication that he had heard Dean's comment. "Your mother didn't have an option. Nobody forced him, all right? If that was the choice he made, then we have to accept it."

"Just like we 'had' to accept it when he went off to college?" Dean snapped. He hadn't meant for his voice to sound so irritated, but the sarcasm rolled thick nonetheless.

"Hold your tongue, boy," John warned.

Mary, sensing the confrontation, laid a hand on John's forearm. The last time she had seen John and Dean argue Dean was only four years old. Now he was a man just as much as John was, grown and raging. "Dean, I think what your father is trying to say is that we can't change what happened. We have to accept things as they are. Fighting the matter is not going to help anyone. That's not to say we don't want Sam back, but if your father says that nothing can get him back, then you have to trust him on this. We don't want to lose you, too. Dean, you're the only son we have now. Don't leave us."

There was a long pause, before John finally spoke. "Let's get back inside, and get a good sleep. Things will be clearer in the morning." Then, as an afterthought for Dean's sake, "Then maybe we can do some research on if we can get Sam back. Maybe there is a way I'm just not thinking of right now." With those words, he and Mary began to walk towards the motel room under the pale light of the parking lamp.

They were about halfway across the parking lot, when they heard Dean from behind: "No."

John and Mary turned around to see their eldest son sliding off the trunk of the car. As he stood with his arms crossed indignantly, he held his head high and met his parents' eyes evenly without a flicker. "I'm not going back to bed to just sleep this all away."

"What are you talking about?" John questioned. "Get inside, Dean. You're acting crazy."

"I listened to you for twenty years, Dad, and I'm not going to now. No, not now."

"Dean?" Mary moved forward, maternal protection flooding her emotions. Her blonde curls moved slowly in the building breeze.

"I know Sam chose to go on his own, and I know that nothing we've ever heard about has made it possible for any person to travel freely between life and death. But, dammit, he pretty much took a bullet that could have been mine, and I'm not going to let him get away with that. I don't care if this takes me the rest of my life. I'm not going to stand here and pretend that what we have is perfectly normal, because it's not. I'm not going to say that we'll just 'make do' with the three of us as a family. Sam belongs here just as much as I do, and I'm not going to leave him behind."

John made a silent protest, perhaps a curse under his breath about the stubbornness of his son, while Mary waited for Dean to speak, knowing what he was about to say, but hoping that she was wrong.

Dean pursed his lips then and tucked the notebook under his arm. "I'm leaving tonight," he said with a click of the gun as he turned off the safety trigger. He smiled slowly in the pale light, a sort of hopeful, determined smile. "And I'm getting him back."