It was another four days before there was the sound of a car on the gravel yard outside the Roadhouse outside their usual working hours. Jo jumped off her seat by the counter forgetting about her lunch, hurrying towards the door, closely followed by a frowning Sam. Ellen sat down the bar towel she'd used to dry off the freshly washed dishes and walked after the teenagers to the front door.
"Dean." Jo's words were but a whisper as she saw the black Chevy that halted in front of their home. As the door opened and the broad shoulders and short brown hair of the young man appeared out of the driver's seat, her voice rose into a squealing shout "Dean!"
The blond girl ran towards him skidding to a halt only two feet from him. Dean's sunglasses came askew as she slapped him across the cheek. It wasn't hard but she made her point. "Dean Winchester, don't you dare ever leave us alone again for two and a half fucking years!" Her index finger stabbed his chest with every word. Ellen would have reprimanded her for the language she used but thought she could let it slide this once. After giving him another stern look the girl jumped forwards and hugged the young man like she would never let him go again. That was probably what she actually wanted to do all along.
Sam stood at the side looking at his brother for a long while before stepping up himself and giving him a quick if not slightly chilly hug. He was pissed off by how long Dean's "road trip" had taken and Ellen knew that. She was tense. She had called Dean to look into where William was. Now four days later he stood in her front yard without her husband. It made her insides coil thinking of the implications.
Dean stepped forward, putting a hand on Jo's shoulder and pulling off his sunglasses. His eyes were dark and sunken, with heavy bags beneath them, and red-rimmed. He looked at Ellen for a long moment before swallowing once and saying the first words since his arrival. She knew he did not bring good news and didn't know if she really wanted to hear what he was about to say. "I drove through the whole night. I just came from the police office in Greensboro..." He paused taking a deep breath. Ellen felt her hands shaking. Greenboro, North Carolina. Over twenty hours drive from here. William was in North Carolina as far as she knew. She took three steps toward the young man who had become her son over the years. Her mind begged him to say that he had a drink with her husband, that he had lost his cell but was already on his way home. "I'm sorry."
Ellen heard a sob leaving her throat. She closed her eyes. Tears welling up and out beneath her lashes and she felt herself being hugged tight by muscled arms.
"What?" It was Sam's voice carrying dread.
She could feel Dean hug her just a bit tighter, his chin which had rested on her hair lifting. "William is dead. I'm sorry."
There was a strangled cry from the girl standing right next to them and one arm left Ellen's back to pull the teenaged girl close as well. Ellen clung to her daughter as hard as she could, forcing down the tears that blurred her vision and petting the blond hair of her child while soothing the sobs that were muffled against her shoulder.
"How do you know? What happened?" Ellen could hear choked tears in the younger brother's voice and she looked up, seeing him ball his fists at his.
Dean let go of them and took a step towards his brother, posture weary and tired. "I saw him. He's dead. I…." He paused, pinching the bridge of his nose. "I claimed the body. It's being transferred here for a proper burial. He should have a proper burial." Ellen knew why Dean wanted to emphasize that. Their mother hadn't had a burial; there was nothing left. Their dad was never buried the traditional way either. There were no funerals, no saying good bye, no closure.
Sam rubbed his hands over his face his voice growing angrier with every word. "Right. Let me guess… you killed whatever did it?"
"Yes."
Sam nodded the muscles of his jaw working vividly. "And you didn't think we'd want to hear about it FIRST?"
Dean rubbed his eyes shrugging. "I had to be fast or it would have been gone and I thought you'd rather hear it from me face to face." Ellen saw Sam's rage grow along with Dean's annoyance. When Dean grew defensive it was never a good thing.
"Yeah, because you showed your face so much in the last years. You didn't even get here for Christmas! You only sent those fucking postcards and a present or two for our birthdays… and then you think we'd need you to come here for THIS?" Sam was close to shouting and Ellen would have intervened had she had the strength. But all she could do right now was hold on tight to her little girl, a girl that at not even fifteen had lost her father.
"You know very well how this business goes, Sam! Holidays are always the worst…. I was busy."
"Will is DEAD!" Jo flinched at Sam's angry screaming.
"I know, Sam… I fucking KNOW that!"
"Where were you when he needed you? Busy?" As Dean only shook his head letting that question slide not seeing the need to answer, obviously sick of arguing, Sam snapped. The boy had always been the most peaceful of her kids so she was dumbfounded to see him launch at his brother who stood only a few feet away and strike him hard in the face. Dean hadn't been prepared for this. His head snapped around and he fel,l hitting his chin on the side of his car. There was a loud crunch before he went down. Ellen wasn't sure if the bone had broken from the hit or the bump on the metal exterior of the Impala but as Dean lay on the ground, blood flowing from his mouth and groaning painfully, she knew that his jaw had been broken.
January 24th was a cool morning sporting a clouded sky. It was less than two weeks since William Anthony Harvelle had been buried. Pretty much exactly two weeks since Ellen had brought her oldest kid into the emergency room with blood pouring from his mouth. But more than that it was Dean Winchester's twenty-first birthday. Ellen hadn't thought they'd get to celebrate this day considering that the last birthday Dean had been home had been his eighteenth. The last party he had attended at the Roadhouse being Sam's fourteenth birthday. It was one of the few things she was glad for these days, having her kids home. All of them. She didn't know if she could have gone on after William's death without them.
She had taken it upon herself to be the strong one so all of them could cry when they needed to. Jo did so a lot. Sam sometimes as well. He had also cried when they took Dean to the emergency room. He had never meant to hurt his brother like that, they all knew that, but Sam still beat himself up over it. Would do so probably until Dean's injuries were fully healed or longer. As it was Dean celebrated his twenty-first birthday with his jaw wired shut, his teeth sitting on each other cleanly to make sure everything would grow back together in the right place. It had taken them a week to understand a word of what Dean said as he was unable to open his mouth while speaking but they managed rather well by now.
Dean had not cried other than the pained tears he couldn't hold back while lying groaning in the back of the car on their way to the hospital. But Ellen was pretty sure that Dean felt Sam had been right with what he had said. Otherwise he would not have let his little brother sneak a punch on him like that. Ellen knew Dean's reflexes and bet he could have rolled the punch if he had wanted to. Maybe, just maybe, it was his way of punishing himself for the guilt he felt for not being there when William left for his last job.
Ellen wished it were that easy to lay blame but she knew it was not. Will had misjudged the dangers of the last job and he had paid the highest price.
Though she was sorry Dean had been hurt, she wasn't sorry his injury was keeping him around for a while. Dean might still be closer to a child then an adult, if you asked Ellen, but he often took Jo in his arms when she cried, especially when he saw that Ellen couldn't handle that at the moment. The loss of her husband had brought her kids back together.
As Dean seemed to pour his grief and guilt into the pain he was still in – sometimes it seemed like he took his pain as a righteous punishment –Sam tried to reconcile with his brother.
Her two boys had always shared a room. It was the biggest of the 3 bedrooms for it was the only one that needed to fit two beds, though in the first year the two had lived with them, she would find them sharing a bed more often than not. The room opened towards the back of the bar and Ellen had often admired the ability of the two Winchesters to sleep with the bar's noises only feet away. They had shrugged it off just as they did Ellen's offer to reorganize the storage rooms and maybe make space for a second smaller bedroom when they had grown older.
They didn't mind sharing, had always done so as long as they could remember, and were content using the bar and the private living room and kitchen as a way to take a break from each other. 'At least we're not stuck in one motel room together for days at a time' Dean had once said and Ellen had once more been surprised by the boys' stoical pragmatism. When she had taken them in they had brought one duffle bag that held all their clothes and personal belongings. William had given them the few items that John had had with him as he died: a leather-bound journal, a set of throwing knives and a picture of the Winchester family that had been taken shortly before Mary's passing. It had been worn at the edges, the colour being rubbed away by eager hands but the boys had it framed in their room next to other pictures they had found tucked into the journal.
Later on the little collection had been extended with photos of their stay with the Harvelles. Most of those Ellen had taken herself. Jo sitting on Dean's shoulders with Sam standing in front of them craning his neck and waving at the blond girl. Another one captured them all together, Sam and Dean sitting on barstools with Jo perched on the counter between them while William and herself stood behind the bar leaning up on the counter on each side of their daughter. She could not remember who snapped that shot but it was one of her favorites. There were pictures with their friends as well: Bobby, Caleb, Jim, those close friends of John Winchester's who made it their duty to take an interest in his sons' well-being.
Not one of the photos showed school friends, though. It was one of those things that sometimes made Ellen frown. She knew that both boys had the usual school crushes, a teenage-girlfriend here and there. But they never kept pictures of them, at least not the way they did with their "real life friends" as Dean had called them once. When Ellen had asked him about the label, he only shrugged saying that those people didn't know what they knew and therefore couldn't begin to understand what they were really like. They didn't belong to their real life but to the world of the innocent, naïve people they had to get along with on a daily basis. Ellen knew exactly what he meant but still thought it sad that she did never have to argue with him about whether he could bring a girlfriend home or not.
Sam did it once and would probably have gotten a scalding look or more from his brother if he hadn't he been on his prolonged road trip already. It had been the week of Sam's sixteenth birthday and the bar was closed for a few days due to the need to renovate the floor of the main room, so they were safe from the usual heavily-armed crowd. They had made sure there were no firearms or machetes lying around that morning. The girl, her name long lost to Ellen, had been sweet enough but was slightly irritated by the fact that Sam at his age still had to bunk with his big brother and the fact that said brother had left nearly two years ago but still had a bed and half the room made the frown on her face only increase. The gloomy atmosphere of the Roadhouse was not a girl's picture of the usual family home and Sam had not wanted to bring anyone home with him again.
As soon as Dean had been released from hospital care he moved back into Sam's room. Sam had cleared his brother's half of the room with guilty enthusiasm as he used the bed and the other furniture as extra storage space. Dean had – in a written conversation – expressed that he didn't expect them to have kept his part of the bedroom and was totally fine with bunking wherever they could get him a corner. Sam made it very clear that he would not tolerate Dean to stay anywhere other than with him.
The older brother did not blame Sam for hurting him, he knew it had been an accident, but he had a hard time coping with all the apologies when he could not snap back at Sam to stop it or just accept them and express his understanding for the situation. It was no fun not to be able to open his mouth and he rolled his eyes at Sam quite a bit when he didn't have a notepad to tell him.
Dean always had witty replies ready and there were times when Ellen saw that he itched to say something or comment on whatever they did but had to swallow it down because expressing himself was just too difficult and the snappy remarks just didn't land where they should when mumbled through gritted teeth and swollen tissue. The result was a Dean who was more silent than any of them could remember him and only made use of some select gestures to show his thoughts (half of them were not really suitable to use around smaller children). By now they understood his mumbling rather well but he still hardly spoke, claiming it hurt but they suspected that he just didn't want to sound like some retard (Dean's own words) when he slurred the words until they were hardly intelligible. What hurt most was probably his pride.
This day Ellen got up early to prepare something for Dean's birthday. Normally she'd make the boy's favorite cake (although Dean had a couple of favorites because everything rich and sweet made him the tamest little puppy in town) but this option was out, considering that the birthday-boy was physically unable to bite or chew. The last weeks were the only time that Ellen could recall Dean not seeming to enjoy their shared dinners. He had watched the others eat their food with a gloomy expression while sipping on one kind of liquid nutrition or other. For the day when his wires were pulled and he was allowed to chew again he already ordered a huge steak, but until that time came it was milkshakes instead of birthday cake.
She busied herself with chopping up bananas into pieces then putting them in the blender and getting the whipping cream out if the fridge. Later on she only had to add the bananas to a mixture of milk and chocolate ice cream, topping it with the whipped cream. After a while she heard a door open. Looking over her shoulder she saw Jo shuffle into the kitchen. The girl sat down on a chair silently watching her mother through sleepy eyes. It was a Wednesday and the two youngest of her kids had to leave for school so it was anything but a surprise to see Sam sneak in silently closing the door to the bar behind him signalling them Dean was still asleep. They had a quick breakfast of cereal –just because Dean couldn't chew that didn't mean the rest of them had to live off shakes alone – before Ellen finished up the chocolate-banana shakes while Jo decorated a tray and Sam ignited the candles.
As they walked into the boy's bedroom singing 'Happy Birthday' Ellen thought she saw her oldest startle in surprise at being awoken like that and grab something beneath his pillow. But the moment was over before it began and surprise changed into awe and then into a wide wire-baring grin.
Ellen was worried. She always had reason to worry. Lots of them actually, but she took it in stride since that's what she did. But today her worries were related to family, more exactly: Dean.
Her oldest boy had always been a serious child. When she first met the kid at the age of twelve he was more mature than most college students. It was the price of a life on the road filled with the responsibility of caring for a younger sibling and the worries about an always absent father, doubled with the pain of loosing that father to a life of hunting and being hunted.
Sam had still been too young to be included in the cruelty of the hunt – not that Dean was old enough but it seemed like John Winchester wanted to leave at least one of his children with as much innocence as possible. Lucky Sammy.
But despite all the hardship and the pain Dean had been an amazing child. When he left the Roadhouse he might have been the most silent of the three kids but he was a charmer beyond belief, wrapping women around his little finger like cotton candy and he had had a witty tongue that sometimes caused him more trouble than good.
Now though, he was gloomy. More so than ever before and the kid had always known how to nurture a good depression, even though he usually tried to hide it behind a few inappropriate jokes. Ever since Dean had returned with the horrible news of William's death he had not been himself. But Ellen let it go telling herself that they all took the loss as hard as she did. Maybe she was closing her eyes to something more. Of course Dean was devastated by Will's death, they all were. But he was the one holding it together, lending a shoulder to everyone else and she took it, not asking twice.
He seemed to have taken the passing of his foster father best of the three kids and it was understandable since he was the oldest, hadn't seen them all for over two years and lived a life where death was omnipresent. But now he seemed to be the only one who was not on the mend. It had been nine weeks. They had survived the shock and life slowly started to go back to normal. She had asked Dean to stick around after the wires holding his jaw fixed were finally pulled and he hadn't argued.
Dean was the kid who cherished family most but needed his own freedom more than any of them. It had always been a strange mix.
"Is he brooding again?"
Ellen turned away from the bar where she was leaning, watching Dean as he sat on a corner table, cleaning and reloading an arsenal. Sam stood next to her, watching his brother with a frown. He was soon going to turn seventeen and had already grown to be taller than any of them.
Ellen gave him a sad smile and only shrugged. She watched as the younger Winchester brother straightened himself a bit before he walked across the room, flopping down on a chair next to his brother, grabbing a shotgun.
Maybe, they were going to be okay after all.
Sam managed to distract Dean from his gloominess when he was there but school and homework restricted the time he could spend with his big brother. Dean would go on hunts, but only for a few days, nothing more than a week, knowing that leaving for long periods of time would not go well with a family that just lost a father.
When Dean was there he would help out around the bar in the evenings, so Sam would have more time for his school work, and sit in a corner booth in the after noon reading or searching for a new hunt. Ellen was sure that he knew she was watching him and every once in a while he would look up and their eyes would meet. He was still quiet, more so than usual and his mood seemed worst when he was reading the small leather-bound ledger that Ellen knew was John Winchester's old journal. Dean had added a few pages with his own hunts by now but there was no real reason to read that book over and over again.
Sometimes he wouldn't be reading, just staring at the pages with a frown, eyes not moving left to right like they would if he had been reading for real. Ellen watched him thinking for maybe twenty minutes before she got out two glasses and a bottle of whiskey. Sam had taken Jo into town for burgers and a movie that afternoon and Dean had told the girl to finally get herself a real boyfriend, earning a slap on the arm from Jo while Sam told him for the fifth time that he could tag along. Dean claimed that going out with his little siblings was un-cool but none of them seemed to buy that.
She walked to the booth Dean claimed as his own these days and set the glasses down with a click, filling them about a finger's width with amber liquid. Green eyes snapped away from the page they had been glued to. Dean raised an eyebrow questioningly as he saw the woman slip into the seat opposite him. She nudged one glass towards him before taking a sip of her own.
Dean shrugged, grabbing the offered drink and pulling down half of it at once. "What did I do to deserve this?"
"Brooding. You looked like you needed a drink."
Dean didn't object, instead taking another sip. He closed the journal and let it rest on the table, settling one hand over it possessively.
"What's been eating you, Dean? You know we are all still trying to deal with the things that happened and it's not easy." Her voice was a little shaky but she managed to keep a hold on her emotions. "Sometimes it's really hard and we all need to cry and rage for a while. Maybe you should just…."
"No." He tipped back the rest of the whiskey and topped it up again from the bottle.
"I have watched you beat yourself up for weeks now and it's enough, Dean. It's not your fault."
"It's not that." He rubbed his eyes wearily and when he looked at her again they were red rimmed but dry. "I mean… yes, I should have been here. Maybe if I hadn't left things would have turned out different."
"No." She sighed blinking tears from her eyes. "We all knew that this could happen and he didn't know this hunt would be so dangerous."
He nodded solemnly into his drink. "I'm sorry, though. I'm sorry I spent two and a half years chasing an invisible enemy around the country. I-."
"What are you talking about, Dean?" She didn't know what he meant but something cold tingled along her spine in dread.
He stared at her for a long time, face blank and lips pressed together in a tight line. She felt a shudder run down her body and couldn't help wondering what in the name of God he could have been up to. Dean wet his lips slowly, swallowing hard and looking at his hands.
"I tried to finish what my dad started. I found some clues in his journal and I…" Green eyes lifted once more to meet hers. "I chased the thing that killed my mom."
Ellen blinked for a moment stunned by the admission of the young man. "You… why didn't you tell us?"
"Because Sam would have wanted to come and he should go to school and do something with his life." The love Dean had for his brother was visible and Ellen could see that Dean wanted Sam to be happy. She knew that part of Dean wished Sam would go hunting with him permanently one day, but Dean wanted Sam to make that decision himself, and for the right reasons rather than family obligation. "At first it was just a wild goose chase but after a long while of working jobs and following leads I found a lead and…."
His jaw clenched and Ellen knew that there was more. "Did you find it?"
"Not yet, but… I'm not going to look any further." He swirled the alcohol in his glass before tipping it back.
Ellen frowned confused and it had nothing to do with the whiskey they were drinking. "What? But if you're that close then why stop now?"
He sighed getting up and standing next to her without looking down. "It's a demon, Ellen, and it's not some pea soup-spitting looser but a really mean bitch. If I hunt it, I will put you all in danger." A calloused hand lay on her shoulder and Dean squeezed lightly. "I lost one family over this, I'm not going to loose you, too. Revenge just isn't worth it."
He walked out in silence and Ellen sat in silence for a few more minutes. She had always thought that Dean was John Winchester's son through and through. Now he had put them over his family's mission. Dean proved to be more of a man than John ever was.