Disclaimer: Still, sadly, I own nothing Supernatural.
Author's Note: Admittedly, there's little story developement in this chapter, more chock-full-of character development...primarily John, because, I'm sorry, but I love and miss the man so much! Anyway, tender moments ahead, be warned.
"Okay, new rule," he says, leaning on the wall just outside his daughter's hospital room. "I get a phone call upon admittance to any hospital."
Sam smirks, lets out an indignant snort. "Does that rule apply to the times you fall off the radar and refuse to answer your phone?"
"Are we doing this again?" John asks, shooting his son a contemptuous glare. Because now is really not the time.
"It was just a question," he replies smartly, either completely unfazed by his father's tone, or actually pleased to push it.
"Don't start."
It takes one long, angry sneer from John to get Sam's head to drop and the words, "Yes, sir," to tumble from his mouth in one exhausted breath. Too tired to argue, too tired to start.
John turns to Dean, takes in his ragged appearance as well, and shoots his thumb towards the exit, a wordless order. "I'll stay here. I want to talk to her when she wakes up anyway," he says softly.
"She doesn't know anything more than we've already told you."
"Maybe I just want to talk to her, Dean. Now go."
But it's Sam who interrupts next, grabbing onto John's arm as he turns to enter the hospital room. "What if something still wants her dead?" he asks in a conspiratorial fashion.
"Then I'll be here."
Sam rolls his eyes, the red-tinged whites lobbing loosely beneath his lids. "That's not what I mean." Of course she'd be safe with him, assuming otherwise would be nothing short of ludicrous. But if there's one thing he knew from his time hunting, and simply living, as a Winchester, being surrounded by real, true evil, it was this: if something wanted her dead, it wouldn't stop, no matter how many of her psychic boyfriends got killed along the way.
"I know what you mean, Sam. And we'll figure it out. We always do, right?" he says gently, encouragingly. Sam nods, barely perceptively. "You two just need to get some rest first. So go." He finishes with a raised eyebrow and a glance at Dean.
Always the first to follow Dad's orders, and the one to lead his siblings, Dean drops his hand onto Sam's shoulder, guiding the still reluctant man towards the exit and whatever hotel they can find nearby.
John simply watches them leave, shoulders slumped, each taking cues from the other, shuffling along, nearly leaning on one another due to pure exhaustion. Due to trust and faith. For all their faults – Sam's uncanny ability to pick fights and push John's buttons, Dean's need to be told what to do, always just a little too eager to follow his orders – his boys at least had managed to hold to the number one thing he'd worked so hard to instill in them. Blood is thicker than water. Family first. Always have each other's backs.
All of his children were good at that much at least.
He enters the room, dark but for the one glowing light above Tessa's bed which adds an air of comfort to an otherwise sterile setting. He looks down at her and smiles, only mildly surprised to see her hazel eyes gazing up at him. "You're awake," he says softly, the words rumbling to her ears.
"I told them they didn't have to call you," she murmurs, pain and fatigue lacing her voice, a faint smile trying to cover it.
John lowers himself slowly onto the bed, shifting and sinking the mattress just enough for her body to roll close to his, hip to hip. "I wasn't far."
"Guess not," she breathes out, eyes flickering towards the clock, noting how quickly he had arrived, mere hours.
"Besides," he says, grasping her hand with his, letting his thumb rub soft lines along her knuckles, "we instituted a new rule."
"I heard. You know," she starts, cocking an eyebrow, "if we have to call you every time one of us is hospitalized, that's gonna be one hell of a phone bill."
He shrugs, "Bill Jameson's paying for it," he says, referring to yet another stolen identity.
They sit in silence for a moment, Tessa letting her heavy lids fall shut once more, barely able, through the haze of medication, to stay alert for more than five minutes at a time. John doesn't move, doesn't even shift his weight, not wanting to disturb his daughter. He simply continues the small caress, worn thumb soothing away.
He's seen her like this before, bathed in the artificial light, the harsh glow of a hospital room, machines beeping and buzzing and dripping all around. He's seen all of his children like this before, and each time seems harder than the last. It's just not something you can get used to. If anything, the fear and pain and, oh God, the guilt increases with each passing injury. Every broken bone and bloodstained piece of flesh, tearing away another chunk of his heart. Every fractured dream and crushed hope – of something real and normal and true – slicing through to his soul. Because they were his children. And they deserved better. And he never gave them better.
Part of him felt much freer during those months away, when he cut off all contact with them. He had an excuse then, not to see Sam small and broken and lost after losing Jessica. Not to see Dean weak and scared – because if anybody could see through his son's cover right down to the fear beneath, it was John – when he was "dying".
He loved his children dearly. But sometimes, being around them was just too much. Even when they were seemingly fine, all bones and skin intact, talking and laughing and behaving like "normal" young people, it pained him. Because he knew better. He knew every old injury and scar that still troubled them, still pocked their pale flesh.
The ten jagged inches along the back of Dean's thigh, a werewolf in Vermont. The painful and paralyzing back spasms that plague Tessa to this day after being thrown into a wall, a poltergeist in San Diego. The bare, bone on bone click that Sam's elbow sometimes makes, an angry spirit outside of Dallas.
He knew their pasts and they weren't pretty or easy or devoid of tears and blood. In fact they were full of them. And it was, entirely, he knew, his fault. Even now that his children are adults, fully capable of making their own decisions, heading down their own paths in life, he can't help but chide himself for starting them down this one so many years before.
But how could he not? When he knew, at least to a certain extent, what was to come, what still is to come. How could he not train them and teach them and guide them in the ways that might later lead them to salvation. Because they were, all three, so much more than simply his children.
"Dad," he hears, a concerned voice to jolt him from his thoughts. He looks down to see his daughter's ashen face, knitted brows. She looks tired and ill, but more than that, simply confused.
"Yeah, baby?" he says with a half-hearted smile.
"You okay?" she asks, voice so filled with care and concern that it nearly breaks his heart. Because she's the one with a knife wound in her back, a dead fiancé's blood on her hands. And he…hell, he's just busy feeling sorry for himself.
"I'm fine," he responds, soft and deep, eyes falling only for a moment before taking hold of hers, sincerity laced through his gaze. "How 'bout you?"
"I can't stay awake," she mutters before stifling a yawn.
He laughs a bit and says, "Then don't."
"No." She breathes deep, cringing as she does, as the sharp and slicing pain in her chest reminds her of the tube between her ribs. She closes her eyes and does all she can to remain to still for as long as it takes to get her breath back and the zapping throb to stop.
"It's okay to sleep," he says softly, nearly a whisper, as he leans down into her. His thumb has stilled and his hand's tightened on hers, fingers laced taughtly together as she works through the pain, works to hide the pain.
"No," she says again, stronger now, shaking her head defiantly.
And John knows better than to think it's something as simple as fear. Because Tessa's too analytical to be scared of something like dreams. Even when she was little, after the initial scream or sob of terror upon waking, she'd rather sit up and try to analyze her nightmares than either give into them or forcibly forget about them. That's just who she is, always looking for answers to everything, ways to explain all the unexplainable, so she might then know the unknowable. To keep fear at bay. Because, really, what could be more frightening than the unknown?
So no, it wasn't anything as simple as that, nothing he could easily fix with an, "I'm here, don't worry. I won't let anything happen to you." Because she already knew that anyway, and would only look at him like he was crazy if he said it. So he wouldn't.
Instead he opts for, "Why not?" And when she turns her bloodshot eyes to him he can see her hesitation, to just say the words. So he says again, in that fatherly order of a way he has, "Why not?"
Her eyes dim and shift, dropping to his chest but looking at, or for, something else entirely. Something that isn't there at all. Something that, he's fairly certain, she sees every time her eyes fall shut. "I found a dress," she says quietly, so soft he barely hears. "I didn't even want a wedding. Who would we invite anyway?" Her voice drifts into a tone that matches the far-off quality of her eyes, especially when she utters, "It's a beautiful dress."
"Yeah?" is all he can think to say. Because what else could he do? What else could he say, when his daughter begins to talk about the wedding she'll never have?
"I bought it," she says, glancing up at John, making glassy eye contact. "It just…fit."
"I bet it's beautiful," he offers gently. "I bet you're beautiful in it."
She nods her head in agreement and says simply, defeatedly, "Hope I can get my money back now."
"Maybe you should hold onto it," he begins, hand coming to rest in her hair, fingers sweeping the newly shorn strands back and down off her forehead, "in case you need it later."
She looks at him stonily, a fiery stubbornness he's only ever seen in his twins' eyes, and perhaps his own should he ever happen by a mirror at the right time. "I don't know what happened," she says in sharp and measured tones. "I don't know why, when, or how. But I know that Ben loved me. And I loved him. I love him."
He nods his head, understanding all too well, but still hoping that maybe… "You never know, Kiddo." Because the thought of his children spending their lives longing for ghosts, be it Sam's Jess or Tessa's Ben, like he's done, pining away for long gone Mary, is too much to bear.
She doesn't respond, and he's glad, knowing from the look on her face that any response she would have voiced surely would have been laced with anger and profanity. He drops his head and with it, his gaze, and doesn't say a word, until the air is too thick not to.
Fingers still playing in her hair he asks suddenly, only now realizing why this act seemed so strange and different, "What happened to your hair?" Because it hadn't been this short since…well, ever. Unless you count when she was a baby, waves just starting to come in, thick and tangled. But, admittedly, he remembers little from those days.
She sighs softly, taking care not to emit any sort of sharp breath that might bring back that awful stabbing pain. "Dean cut it off," she says with the voice of a sulking four-year-old.
"Dean cut it off?" he asks, mind quickly flitting through the images of all the horrible things his kids had done to one another in the past. Another prank war, he assumes. And it's his turn to sigh, long and defeated, just like he did every time one of them would run to him after being on the receiving end of some such joke.
She laughs, only briefly before gasping a bit and letting out a long drawn out, "Owww," smile still playing on her face. Because she recognizes his sigh and knows what he's thinking. And she's tempted to let him think it, let Dean get in trouble, which surely he would. And even the idea of it makes her laugh.
"Careful," John says, crooked smile on his lips as well. He knew, maybe better than anyone, in their family at least, that the worst thing you could do with a chest injury of any kind, the most awful and painful and terrible thing, was to laugh.
She takes a moment to compose herself, find her voice, smile slipping inadvertently from her lips as she does so. "It got stuck in a door, my ponytail. He had to cut it so we could get out of the house. Stupid poltergeist."
"I see," he says nodding, only slightly amused, because, really, he's always loved her hair. His little girl, always dressed in worn hand me downs or bargain bin threads, nothing trendy or particularly girly. Not until she was old enough to makes her own money anyway, buy her own stuff. There were times, when the kids were young, that the only way anyone could tell she was a girl was her long and lovely hair.
"I like it," he says, voice a little too high. His fingers pinch a chink and pull it taught so he can get a better look at just how short it is. Terrible.
"Liar," she says.
And he laughs, because of course it's a lie.
He can remember running his fingers through that hair, from her scalp down to her back, on countless days and nights. If she was sick or hurt, or just couldn't sleep. If she was upset because the boys wouldn't let her play with them and their friends, because she was a girl. If he'd just gotten back from a long and arduous hunt, finding Dean asleep on the couch or upright in a chair, having nodded off despite trying to keep watch. The two younger children likely curled together somewhere, the one double bed they could afford, or perhaps on the floor by Dean's feet.
He'd put them all to bed, eldest son insisting on getting up and going himself, movements still weighted with sleep. Sam, nothing but dead weight, still gone to the world even after being tucked in. And Tessa, always awake, but pretending not to be, letting John carry her off, pull the covers up close to her chin, straighten and stroke her long locks, never moving.
Dean used to brush her hair, when she was small and refused to do it herself, claiming she couldn't even remember how. And John would get too frustrated, too violent with the tangles that plagued her dark waves. Only Dean would take the time, surprising him with his patience and tenderness. He'd comb it out gently, making Tessa count the strokes, helping her learn her numbers as they went. And then later, when she was older and saw how the other girls at school would wear their hair up and out of the way, making it easier for play. Then, his ten-year-old son taught himself how to braid.
Even Sam seemed to love her hair, absently playing with it, curling it between his fingers, as they drove on and on, sandwiched together in the back, so often falling asleep on each other's shoulders.
If it was the only truly, obvious piece of femininity that Tessa possessed, then it was also the only piece the family had as a whole. For a man who longed for his wife, and two boys who craved a mother, that one beautiful head of hair was the only reminder that they did carry some feminine comfort with them.
Stupid, but true. It's only hair, but running his fingers though it now, barely able to curl a chunk around his knuckle as he had so many times before, John can't help but feel as though another part of his history has fallen away.
It's what happens when children grow.
And find only heartache.
"Dad," she says again, silent and confused like before. He looks down at her and waits. "No matter what. I have to know, no matter what."
And he feels his heart still, nearly stop all together. Because he might not know everything, about what's happened, or what will happen. But he knows enough. He knows enough to understand that the words, no matter what may just be the most dangerous and frightening ones in the English language.
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