Eighteen bottles of beer on the wall
Summary: John Winchester and alcohol, Part Two. The aftermath of November 2, 1983.
Jim, Jack, and Jose
That fatal night in November of the year his second son was born, John Winchester's life burned up with his wife, his darling Mary, the woman of his dreams. All of their wishes and promises, their hopes and dreams, they all went up in an inferno of orange flames and black smoke, burning and choking the very existence out of him.
And what he saw…He knew what he saw that night, and no damned idiot cop was going to tell him different, no sirree. He saw her, burning to death in front of him, on the ceiling. Shock, his frickin' lily-white ass. He'll give him shock.
Anyway, the pull of the bottle was too much for him, seeing that no one believed a word he said, shaking their heads and looking at him and his boys with unwanted pity, and he fell down that slippery neck into the broken glass gullet of caustic liquor, down, down, into oblivion.
One chilly afternoon, he woke up from another drunken night to find his four-year-old son staring silently at him from across the room with his baby brother clutched in his arms, as if he'd never let go since his father had told the toddler to take Sam and run to safety. It wasn't the tears on the young face that broke John out of his trance, for there hadn't been any more to be wept after the first week of trauma and motherlessness; it was the emptiness he saw in the green depths, the vast hole of desolation that grief leaves.
He reached out a hand to his sons, crawled to them, and swept them up in his arms. "I'm so sorry, baby. I'm so sorry." He rocked Mary's boys, sobbing his apologies into their small bodies.
That was Christmas, one of the bleakest the Winchesters ever had.
Dean didn't say anything. He didn't say anything for almost two years after Mary's death. Even then, when he got bigger and started talking and laughing, almost like that happy little boy he'd been before the fire, Dean never said anything when it came to John and drinking, not a word to stop him from swallowing that poison whiskey, nothing to stop him from going out to a bar for a beer or five. That look in his too-expressive eyes, even though he tried to hide it, was enough of a stinging reproach.
That same sad, disappointed expression Mary had had whenever he'd returned to the bottle.
Well, John couldn't stand it most of the times Dean got that look—boy didn't even know he was doing it, couldn't know that John saw Mary in that look each and every time—but even though he knew he was doing wrong, he went and took that drink anyhow. Only way to numb the pain, other than hunting down that evil sonofabith that killed his Mary.
There are a handful of days in the year on which he always gets shit-faced, just like clockwork, year after year. Mary's birthday, the day he first asked her out, the day she said yes, the day they got engaged (which coincided with the day her parents…died), their anniversary, the day she was killed and left her young boys motherless, the day he finally realized that little Dean had gone mute, the day he realized that little Sammy was a burbling baby no longer but an independent teenager…
John Winchester's had a lot of bad shit happen in his life. He figures that justifies his long-term affair with Jim, Jack, and Jose. 'Course, he makes sure he don't think of his sons, and especially Dean and that look (just like his mother's—he don't think of her either), when he does his reasoning. The whiskey goes down better that way.