John loved to watch Dean hunt. He always had. Even as a boy, his eldest had moved with a fluid, catlike grace it had taken Sammy years more to learn. As he'd gotten older, the grace had remained, the nimbleness replaced by a controlled raw power that was impressive to behold. It had told John, even on the days he doubted himself, even on the days he wondered if maybe he should have just let Mary's death be and moved on with his life, that he had made the right decision. Dean was a god damn natural.

Most of the time, anyway. His natural flew past him at hip level, hit the ground rolling and came to a stop next to a tree and lay still. The wendigo soul that had thrown him shrieked and John leapt forward, smashing his club into its head with a grunt. It gurgled as its skull caved in, but wendigos were tricky monsters to kill and this one was no exception. It stumbled forward, swiping with its claws, and would have taken John's arm off if he'd looked at Dean—who was starting to pick himself up, thank God—for any longer. Nearby the vampire was grappling with two more. The fourth, felled by Dean's cleaver before the others knew what hit them, lay a few feet away, its severed head wedged under a nearby bush. John landed another blow to his adversary's head and this time its whole cranium burst open, splattering him with a lumpy grayish fluid and bits of atrophied brain. It fell, and John smashed its head in once more for good measure. The other two wendigos had the vampire on his back and John saw Dean stumble across the stony ground, grabbing his cleaver as he went, to land a clumsy blow downward where the creature's neck met its shoulder. Clumsy was worrying and so John joined the fray, pulling the injured wendigo away from the vampire so Dean could finish it off with a better-aimed swing.

The vampire had managed to pin the last wendigo against the ground, and glanced up at Dean for a moment. "Where's the angel?" he asked the creature in the politely condescending southern drawl that John was very quickly growing tired of, rattling it and knocking its head off a rock when it didn't answer. "You seen the angel?" The thing just made a wailing noise and after a second or two of that Benny shrugged, glanced at Dean again, and cut its head off. Dean nodded approvingly as the creature shuddered and went still. Dean and the vampire worked well as a team and that bothered John in ways he didn't fully understand himself.

"All right, Dean?" John asked as soon as it was clear no member of the wendigo pack was going to get up again.

"I'm fine," Dean said, though one arm was wrapped around his ribs and he was breathing shallowly. Knowing Dean, that meant something hurt but wasn't likely to kill him. But something like a fatherly instinct was kicking in after so many years and he couldn't help but size Dean up again.

"You sure?"

"Yeah, I'm sure." Dean sounded a little irritated, then swallowed it and looked back and forth between John and the vampire. "You guys okay?"

"I'll make it," Benny drawled, catching John's eyes just long enough to let him know his next words were, in fact, a poke at John. "Thanks for asking."

John bit down on a surge of annoyance as well as the urge to roll his eyes, and answered Dean instead. "I'm fine too," he said, and looked his eldest up and down. He was still concerned about Dean's sloppiness in the fight. "What happened there?"

His son shrugged, then winced slightly. "Not sure. Thing was faster than me. It happens."

"It happens too much and you're dead," John said, then let it drop, crouching to use a handful of leaves to wipe gray goo off his club. Instead of acknowledging John's concern, however, with a nod or a yes sir like he might have once done, Dean just glanced around at the carnage.

"I friggin' hate wendigos," he said. "Never tell you anything useful."

"Don't smell too good neither," the vampire agreed. John refrained from pointing out that bloodsuckers didn't make for great company either. Dean had made it clear early on that he wouldn't tolerate jibes from either side, and out of respect for his son John had mostly kept his feelings about the vampire to himself.

All in all they'd been at this for nearly five days now, scouring the area around where John had last seen the angel, an otherwise unremarkable clearing with a large rock, looking for any creature who might know where it had gone. John wasn't in love with the idea of finding the angel. No matter what Dean said, an angel was a creature, and in twenty years of hunting, a century of Hell and five years fighting for his life in this godforsaken place, he had yet to meet a creature who didn't mean him or his family harm. Hell, Dean's word was the only reason he hadn't yet killed the vampire where he stood, too.

"So where to next?" Benny asked, stowing the blade he'd stolen off a shapeshifter corpse two days back and scratching his head under his cap.

Dean gazed into the forest. "I say we keep going the way we been going," he said, his voice strained but determined. "Some monster around here must have seen him."

"Let's just hope it's one that speaks English," Benny said, then grinned at Dean. "Or French. I could do French."

"Maybe you shoulda tried that with the wendigos," Dean joked. As soon as he caught John's eye, however, the amusement fled his face.

"Let's go," John said.

Soon, they were walking again, in search of another monster or four to interrogate. Dean took the lead, John followed, and Benny trailed several feet behind. Over the course of the past few days, Dean had described to John what must have been the lion's share of the lore he and Sam had encountered over the years. Angels, God, Lucifer, alphas, time travel, parallel universes, resurrection and Death…there was more than John could have imagined. Dean seemed to have a pretty good grasp of it all. "You should keep a journal," John had suggested with a smile. At this, however, Dean had only shaken his head, his expression sad, and John hadn't brought it up again.

Some apparent sense of obligation had also prompted Dean to fill John in on which of the people John cared about had died—for good, he stressed—since John had gone underground. Bobby, Rufus, Annie, Ellen, her little girl Jo…but the real kicker was Adam. Adam, the son he'd barely known, and the one boy he'd tried so hard to keep away from the life. But of course he'd been sucked in as violently as he possibly could've been. Once the life touched you there was no escaping it, and that was the other reason he'd known he'd made the right decision with Sam and Dean. At least they'd been prepared.

What Dean had spared the details on, however, had been the specifics of his and Sam's involvement in all that had apparently happened. He knew, for example, that Dean and Sam were supposed to have been Michael and Lucifer's vessels in the apocalypse…but Dean had been highly fuzzy on the why, claiming angel mumbo jumbo and destiny and such, which John had a hard time believing. Nor had he been particularly clear on why he and Sam had spent so much time hunting the demon Lilith, nor just why Sam had gone off on his own to kill her, raising Lucifer, though Dean stressed that Sam couldn't have known.

What most niggled, however, was how evasive Dean had been about what had transpired in the year between John's death and his escape from Hell. Not so much because it particularly mattered, now, but John had gone to Hell terrified of what might happen without him there, spent untold decades getting flayed and beaten and scorched and pulled apart piece by piece, all the while wondering how his boys had fared with his final order. He knew they'd both lived long enough to make it to the Hell Gate, of course, but he still wanted the details. Now, they had a several hours' hike through the dull gray Purgatory forest until Dean was content to call it a day, and John was tired of wondering.

"So Dean," he began abruptly. "Do you remember what I said to you before I died?"

Dean glanced back without stopping, but his face registered pure alarm and he quickly looked back to the path ahead. He'd been moving gingerly since the wendigo fight but now he went downright stiff. "Of course," he said.

"How did it happen?" John asked.

For a moment, Dean didn't answer but just kept plowing ahead, sweeping a thick growth of vines aside with his cleaver. "I told you Sam's fine."

John quickened his pace until they were almost side by side despite the narrow path. "That's not what I asked," he said. He had a feeling his son was being deliberately obtuse but—unlike Sam, who generally answered a harsh tone by getting angry himself and yelling whatever John wanted to know in the first place—Dean responded to being snapped at by shutting down and giving one-word answers until the conflict was over. Or at least, John thought, that was what his boys would have done six years ago or more. However, it was becoming more and more obvious that he barely knew this Dean at all. "I want to know how you saved him."

Dean still didn't look back. His voice was measured. "I told you. Yellow Eyes collected his special children and did some kind of battle royale thing to pick his guy. Sam didn't win, so me him Bobby and Ellen went out to the Devil's Gate. Not much else to tell."

"Look, Dean, my sources were clear," John said in a tone that brooked no nonsense. "Your brother would have to be killed or be saved. I thought it would have to be me then I thought it would be have to be you. But there was no getting around it."

"Well I didn't do either," Dean snarled, then paused so that John nearly ran into him, and rubbed a hand across his forehead before letting it fall with a grimace. He looked back at John for a second but addressed his apology to the path in front of him, picking up his pace again. "Sorry. But that's not how it went."

"How did it go, then, Dean?" John pressed.

"Doesn't matter."

"I'm your father," John reminded him. It had been so long since he'd wanted something from Dean he hadn't gotten he hardly remembered what he was supposed to do. He knew Dean was an adult now—hell, at his age John had had a ten-year-old and a six-year old—but if Dean was going to act like a petulant child, John wasn't going to hold back. "I went to Hell for you. I spent a hundred years on the rack so you could live to do whatever you had to do and now I want to know what that was."

"...That was why you went to Hell?" Dean asked, his voice hollow. Of course that hadn't been quite what John meant, but something stubborn in John rebelled at correcting him. If it took letting his son think that to make him treat John like his father again, so be it. People had thought plenty worse. Dean whacked another rope of vines out of the way, gritting his teeth. "I didn't kill him or save him," he said in a low, regretful voice. "He died. I brought him back."

"What?" John demanded, louder than he'd meant to. "How?"

For a few seconds, Dean said nothing. Then, in a voice as soft as John's had been harsh, "I made a deal."

A deal. It took a second for the full meaning of the words to permeate John's mind, but when they did his annoyance escalated to a blind anger, a seething sense of injustice like he hadn't felt since the last time he'd spit in Alastair's face for offering him a way out. "You did what?" Without thinking he reached forward, grabbed Dean's shoulders and spun him around. Dean gasped and winced as his ribs pulled but John tamped down on his guilt and stared at him wildly. Of all the things... He was aware Benny was watching with concern but he gave even less of a damn about what the bloodsucker might think. "When does your time run out?"

Dean closed his eyes, unable to meet John's anymore. "I already paid my dues."

John resisted the urge to shake him, fingers digging into Dean's arms. Dean opened his eyes, but his expression was guarded. John could barely believe what he'd just heard. His boy, who he'd gone to Hell to protect, had followed him there not a year later? It was unfair and it was wrong and for all he was sure Dean had thought he'd done it for the right reasons John couldn't find it in himself to care. "How long?" he gritted.

"Forty years," Dean said blandly, then swallowed. "The angels pulled me out. Cas pulled me out."

"I went to Hell for you," was all John could say. He couldn't believe it. Dean, who he'd trusted implicitly…this went way beyond disobeying orders. This meant that John's sacrifice had been for nothing, that all those years of pain and torture and hellfire, of terror and agony and hatred, had been for nothing. All because Dean hadn't been able to follow his final order. "I gave up my soul for you, boy," he added, "and you threw that away while I was still rotting down there?"

Dean did look him in the eye now. "I did it to save Sam," he said, his voice taking on a new edge. "Figured that'd mean more to you."

John snorted. "You should've found another way."

"You didn't," Dean said.

"Only because the two of you didn't have the balls to kill Yellow Eyes when you had the chance," John snapped. He remembered Dean lying on the floor, begging Sammy not to shoot. He wished as he had a thousand times before that Sam had just ended it there. "I gave you an order. You should never have let your brother die in the first place. You disobeyed me and you threw away the greatest sacrifice I could have made for you, and now you're trying to tell me you're in the right?"

"I did what I had to do," Dean said.

They stared at each other. Benny's eyes traveled back and forth between them uncomfortably.

"Anything else you want to tell me?" John asked, his voice hard.

Dean's hesitation told him everything he needed to know. John let go of Dean's arms, violently enough that Dean stumbled backward a step.

"You know what, Dad?" Dean's voice still had a defiant edge, raw now with emotion, and John narrowed his eyes. "Yeah," Dean said roughly. "I let you down. I let Sam down. I let half the people I cared about die. Hell, I don't know if I've saved more people than I've hurt. I took Alastair's deal in Hell after thirty years, Dad, and tortured innocent people for ten more. I kicked off the damn apocalypse and I let Sammy trust a demon bitch who got him hooked on demon blood so he could finish it off and when I tried to have a normal life and a family I just screwed them too. Hell, one of the last things I did on Earth was play nice with the King of Hell so we could do a better job fighting the leviathans. But you know what else?" He didn't wait for John's reaction, the words rushing out like he couldn't stop. "I did the best I could with this crap sack life you forced me into. And I'm still your son so that's going to have to be damn good enough for you." By the time he was done he was out of breath, clutching his ribs with one hand. His eyes were shining.

John took a deep breath, exhaled it, and for a few seconds said nothing. He knew he would have to learn more, to unpack the rambling confession his son had just made and figure out what just what kind of a mess he'd left behind…but now, he couldn't even think of handling it. The weight of what Dean had said coupled with the allegations that somehow this was all his fault mixed together into something that was altogether too much. "It's not," he said simply and honestly. Dean looked like he'd been kicked in the stomach, but John felt too much like that himself to care. So instead he set his face and nodded to the path ahead. Suddenly he couldn't stand waiting there any longer, looking at Dean's face while the vampire stared at them both, mouth halfway open like he had something to say. "Let's find this angel," John said. "I want to get the hell out of here."

Dean nodded, swallowed, and turned away, starting slowly down the path. Benny glared at John for a few seconds before joining him, and John did the same. They would find this angel of his, John had no doubt, and he would even put up with the bloodsucker's irritatingly genteel presence until they did. What might happen next…well, he'd have to think long and hard about just how much he trusted Dean's judgment.

None of them spoke again until several hours later, when Benny stopped and sniffed the air.

"Werewolf," he said, pointed over a short ridge, and addressed Dean. "Maybe this one'll know where your angel is."

"Yeah," Dean said gruffly, meeting John's eyes for a brief second before following the vampire's gaze into the darkening woods. The flash of pain he saw there was replaced quickly by determination. "Let's go find out."

Next up: John meets Cas!

Big thanks again to Becky for her awesome suggestions/edits.