Chapter Text
Prologue
Dean Winchester was a good son. No one could deny that. After every fight his mom and dad had, he made sure she was okay. He would tell her not to worry, even though he had no idea what those words really meant at the time. He just hated to see his mother cry.
His mom, Mary, died when he was nine years old. They were on their way to Dairy Queen to get a soft serve, just the two of them. It had been their Friday night tradition since Dean could remember. They would each get a vanilla cone, sit out on the patio and catch up. He would tell her all about school. What he was learning and which subjects he loved and hated. She would listen attentively, never talking down to him. She called it their weekly wrap sessions and he cherished them.
Then on Friday, November 18th, 1988, a drunk driver ran a red light two blocks from Dairy Queen and smashed into the driver’s side door of his father’s beloved Impala. The impact killed his mother instantly, but somehow Dean made it out alive with just a few scratches and the image of his mother’s open eyes, blood dripping down her forehead, seared into his memory. The driver died two days later, not once seeing the suffering his mistake had caused.
Dean didn’t speak for two months after his mother died. John tried everything to get his son to speak to him, but nothing seemed to work. Then his dad got it in his head that fixing the car would somehow help. He took the Impala to his old marine buddy’s garage. Bobby told him it might not be a good idea, asking what good it would do to dredge up all those bad memories. But John insisted, so Bobby grudgingly acquiesced, and John threw everything into rebuilding that car, making sure that Dean was with him every step of the way.
Dean hated it at first. Every time he looked at that car he saw his mother lying there, dead. The image of her taking her last breath, her eyes just staring at him blankly haunted him. But as the days passed, somehow working on that car made things better. John showed him the inner workings of the car, teaching him where everything went, showing him how to rebuild something when it was broken. One week into his time at the garage, Dean uttered his first word since watching his mother die. John nearly cried and Bobby gave him a big hug.
He cherished that time he spent rebuilding the car. Cherished the time with his dad, learning, and healing. But it was short lived. The collapse of Dean’s life had only begun.
Grief is a funny thing. It can hit you in waves, some bigger than others and one of the bigger ones came crashing down on his dad six months after his Mary died. His dad received a delivery one day. Just something that seemed innocuous at the time, yet it was anything but. Sometime before her death, Mary had ordered a brand new Laz-y-Boy recliner as a surprise for John’s birthday. Dean watched him from the corner of the room as the chair was set into the middle of the living room. It was almost ugly, but there was a power to that chair that he still couldn’t understand.
John circled it like he was trying to decide the best way to tackle it. He ran his hands down the material, committing every bit of leather to memory, and then his dad sat down in that chair and it was like something broke inside him. Something he had been trying to keep together for his boys. For the world. He watched as his father cried and cried until he passed out.
Things went downhill after that. Little by little their dad started drifting away from them. It started out with laundry. John had never been one to shy away from household chores. When his mom had been alive, laundry had been his task. But two weeks after that chair arrived the laundry sat stacked on the laundry room floor, the dirty shirts and underwear overflowing. Dean and Sam had been forced to wear dirty clothes to school. But then one day Sam came home crying after some kid teased him for wearing stinky clothes and Dean decided to teach himself how to do the laundry. They never went without clean clothes again.
Next was food. His dad had never really been much of a cook, the truth was his mom hadn’t been either, a fact that he wouldn’t learn till much later in life, but they both always made sure to have a hot meal on the table for the boys. Those hot meals became frozen dinners and boxes of stale cereal. There would be days when they would go without lunch and end up sharing food with some of their friends at school. So Dean learned to cook. It started with macaroni and cheese with all the exotic variations he could come up with. Despite how disgusting some of them were, Sam delighted at each one. He even requested macaroni and marshmallow fluff for his eighth birthday. Eventually, he became a pretty skilled cook for his young age and two years after his mom died, Dean helped Bobby prepare Thanksgiving dinner.
Then the money problems came. It started when his dad lost his job. He had been coming into work late every day, sometimes just missing work altogether. Then one day he showed up to work drunk as a skunk and they fired him. Instead of getting another job, John decided to dip into their savings. They had received about five thousand dollars after Mary had died from a small life insurance policy she had. The plan had been to save it for the boys. That was what Mary would’ve wanted. But John insisted that he was just going to borrow it to pay for bills and such, promising that he would pay it back as soon as he got another job. Instead, most of it ended up going into his growing alcohol habit and his new pastime of gambling. Pretty soon the money dried up and John fell further into a bottle of whiskey.
Dean started picking up odd jobs here and there to try and contribute something to the household, but it was never that much. Just enough to pay for the most basic of Sam’s school supplies. Bobby helped with the rest, even taking out a second mortgage on his house when the bank threatened to take away the Winchesters’. Dean knew he would never be able to pay Bobby back for everything he did for them, but he would never stop trying.
The last thing to go was his dad’s affections. The more he drank, the more he seemed to resent them. He looked at his boys as being constant reminders of the wife he lost; especially Dean. He knew his dad blamed him for his mother’s demise. Dean tried not to let him get into his head too much, but he found himself crying himself to sleep more times than he would like to admit. After all, she was on that road that night to take him out for soft serve.
When his dad got really drunk, he would yell at him, telling him he was a waste of space and that he would amount to nothing. He was only slightly kinder to Sam, saving whatever affection he had left for his boys for him. Dean was okay with that. He tried his hardest to make sure Sam never got the full brunt of his father’s rage. He succeeded at times and failed at others.
Living in that house was like being on a roller coaster and Dean could always tell how bad the day would be by the number of empty liquor bottles on the counter. He swore to himself that he would never drink like his father did, and for the most part, he kept that promise. Sure, he had his drunken times and he hated to admit how much he favored whiskey, but he kept it under control.
A damn chair and a stupid craving for soft serve had shaped Dean’s whole life. He never once sat in that Laz-Y-Boy chair and he would cringe anytime he saw one like it.
***
Dean Winchester was a good brother. Sam could attest to that. He made sure his younger brother knew about their mother. His dad was never going to do it, so it was up to him. Dean would play her favorite albums for Sam and describe in great detail the cadence of her voice. He made sure that Sammy heard Hey Jude every night before he went to bed. Sure, it couldn’t compare to being able to hear his mother sing it, but he had to let him continue to experience the act of falling asleep to the soothing notes of that song. Besides, it was the least he could do for a son who had few tangible memories of the mother who adored him.
Sam was smart. Too smart for their small town of Lawrence, that’s what everyone always said, and Dean was determined to make sure that his little brother got out of there. He bought a blue piggy bank and started depositing money for Sam’s college fund when he was twelve. When he was fourteen, he took the contents to a local bank and opened a savings account with Bobby’s help. He had saved up five hundred dollars. Bobby nearly cried when he saw that and ripped into John when they returned from the bank.
At the age of sixteen, Dean dropped out of school. His dad had lost his sixth job in six years and he needed to help pay the bills. Dean wouldn’t admit that his dad encouraged him to drop out, but the little guilt over his craving for ice cream sure was an incentive. He got a job as a short-order cook at the local diner his mom’s best friend, Ellen Harvelle, owned and in his spare time, he would work at Bobby’s garage. Bobby hated the fact that he dropped out of school. He tried to convince him to go back, telling him that they would find another way to pay for everything. He even offered to take him and Sam in, something he offered at least once a year, but Dean refused and Bobby eventually gave up. Dean put half the money in that savings account and the other half into the bills, and every once in a while a few dollars would make their way into a little jar he kept in his closet.
Sam was valedictorian of his class and he was awarded a partial scholarship to Stanford. Dean had managed to save up close to five thousand dollars. It may not have been enough to cover everything, but it would get his brother out of there. Sam cried when he presented him with the check and John told him that that money should have gone to the family. Dean figured getting one of the Winchester boys out of Lawrence was doing just that.
Dean got his GED the year Sam left. He had been studying in secret. He couldn’t quite explain why he wanted to get it. He had never really liked high school. He always felt like a bit of an outsider. Sure, he had friends and girlfriends, but he never really fit into one group and there were quite a few people who thought he was stupid. They would say, “All the brains went to the younger Winchester boy.” But Dean was actually very smart. He devoured books, mostly in private, and he loved science and English, but he never wanted to outshine his brother, and so he would hide most of that.
Dean scored two hundred on his GED, the highest score you could get. He celebrated by baking himself an apple pie and making a bacon cheeseburger. But he didn’t tell his dad. Didn’t tell his brother. Didn’t even tell Bobby. The GED sat inside a special box Dean carried with him. A memory box, if you will. A picture of his mom and him adorned the cover.
Dean stayed in Lawrence for two years after Sam left. He helped take care of the house, his father losing two more jobs. But then one day his dad made a pass at his girlfriend Anna and that was the tipping point. Dean left in the middle of the night, a thousand dollars in his pocket. He took Baby with him. His dad never drove the car anyway. Anna decided to stay behind and he tried not to let the hurt of that take over. He spread a map out on his bed, closed his eyes and let his index finger decide where he would live. Phoenix, Arizona was his first destination. He smiled as he climbed behind the wheel and left Lawrence in the rearview.
He bounced around from town to town, never staying too long in one place, never getting attached. Two years after he left Kansas, that index finger landed on Cape Girardeau, Missouri. That’s where he met Cassie Robinson, the woman who changed his whole life. He fell hard and fast for her. She was an investigative journalist and the first black female reporter to work at the local paper. She was funny, sexy, smart as hell and the first person he told about the GED. Part of that came from wanting to prove to himself that she wasn’t miles out of his league, but he also wanted to tell someone whom he loved, and God did he love her. She never once judged him. She even put the thing in a frame.
Six months after they met, Dean proposed and they got married three months later in Reno, the same place his parents had tied the knot. Yeah, it was quick, but they were in love and everything seemed possible. Sam was his best man and he brought his fiancé Eileen Leahey, whom he’d met at Stanford. Eileen was studying medicine and hoped to be a pediatrician. A doctor and an attorney; couldn’t get more normal than that.
He didn’t want to invite his father, but Cassie told him he would regret it. She thought it would be best to do the invite in person, so, against his better judgment, they drove out to Lawrence. The house was in shambles, the lawn in serious need of a mow and the paint peeling. Every dish in the house was in the sink and his dad looked like he hadn’t showered in days. He had never felt so ashamed in his life.
Cassie was amazing. She held his hand the whole time and she bragged to his dad about his job as head chef at a local steakhouse. Her whole face would light up when she talked about him and it was the first time since his mother that he knew what love really looked like. His father wasn’t as impressed. He told him cooking wasn’t a real job and that he should try and make something of himself like his brother Sam. Cassie wanted to stick up for him, to argue with his father, but Dean convinced her it wasn’t worth it.
But the worst part of the visit was when Dean told his dad they were getting married in Reno. He saw the grief flicker in his eyes and he could see the tears threatening to fall. He quickly turned that grief into anger and lashed out at Dean for getting married there. Telling him he was sullying his mother’s memory.
Dean and Cassie left after that and Cassie apologized profusely to him for making him go out there. He told her it wasn’t her fault, that she could never have known how bad it was. She swore to him that she would never make him go back there again.
Their wedding ended up being a rocking good time. Cassie was a beautiful bride. The most beautiful bride he had ever seen. They wrote their own vows and had a perfect wedding. He thought that was it. His life was finally turning into something more than grief.
***
Dean Winchester was a good husband. He really was. He never cheated. Never raised his voice, even when he and Cassie would get into fights, and he didn’t get drunk every night like his father. But he shut her out sometimes and he knew it. It wasn’t that he didn’t know how to show his emotions, it was just that he still worried that she would see some of the stuff he kept inside and run. By trying to protect her, he ended up losing her. She told him she wanted a divorce five years later. She said she needed to do it before they got to the point where they no longer liked each other. His heart shattered when she took that wedding ring off.
In the end, she had been right. Their divorce actually went pretty smoothly and they somehow remained friends. Best friends really. He still loved her with every fiber of his being, but he learned to be content with only her friendship.
He pulled his map back out when the divorce was final and went back out on the road. He couldn’t bear to live that near to the perfect life he had let fall apart.
Ten years after Dean left Lawrence, John was diagnosed with liver cancer and told that the only chance he had for survival was a liver transplant. His dad was put on a donor list and it was even suggested that he see if his sons could donate, but in some act of fatherly kindness that Dean didn’t fully understand, he refused to let them. So he sat on that donor list while his health deteriorated.
Sam paid for his in-home nursing care and for someone to clean the house once a week. Dean felt a sense of shame at this, but Sam told him it was his turn to take care of the finances, take care of their dad. He was a promising young attorney after all and he was married to a promising young doctor.
Bobby called Dean six months after the diagnosis and told him that he should get to Lawrence as soon as he could. He knew what those words meant and if it didn’t hurt so bad, Dean would laugh at the irony of alcohol killing both his parents. There was a part of him that wanted to refuse. He hadn’t talked to his father in nearly five years and the thought of seeing him again made his stomach queasy. But he was a good son and he knew he would go.
He called Sam to let him know that their father would be dead soon, but Sam refused to go out there. He said that he had already made his peace with their dad. Dean wanted to beg his brother to come just to hold his hand, just to make sure he didn’t fall into a bottle of whiskey after their dad was gone. But he just told Sam he understood and that he would call him when John was gone.
Dean climbed behind the wheel of Baby, leaving Taos, New Mexico, the latest place his finger had landed, behind and headed to Lawrence, Kansas. The place of his birth. The place of his mother’s death. And the place where he would lay his father to rest.