Archive of Our Own ^beta

John made a wish once. The thing of it was, it came true.

Someone hits his shoulder and nudges him awake. "Johnny? Can you answer the phone?"

He wakes up, slowly, the ringing of the phone only a vague echo of a world. Her breath feels steady against his cheek, as does the familiar, comforting weight of her warm body curled up next to him. Mary.

Easy as breathing, he remembers the wish he made last night and the slow smile on the face of the bartender he'd told it to. I want her to live.

Mary.

He lets the phone ring and kisses her, her giggle reverberating through his body.

"I missed you," he says.

And she replies, "I was right here," and kisses him again.

Mary.

He spends the first days in a haze, thinking (knowing) it might be some demon's trap, something he should escape, but nothing happens. No distortions, no nothing. Like he just got a break and a do-over.

Sometimes miracles do happen, right?

She's not pregnant, he realizes, six months before Sammy's supposed to be born, a year before she died, earlier. The loss hits him like someone taking a knife to his insides.

He doesn't know what to do. How do you ask: Did you miscarry our son?

He's not sure if he wants to hear the answer.

On the day Sam was supposed to be born, John cries, finally, clutching on to a blanket that he bought for Sammy first time around and bought just in case, now, even though Mary said Dean is a little too old for blankets like that.

There's an edge to everything that happens (that doesn't happen) because it coulda' shoulda' woulda' been like this or like that.

He sees shadows and stocks up on rock salt, but nothing happens.

Sunshine and daisies, preschool plays and work, and Mary's smile to wake up to every morning. He can keep his family safe. He can give Dean a proper childhood and a home and a mother. He can give Mary a lifetime she never had. She gets to watch her son grow up. She gets to grow old with him. She gets to live.

This time.

This is what heaven is.

Eventually, he stops waiting for the world to crash around him, prays instead for forgiveness to whoever might be listening that it took Sam never being there to make things work, and lives.

They all just live.

A year later, he tucks Dean into bed and sleeps soundly, arms wrapped around his wife.

He doesn't ever think about the lives that might be saved, about the people who died because he wasn't there. He can't. It would damn this life that he can't have damned.

Some people - Jim, Bobby and William, among others - get added to wordless prayers that he never says out loud or commits to memory, just in case his world gets snatched away.

Dean grows up an only child, a little spoiled, a lot softer, and always, always close, just in case.

That's the thing that damns them, probably. John is so afraid to let go that Dean pulls harder and harder, and eventually runs away to college on the other side of the country. John remembers Sam leaving then with a pang, then. Shouted arguments, Dean's unnerving calm and the tight smile on his lips, slammed doors and, finally, an empty bed one morning.

The grief is twice as hard when he realizes he hasn't thought of the son he never had for years. He hadn't meant to forget.

He calls his son to tell him he's sorry. This time, his son picks up and says, "it's okay, dad. I love you, too."

The problem is: when the world doesn't crash around you when you most expect it, eventually you stop expecting.

His son grows up, graduates, teaches preschool. He gets married to a pretty, blonde girl named Kelly, a public defender.

He watches with pride and affection as Dean hands over the little thing wrapped in a blanket to Mary, his son's face shining with so much love.

"Mom, dad, I'd like you to meet our daughter, Samantha." John can feel his heart, pumping memories along with blood, but they're fleeting like air, easily brushed away.

"She's beautiful," they say, with meaning.

God forgive him but he did forget. He always forgets. He got old and settled, overweight, his hair turning gray. He stopped worrying about demons, ghosts and other things that go bump in the night, focusing instead on the taxes of his garage, whether Mary can retire this year and focus on spoiling their grandchildren stupid.

He just lived his life in happy ignorance, happily ever after, with Mary.

So when a phone call wakes him up in the middle of a cool November night, nothing in his lifetimes could have prepared him for it.

He hears Dean's voice, calling out his name in something resembling hysteria, "dad, dad, dad, please help me," and that's enough of a punch in the throat that he can barely breathe, he can barely tell him to slow down and tell him what's happened.

The words that follow are almost like an afterthought.

"There's been a fire."

He finds Dean with his arms wrapped around his little son, shaking, as the firemen try to salvage something of the house, some knickknack that isn't going to be worth a thing, not when his wife is dead, not when little Sammy--

Not when his life is still burning to cinders around him.

Dean is shaking his head, the fire engine's flashing lights the only reason John can see every moment of horror and grief reflected on his face. He looks ashen, dead on his feet.

"You don’t know," Dean says, a broken man clutching his son to him like the only thing that's still real in this world.

John doesn't know how to tell him that once upon a time, he used to.

~fin