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The Demon was smart, no question. Hell, for that matter, so was John. They both got what they wanted (John dead, Dean alive, Sam and Dean still out there doing their thing, everything holding in a fixed stalemate), only giving up inches to their adversaries when they gain the same in return. So no question, they are two highly skilled, crafty, wicked smart (emphasis on the wicked) individuals. ("People" would not be the right word to use here.)
Therefore, it was only fitting that the only mistake either one of them made was the exact same one.
"This is all your fault," John growled from the settee, coffee cup balanced on the flowered upholstery back so he could properly shield his hand of cards from his opponent.
"You know, there's a reason why they call this place 'Hell,'" the Demon said wearily. "I just didn't think I would be the one punished in this situation." It sipped its tea. "Go fish."
The argument was an old one, even now, and John had really only started it out of habit and boredom. And to hide the fact that he really, really needed that seven of clubs.
***
So John died and Dean lived, but neither John nor the Demon really thought too much about what happened after that. Both of them figured John would end up in hell - John because of the sins he knew in his heart he had committed against his boys, his Mary, and all the things he didn't think too hard about before killing, the Demon because, hey, it killed John, and it wanted John to go to hell. Neither of them figured on John ending up in the Demon's own little corner of Hell. Really, if either of them had thought about it long enough, they would have known Hell has a sense of humor. That's what made it so infernal.
And sure, to some extent, Hell's just an intellectual construction of the spirits and beings contained within it. That doesn't change the fact that when the Demon retreated to its own little corner of intellectual construction, very pleased with itself in having gotten the Colt and eliminated at least one very large annoyance from its existence, there was John Bloody Winchester, or whatever was left of him, sitting on its intellectually constructed couch, drinking its intellectually constructed whiskey. Apparently Hell for John Winchester was being trapped for eternity in a one-bedroom apartment with the thing that had killed his wife and systematically destroyed his life. And, not that Hell had bothered to ask it, that was pretty much the Demon's idea of eternal misery, too.
Ain't that a kick in the intellectual construction.
***
For the first month or so, they learned that old habits died harder than, well, John did. However, John couldn't leave the confines of what appeared to be a one-bedroom apartment previously inhabited by a herd of frat boys and their mothball-laden grandmothers, no matter how hard he tried to escape or how often the Demon tried to throw him out. John was dead and couldn't be killed again, no matter what the Demon tried, and the Demon was on its home turf (or home shag carpeting, as the case may be. even the Demon didn't like to think too hard about the mysterious, eternally sticky stain in the back corner of the living room) and couldn't be destroyed, no matter what John tried.
That was stage one - denial.
The second month consisted of a great deal of drinking, on both their parts. The Demon was incorporeal and thus had no need for sustenance or intoxicants, but it had grown rather fond of some of the customs of the irritating little creatures it had been trying to control and influence for millenia. John was, yes, still dead, and also in no need of food or drink, but, well, see above re: old habits, the dying hard thereof. Whenever the Demon returned from its regular rounds of tormenting and world-control/destruction planning, they would sit in grim silence on opposite sides of the living room, John on what had swiftly become "his" settee, the Demon on its sofa, drinking steadily. The Demon admittedly had a flair for the dramatic (why else would it burn women on the ceiling? pyro was always fun), so when it had drunk enough, in its intellectually constructed drunk, it would rage against Hell.
"What did I ever do to you? Do I not send you souls on a regular basis? How dare you?" This usually ended with the Demon gesticulating wildly with a half-empty glass (it was impossible to have a full glass in Hell, or even a half-full glass) and getting whiskey on the antimacassar. By the third week of the second month, John had stopped snarling at these rants and had settled into something closer to grim amusement.
Month three was the bargaining month. The Demon spent more time out of the apartment, calling on every favor it could think of, doing its damnedest to get rid of its most unwilling roommate. (Bargaining with one's deity was made both easier and more complicated when one had actually met one's deity face-to-face before. Granted, it had scared the shit out of the Demon, and it would really prefer not to repeat that encounter, but it couldn't help but hope for a little leverage.) Meanwhile, John had set up a rotating series of altars in the bottom of the linen closet in the half-bathroom. If Hell wouldn't help him, maybe Heaven would. Or surely there was another demon that hated John's Demon as much as John did. Though, upon reflection, John realized that any Demon that hated his Demon that much would probably just leave John there, that being the most effective torment anyone could come up with.
By the fourth month, they were back to drinking, longer and harder, and with no histrionic rants this time. At least not from the Demon. John didn't get histrionic, precisely, but this time, after five or six fingers of bourbon, he'd start talking. To Mary, his boys, Pastor Jim, even the Impala. He apologized. He said the things he never said in real life, things he should have said, things he was really glad he hadn't. (Even the Demon felt a little bad about smashing up the Impala. It never told John, not even later on, but the day after John apologized to the Impala, for nearly two straight hours, the Demon snuck up to check on Sam and the other one, only to find them on the road again, the other one behind the wheel of the perfectly restored Impala. If it had had a heart, it might have clenched a little in gladness at the sight of her sleek perfection back on the road. But it doesn't, so it didn't, so whatever. It's just a car. The Demon is beyond such things.)
By the fifth month, the eternal stalemate had settled into something a little closer to an uneasy truce. John couldn't leave, and the Demon couldn't not go home, so they granted each other grudging coexistence. John started intellectually constructing hobbies for himself, no matter that they always turned out vaguely crappy. (It was Hell, after all.) His trees were not happy trees. The mystery novels were always missing the last ten pages. Everything he tried to whittle ended up looking like an organ grinder's monkey. He even tried board games, but the shoe was always missing from the Monopoly set, and his hippos were mostly full, certainly not hungry hungry. (Dean always had to be the shoe, and the hippos always made Sammy laugh, especially when Dean would whack the hippo handle hard enough to projectile marbles across the room. Naturally the only games he could create depressed him, in addition to sucking.) At one point, he created an elaborate amalgamation of Monopoly, Hungry Hungry Hippos, parcheesi, and Life that he thought might actually be vaguely amusing, but he would be damned if he would ask the Demon to play.
Then he realized he was already damned. Probably for eternity.
That's when he started to create the deck of cards.
(Oh, and don't even get John started on the time he tried to create a tv. The only programming in Hell is the Home Shopping Network - not even QVC, VH1's I Love The (18)80s, Crank Yankers, and endless repackaged World War II documentaries. There was only so many times John could watch Hitler dying, in a ditch, covered in petrol, on fire. While on his honeymoon. The Demon drifted through the living room one night while John stared vacantly at the screen, saw what John was watching, and muttered, "God, I hate Peter Graves." This terrified John, as it was the first thing he and the Demon ever agreed on. Well, other than the fact that the entire situation sucked. Hard.)
***
Real trouble started about six months after John died, when John realized that he had missed Sam's twenty-fourth birthday. (For Dean's twenty-eighth, John was deep in bargaining mode, and he still had foolish, desperate, completely unreasoning hope that he'd be back in time for it, or at least in his own little corner of Hell.) After the fact, John swore he had nothing to do with the knitting needles and ugly, brick-brown acrylic yarn that appeared on the end table the morning after his personal celebration of his boy's birthday (during which the Demon hid in the kitchen and sang Henry the VIIth over and over again, just to piss John off but not quite willing to interrupt), but that didn't change the fact that there they were.
John's grandmother had taught him to knit when he was a little boy, just like she taught him to mend his clothes and sew buttons. "Every man should be able to take care of himself and keep himself clothed, no matter whether he has a woman or not," she'd say, gnarled hands guiding John's little boy fingers around the recalcitrant wool. John had used much of what she'd taught him, both in the Marines and in raising two little boys who seemed to tear or outgrow their clothes on a weekly basis, but he'd not picked up a pair of knitting needles in over forty years when they showed up in Hell.
It took him nearly a week to remember how to cast on, but after that, the stitches came back relatively quickly, his fingers remembering the old rhythms faster than he ever would have thought. It was another two months before he realized he was knitting a sweater, but it didn't take him long to realize who he was knitting it for. (He'd already set aside the best of his organ grinder monkeys, because, even though he would never get it, John could imagine Dean's reaction to an organ grinder monkey statue in his stocking on Christmas morning. Even though they hadn't done stockings since Sam was twelve. John had grinned at the thought, though, imagining Dean laughing and getting one of those temporary sticky pads so he could cram the monkey on the Impala's dashboard. That was the last monkey he whittled for a long, long time.)
He never ran out of yarn; if he was near the end of a skein, all he had to do was set his knitting down, walk into the kitchen, and when he came back, there would be another skein waiting for him. The yarn was always the worst kind of acrylic, likely to melt into a solid pile of goo if it ever got close to anything vaguely warm, much less actual fire, but it came in a wide assortment of colors. (All ugly.) He stuck with the dirty-brick color for most of the sweater, but he used a puke-green to stitch an S on the chest and on the ribbing around the cuffs.
John was never sure why the Demon conjured its own needles and yarn (to be honest, neither was the Demon), but about two weeks after John was really back into the swing of knitting, he glanced over to the sofa and saw the Demon scowling at a tangled mess of violently yellow yarn, almost the exact color of its eyes. Two weeks after that, the Demon gave up on "goddamn two needles, more trouble than they're worth," and it picked up a crochet hook. It started with potholders, but after that, there were placemats, a toilet seat cover, an antimacassar for John's settee (which naturally did not match the one on the Demon's sofa), and fishnet stockings.
John was two sleeves and half the back into his sweater when the Demon started its sweater. John caught it looking at John's measurements, but he didn't say anything. Nor did he say anything when he saw the Demon's sketches for various S-shaped stitch patterns. He just knitted faster. Crocheting may be faster, but John had a head start, and he'd be damned - even more - if he let the Demon beat him. Plus, the Demon still had to torment and plan world domination/destruction, while all John had to do was knit. If he couldn't destroy the Demon, then he could damn well produce a better Christmas present for Sam than it could.
***
Elsewhere:
Dean picked at his turkey from the buffet at Shoneys. "It just seems weird, though, that after all those possessions back in March, and all the weird shit that's been going on since then, that now everything would die off."
Sam shrugged and used his fork to sculpt his cranberry sauce/jello into something vaguely monkey-shaped. "Maybe Hell takes time off for Thanksgiving."
Dean snorted. "Yeah, and they're getting a jump on their holiday shopping, too."
***
A month later:
"Hey, Dean? I thought we already exchanged presents." Sam stared at the lumpy packages at the foot of his bed.
"Yeah," Dean called from the shower. "I don't know how you found the Zeppelin BBC recordings on tape, but I do hope you know that that's all we're listening to for the next week, minimum."
Sam grinned and poked at the packages with his toe. "Yeah, well, I hope these are your real presents, because the other one is going into the nearest dumpster I can find. Clown-themed porn, jesus. I don't know how you find these things."
Dean emerged, furiously towelling his hair. "Hey that was my real present. I'm hurt that you don't appreciate the time and effort I put into finding something so very personal and special for you."
Sam frowned and withdrew his toe. "Then what the hell are these? They were on my bed when I got out of the shower, and they weren't there earlier."
Dean shrugged. "I don't remember them. No one came into the room while you were gone. Did you forget the other expensive presents you bought me?" He flopped down onto his bed, then shot back up, yelping. "The hell did you put in my bed?" He fished around in the sheets and pulled out another poorly wrapped package.
"I didn't," Sam said. "That's what I've been trying to tell you." They exchanged glances, then bolted for the supply duffel.
Ten minutes later, the packages slightly damp and surrounded by salt rings, Sam finished chanting and tossed John's journal aside. He nodded at Dean, who used an unbent hanger to pry the tape off each of the packages in turn, then push away the unicorn wrapping paper.
"Huh."
"Huh."
Dean tilted his head and nodded. "Well, they may not be evil, but those are by god the ugliest sweaters I have ever seen."
"Look who's talking, monkey boy."
***
(For the record, the monkey ended up in the rearview window, not on the dashboard. And sometimes, when they were really far north and Sam's thin blood kept him shivering constantly - "California pussy." "Too dumb to come in out of the fuckin' snow." - he would layer the brown sweater with the green S underneath one of his hoodies. Never against his skin, because it was too scratchy for that, but it kept him warm on the coldest of days. The yellow sweater with the orange S they used to clean knives, especially when there was something sticky or chunky on them. It kind of looked like a giant potholder.)