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Sometimes, Sam wondered if his dad was just a story. He's a superhero, Dean had said. And Sam imagined pages right out of a comic book, John a mere drawing in freeze-frame spandex, all of the movement happening between panels, between pages of a well-worn leather journal. So much of John was wrapped up in lies already, little falsehoods ‒ and big ones ‒ that Dean told Sam. Dad's gonna be home for Christmas. Sam didn't always know which ones were real and which ones weren't. Didn't know where the story ended and the man begun.
He pieced it together, slowly, maybe, over a long string of years. But even then, there were gaps. Pieces that didn't fit, or pieces that had simply never been there in the first place. Their marriage wasn't perfect until after she died, Dean said. And Sam popped the cap off of the red pen in his memory and scratched another revision.
When Dean came by Stanford that night, they found a journal and an empty trail that led into the hazy unknown, a narrative road that stretched out before them, a crossroads, really, though even an absent John somehow still swept them all onto the right path. Or the wrong one.
There were more holes than there were answers, and Sam filled them in as best as he could, but it was all recounted by other people, a grand, weaving tale spun by motley voices, and it may have had actual substance, once, but to Sam it was still just another story.
Later, after John was gone and dead, all Sam had left of him was his music, which Dean played as faithful as ever, his jacket, which Dean wore as if he filled it, his car, which maybe had never truly been John's, not if Dean had really been the one who chose it and made it home, and of course, John's journal. Which maybe was all John ever had been. Some sort of sketchy figure that moved between the lines of text and drawings as if they were panels in a comic.
And after John's death, they still followed his specter like they were chasing a legend. Hearing about John's victories, his falling-outs, his affairs, from people with faces and voices that in some ways were more real than parts of John because at least they were there. There, and tangible, with real tears on their cheeks and real fingers clutching their drinks, hurt and anger burning in their eyes.
The most telling clue, maybe, that John might just be a story was that Sam started to romanticize him. Or maybe he had always done so. Had even romanticized him as some vague force to rebel against, some bundle of ideas to pointedly discard and step all over on his way out the door towards finding a normal life.
But Dean was different. Dean was Real. He was there, and he was tangible, and sometimes they fought, but Dean was Everything in Sam's world, and Sam was clearly Everything in Dean's. And sometimes, it turned out that "Dad" had actually been Dean. Sam learned to distrust his memories, that way. He thought John was in some of them, but maybe he hadn't been. Maybe Dean had told him lies, had fed him stories of John where in actuality, John had never been there, and Dean was just trying to cover that up for what he assumed was Sam's sake.
It was easier, maybe, to think of John as a story. Easier to love him when he was a hero than when he was an empty spot at the table that tasted like SpaghettiOs for the fifth night in a row. Because a hero was a good guy that saved people, and Sam's dad was a man that came back only sometimes and then mostly just passed out on the couch and smelled like gunpowder and beer.
Dean confessed that sometimes, he thought that John had died when Mary had. Which meant that maybe John was some sort of living ghost. Something that ate, drank, pissed, and wore a meatsuit. That haunted the same car, the same objects, the same person that it had when it had lived. Just repeating its same narrative, again and again, turned bitter and broken with vengeance. Maybe John was an urban legend, too. A haunting, showing up in a single-column article running down the front page of the paper beside the spread about the fireman who had recently rescued a kitten from a burning building, a cinematic photo in full-color glory of a uniformed man passing off a small, furred bundle to a waiting family, all relieved and safe and happy and together.
Maybe it was better when John died ‒ for real, this time ‒ because at least after that, it wasn't so confusing anymore. After that, all of John was a story. He existed as memories ‒ Sam's and Dean's and others' ‒ and as words in an old leather-bound journal. He was a phantom creature that Sam and Dean trailed after, sometimes, piecing together stories recounted to them by other people, testing elements of the legend until they found what worked and what didn't, what was real and what wasn't.
But as Sam listened to Ellen tell him about how word spread in the Roadhouse, overheard and repeated and warped, and as Sam picked up the cheap paperback books that had him and Dean's names in them, as Sam watched their faces show up plastered across the national news as criminals, as the Scribe of God tried to cast him as a pawn in a scripted drama, as other hunters got that look of recognition on their faces and said, "Winchester, huh? I've heard of you," as Sam listened and observed his own tale be taken and rearranged and re-appropriated and spat out, Sam started to wonder something else. He wondered if all he, too, would ever amount to be was just another story.