Chapter Text
1972
“I know you want to name him after your mother, sweetheart, but that’s, well…”
“What?” Mary was a hair away from not being in the mood for this, still sweaty from the stress of the birth.
“A boy named Sue, if his classmates ever find out.”
“Don’t be silly. Nobody’s going to think twice about the name Dean.”
“Or we call him Jason.”
“Maybe.”
“Compromise: Jason Dean.”
“Jason Dean Winchester…that does have a nice ring to it.” Mary smiled at their baby, pushing back a momentary flash of guilt over the deal. John was alive. She was a mother.
She would deal with Azazel when he arrived.
1976
Azazel arrived, standing over Sam’s crib, his eyes flashing yellow.
Mary had expected he would come for little Jason Dean. But Dean (as he insisted on being called, which always felt like a little “I told you so” to John) had turned four with no sign of demonic visitation.
She wasn’t ready for Azazel. The house had been child-proofed so thoroughly that she’d have had to get through the baby gate and the locks on the silverware drawer to find any weapons at all, let alone the ones in the attic, the ones that would actually work on him.
“You.”
Mary took a deep breath, ready to recite the exorcism ritual she’d memorized when she was younger than Dean, just as a precaution, sweetheart. Demons are rare, but I feel better knowing you know this.
Azazel raised his hand, and Mary hit the wall, and her last breath came out in a scream instead.
She was on fire, and the house was burning around her, and her last thought was for Sammy, trapped between a fire and a future.
1981
“I didn’t mean to,” said Jason Dean numbly. There was a shotgun abandoned in the doorway, bullet holes in the opposite wall. The shtriga had vanished out the window. “Sam, I didn’t mean to, I just wanted to go to the arcade, you were fine alone.”
Somewhere, as if in another world, the motel owners were shouting, and there were footsteps pounding down the hall. But in that little room, it was just Jason Dean and an open window.
And his baby brother, lying in the motel bed, still as death.
Dad met Jason Dean at the hospital hours later. The doctors were saying Sam was in a coma, and Jason Dean was trying and failing not to cry.
Dad took Jason Dean to the nearest Hunter in the Impala, lecturing him about shtrigas and responsibility, voice wavering between rage and the kind of calm Jason Dean already knew meant he would be crying if he was a woman.
So Jason Dean didn’t cry either. He had messed up; this was all his fault. You didn’t get to cry if it was all your fault, not even if you were a sissy or a girl. You just didn’t.
He didn’t cry when Dad came back the next week with the news.
He didn’t cry on the long drive back to Kansas.
He didn’t cry when he watched the graveyard workers lower Sammy's little casket into the grave next to Mom’s headstone.
After the funeral, Dad got in the car and started driving in near-silence. Jason Dean asked where they were going three times. He asked if he could turn on music once. Dad only grunted.
At last, three hours in, Jason Dean said he was hungry. Dad twitched like he was waking up, then stopped at a 7/11, bought him a slushie and a handful of snacks, and started driving again.
Jason Dean helped with his first hunt two years later. It almost made it better.
1989
"Look, Jason." Dad was pacing the kitchen in the house some dead Hunter had left to the cause. JD, setting out the guns on the table, watched him. "I'm wanted after Milwaukee. The name Winchester isn't safe anymore."
JD waited for the point.
"So we're dropping the name."
"We're what?"
"I'm registering you for school under the name Jason Dean. I'll be John Dean."
"Dad-"
"It's already done." Dad sat across the table from JD and picked up his rifle. "We'll only be here a few months at most, anyway. Whatever that thing is, it's killing every week—there's got to be a pattern."
JD said nothing, only started to clean one of the pistols.
JD sat at the edge of the room, trying to read but mostly just watching the new school’s popular girls pressuring one of their number into who-knew-what.
Something was off about the argument. Something about the way they were talking was weird, and he couldn't figure out what.
He told Veronica a little about himself, some of it almost true.
JD for short, not Call me Dean, although he hadn’t really gone by Dean since he was four.
Maybe she was just being polite when she took the offered slushie, but she did take it. He watched, and waited, and-
"Son of a bitch!"
And when the brain freeze hit, he almost laughed.
She was gone moments later, after the red popular girl, leaving JD with the cup and the aftertaste of slushie.
"Veronica?" JD slid one hand under his pillow, where he kept his favorite knife. "What are you doing in my room?"
"Shh," she said. "Had to see you…"
She finished climbing through the window and off the desk just underneath it, moving in the deliberate way of somebody drunk and trying not to fall over. The smell of alcohol was strong on her breath, and he slowly let go of the knife.
Maybe she was a demon or a ghost, maybe she wanted him dead, but he didn't care. Veronica was beautiful, and she was in his room, and she was taking off her jacket and crawling onto the bed next to him.
JD reached out to touch her, and she let him, her hands finding the hem of his shirt and lifting.
She was talking, he realized, about one of the Heathers and how much she needed to have one good weekend before school the next Monday.
In one night, Jason Dean fell in love.
She was a siren.
She had to be a siren, to make him feel like this, like he'd do anything for her, even kill.
He had killed for her.
It had barely been an hour, but already he couldn't remember whether he'd meant to kill Heather Chandler or not. He remembered pouring the drain cleaner, remembered joking about killing her, remembered picking up a glass and deciding it was the right one, but he couldn't remember whether he'd known it held drain cleaner.
That was a bad sign.
He didn't care. Veronica was a siren, so young she couldn't bear to witness him killing for her? That was all right. He'd protect her. He'd feed her, and worship her, and someday he knew he would die for her with a smile on his face.
She was the only thing that was right about the world. He was broken, irreparably broken after what he'd allowed to happen to Sammy, but if he could protect her it might all be worth it.
He told Veronica his father was in demolition. He told her his mother died by walking into a building he was destroying. Anything to avoid the name Winchester, anything to avoid having to tell her about Sammy.
Somewhere deep down, he wanted to tell her the whole truth.
Ram and Kurt were easy sacrifices, easy to kill. Veronica got stronger, he thought. It was hard to tell. She didn't seem to know what she was.
Soon, Dad would drag him out of town again. He didn't have a choice. Dad had a theory about the monster; he was just looking for its lair. There was only a matter of time before he had to leave.
He wasn't sure he could fight it. Sometimes he looked at his favorite gun and thought about it, thought about putting a bullet into his father's head. More often, lately, now that he wasn't thinking about putting it into his own.
Veronica needed more.
She was fighting, denying her true nature.
And so he built a bomb.
When he saw her body hanging, he shattered, the shrapnel of his heart carving through muscle and bone and organs before reforming.
It didn’t change anything. The world hadn’t deserved Veronica, and those assholes at Westerberg didn’t deserve the world.
And then Veronica was there, human and perfect and willing to die for them, and he knew what it felt like to be willing to die for someone, so he took her cup of suffering.
And he died for her.