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He shattered the morning sky
and possessed my heart with weeping.
My messy soul now tied to air
and blown to the burning, empty keeping.
My heart, oh my bursting heart!
Longing desperately for the warm glow,
returned with aching silence
of the colours i'll never again know.
I used to bask in the sacred light
now its replaced with the haunting thought
of the smiley lines around his eyes,
the flickering moments i wish i forgot.
Days are dark, nights eternal
all of th romance lost from the moonlight
i close my eyes to see the shine
of my hope he stole away from the sky.
- Jordan Phoenix, “The Evil God Who Stole The Sun”
Being an angel’s vessel changed someone deeply. An angel’s grace wound its way throughout every cell, every molecule, of their vessel’s body. It burned. It cleansed. Those who were used as an angel’s vessel and survived were always a bit stronger, a bit faster, a bit unnatural — their very being warped by holding an angel’s power. But there were very few who survived.
Being an archangel’s vessel and surviving? There was only one person who had the privilege of an archangel’s essence being shoved into their tiny body and then surviving. John Winchester. It was barely for an hour during mess that was the fallen angel Anna coming back in time to prevent the births of Sam and Dean Winchester by killing Mary and John. But John held that burning, burning grace that was the size of the Moon inside a six-foot body and survived.
Sure, Zachariah made sure to block all this from his memory, being used as angel’s meat-suit and meeting his sons from the future and learning that Mary used to hunt monsters, but they couldn’t destroy the hints of archangel grace that stayed in his body and soul.
In fact, those wisps of power eventually eroded the barrier around those memories away.
Just not in time.
Three months after Mary was killed, was gutted on the ceiling above Sam’s crib then set on fire, John woke up without the headache of a hangover for the first time since the incident, but it wasn’t because he stopped drinking. It was the grace in his soul, finally turning away from the barrier in his mind — the intrusion was prioritized — and fixing up the damage he’d done to his body.
John knew this somehow. It was almost instinctive, this use of the residual grace.
Memories flowed through his mind. Meeting adult Sam and Dean, going to the garage because Anna tricked him, almost getting killed, Mary fighting her and almost getting killed, Sam and Dean telling him about the supernatural, Mary telling him of her childhood of hunting, Sam and Dean telling them how their father thought they were soldiers instead of his sons, Zachariah and Anna almost killing Mary and the men from the future. John saying yes to Micheal to save his wife. The feeling of being strapped to the sun itself, then it going away, and waking up in bed the next day with no memory of what happened.
Mary told him he fell and got a concussion. For the last five years, he believed her.
John raised himself onto an elbow and looked at Dean and Sam, who were peacefully sleeping on the motel bed and in a borrowed crib respectively. He remembered their grown-up faces, their expressions of almost fear whenever he opened his mouth, their love for a father who didn’t love them back, their hatred of his ways of raising them.
He barely reached the toilet before throwing up.
He looked at himself in the mirror after he stopped gagging. His eyes were bloodshot. They were more intense, deeper and older, now. His beard was scruffy and his hair was greasy and sticking up in odd places. He did not look great.
With shaking hands, he started shaving. When he was done, he looked better, more alive. More like himself than a shell of grief.
He went back into the motel room and, after a glance at his still sleeping sons, started cleaning up the empty bottles of alcohol and the empty takeout containers that have been piling up over the past few months. Dean, John realized with a hot ball of grief, had to have been cleaning up some, since there were less than there should be. It was almost five in the morning when he was done, an hour after he woke up with new memories.
With new knowledge, he started rifling through the cabinets until he found a large box of salt. He put a line across the windows and the door. He may have only been in on the supernatural world for two days five years ago, but Mary, Sam, and Dean were all great and knowledgeable hunters. They taught him a lot, and not just against angels and demons. There wasn’t a lot more to talk about during the long hours of waiting. Making sure not to break the salt line, John left the room.
The January air was freezing, John knew, but he couldn’t feel it as sharply as he should, especially with no shoes or jacket. He walked across the parking lot to the spray-painted but hopefully still working phone booth. The asphalt was rough under his bare feet. It was a sensation that grounded him to the here and now in a way that he hasn’t felt in three months. The door to the phone booth was painted with bad drawings of dicks and slurs. It squealed as he pulled it open.
It wasn’t until he was putting in the number that he consciously realized who he was about to call. The tinny voice of Sergeant Caleb Wisher came through the receiver, “Wisher. Who’s this?”
“Sarge,” John said, trying and failing to keep his voice even. “Sarge, I need help.”
“Johnny? Johnny Winchester, is that you?” Caleb suddenly sounded a lot more awake. “Are you alright?”
“Not at all,” John laughed with little humor. His voice dried in his throat as he tried to figure out what on earth he was supposed to say now. What on earth he could say. My wife was made a deal to bring me back to life ten years ago, then got killed by the demon who did it, who also made little Sammy a potential vessel for Lucifer? And I know all of this because my sons from the future told me only because they thought I wouldn’t remember it? Like that would go down well.
“— chester. Corporeal Winchester, report!” Sergeant Wisher barked.
John blinked, trying to concentrate on the here and now, trying to forget the sensation of holding the sun inside himself, trying to forget the sight of Mary on the ceiling. “Sir?”
“Are you injured?”
“No, sir,” John said. He punched the wall a few days ago and broke a knuckle, but with the remains of Micheal’s grace no longer fighting Zachariah’s it was now healed.
“Are you going to injure yourself?” Sergeant Wisher asked in the same hard voice he used to ask if any of Echo Company had seen the enemy when they were in the jungles of Vietnam.
“No, sir.”
“Is anyone else injured?”
“My wife is dead,” John finally managed to squeeze out of his un-cooperating throat.
“Oh, Johnny,” Caleb said, sympathetic but not the cloying pity like everyone else held in their voice whenever they talked to him.
“I thought… I thought I could keep it together for my kids, but I can’t. I can’t. I woke up today and realized that I haven’t changed a diaper in three months because I’ve been too drunk to notice Sammy crying and Dean’s been doing it, but he’s only four and he shouldn’t need to deal with that and I think I’m going crazy here but there’s nowhere else to go and —”
“Breathe Johnny,” Caleb soothed. “Breathe in, hold, then out.”
John followed his orders just like he did in the jungle. It was easy to follow Sergeant Wisher. He was a hard ass when needed, but he was also just another one of the men when needed. He was firm but fair. Kind to injured men under his command. Angry as hell whenever someone disobeyed an order.
“Better?” Caleb asked, after a minute.
“Yeah,” John said, choking on his tears, which he didn’t even notice where falling down his cheeks until now. “Yeah.”
“Good. Now where are you?”
“The Green Motel, Lawrence, Kansas,” John said.
“Can you wait a day or two? It’s a long drive from Maine,” Caleb said. “I have Duke and Earl with me and Richard is only half hour’s drive away. Who do you want me to bring with?”
“I can wait,” John said. “And, um, bring Duke. He’s good with kids.”
“He is. Do you have a car or do we need to bring the van?”
“I have a car,” John said — then paused as another memory occurred. The man who nudged him to buy the Impala was very similar to Dean from the future. John was half-sure he said something about the whole Anna thing not being his first round of time travel.
“ —ny? Johnny? Did you hear me?” Caleb asked.
“Uh, no, sorry. Lost in thought,” John said.
“We’ll be there on Thursday,” Caleb said, “Hopefully around noon, but you know you can never predict traffic. Take care of yourself and your kids, Johnny.”
“I will,” John said, determined to not be the father he’d been in the future, which was a very weird thing to think, but true nonetheless.
The sky was lightening outside the phone booth, the eastern horizon turning gray. John walked back over to the door to the room he’d been renting for the past three months, feeling like he was breathing for the first time since Mary’s death. He had a goal, don’t raise his kids as soldiers hunting the supernatural, that superseded his original goal of revenge. He could still remember Mary’s shock and horror at the fact that her kids suffered the same childhood she got out of by marrying him. As much as he wanted to rip the demon who killed her to shreds, and he probably could given the archangel grace in his system, he knew it would be better for Sam and Dean if he tried to live a normal life.
It was what Mary wanted for them, after all.
For the first time in months, John started cooking breakfast. It was just eggs, but it was more than he made in those long weeks since Mary’s death. It was too early for Dean to wake up but it was something for John to do that made him feel less like a shit-stain.
Dean’s smile when he woke up to a plate of steaming eggs — John ate the first batch — was huge. The biggest smile he had seen on his son in months, but it was also the longest he had paid attention in a while too. The realization hurt.
****
“Are they here yet?” Dean asked for the hundredth time that morning.
“No, you’ll know when they’re here ‘cause they’ll knock,” John answered once more as he scoured under the beds to make sure none of the children’s toys ended up down there. Dean had cried yesterday when they packed because he couldn’t find the red truck Mary got him. John smiled as he saw a wheel between the bedposts and the wall, then grimaced because it was sticky with something he wasn’t sure he wanted to name.
“Here, wash this off so it doesn’t get any of your clothes dirty,” John told Dean, who ran off to the sink to do just that. He had to use a step stool to reach. John turned his gaze to Sam, who was on a blanket on the floor with a few soft toys that he was gnawing on contentedly. John would’ve put him on the bed, but he recently started to figure out how to scootch around, not quite crawling but still moving himself, and John didn’t want him to fall off the bed.
A knock rang out against the flimsy motel room door. John scooped up Sam, whose face started scrunching up as a warning sign before he started to cry, while Dean ran over to the door and opened it with soapy hands and a grin.
John wanted to cry at the sight of Caleb and Duke. Caleb was taller than John, about fifteen years older, and built like a grizzly bear. Duke was a stick-thin African American with a face made to smile. He was a private in the Echo Company but John was almost certain that he was now a teacher of some sort.
“Are you Daddy’s friends?” Dean asked as he led them inside.
Both, to John’s relief, passed easily over the devil’s trap he painstakingly replicated onto the bottom of the doormat.
“We are,” Duke said, “And you are… Sammy?”
“No!” Dean said, a little outraged. “I’m —”
“Oh, the maid?” Duke interrupted.
“No!” This time Dean was smiling.
“John, but shrunken?”
“No!” Dean laughed.
“Ah, I give up. Who are you then?” Duke asked.
“I’m Dean!” Dean said with a grin. Duke smiled and was soon led over to Dean’s pile of toys, where they started a game that was simultaneously helping Dean pack.
John rocked Sammy, who thankfully was just whimpering instead of screaming, as Caleb came over to him. The former Sergeant did a once over of him with a concerned frown on his face, almost obscured by the man’s thick beard, before he said quite plainly, “Johnny, you look like shit.”
Then he carefully pulled John into a hug. John switched his grip on Sam to one hand so he could put an arm around Caleb. They broke apart soon and then Caleb switched his attention to little Sam. “He’s adorable,” he told John.
“He’s even cuter when he’s not crying,” he replied.
It only took fifteen minutes for them to get everything the firefighters could save from the house to the Impala and Caleb’s truck, which made John feel several things he didn’t want to name but were not good. Grief, definitely. Nostalgia maybe. Some deep and dark anger.
While Dean was distracted by Duke and Sam was asleep in the Impala’s passenger seat, Caleb finally asked something John knew he was wondering ever since John called him. “Your wife,” he started carefully, closely watching John as he fiddled with the straps of Sam’s carseat. “What was her name? You haven’t said.”
“Mary,” John said. “Mary Winchester nee Campbell. We were married for ten years.”
“Ten years… you must have met her just after the end of the war,” Caleb continued, still picking his work carefully.
“I did. We hated each other at first,” John said fondly, thinking back to their harsh arguments. His voice broke with emotion as he continued. “But we quickly fell in love. She was… She was passionate about everything. Her favorite color was yellow because she liked sunshine and lemons. She liked to play football and would always manage to tackle me into a mud puddle, no matter how dry our yard was. She could bake the best pie I’ve ever tasted.”
She would take on an angel for him. She would make a deal that killed her for him.
“I wish I could have met her,” Caleb said, “She sounds perfect for you.”
“I think she would have liked you. And everyone else in Echo Company,” John said. “‘cept maybe Father Hanson. I think they’d have a fist fight.”
“Who would win?” Caleb asked.
“Mary, of course,” John said. “She never lost a bar fight. And she’s been in a lot of them.”
Caleb smiled at him. “Keep those memories close. Remember her best days, your best days with her, not whatever happened at the end.”
“A house fire,” John said, which was only half a lie. It wasn’t like he could say the truth.
“That explains the motel,” Caleb said, sympathetic.
“The fire marshal thought it might’ve been arson,” John said. “But only at first. Apparently it was just a faulty wire in the ceiling.”
“Shit, Johnny.”
John shrugged. There was not really anything he could say to that.
“Daddy, Daddy,” Dean shouted as he came running over to him, “Did you know that Mr. Duke has three dogs? They’re named Red, Blue, and Yellow, but all of them are brown. He said he named them after colors ‘cause he couldn’t think of anything else. I told him if we had a dog we’d name it something other than a color, like Zapper from across the street. I think Shocker is a good name. Or maybe Zipper if they’re fast. Or-or-or —”
“Slow down, Dean,” John laughed, spirits brightening out of the gloom that came over hi whenever he thought of the demon that killed Mary, “I can barely understand you.”
Dean ignored the slight scolding and went on saying, “Can I ride with Mr. Duke? I want to know more about his dogs, so when we get a dog I’ll know everything about how to care for them.”
John ignored about the part about getting a dog for the second and looked at Caleb, “If that’s alright with you?”
“I have no problem with it. You can ride with us, Dean,” Caleb said.
Dean grinned and ran back over to Duke, who helped him into the truck.
Soon, John would leave Lawrence, Kansas, and start a new life somewhere else.
A different life than the powers-that-be want him to have. But the traces of archangel grace obscure his soul to any who want to find him, helped along by the bloodline of Men of Letters and the bond he had with Mary, whose deal for his life touched their souls together.
Even so, it would not be an easy road ahead of him.
It never was for a Winchester.