Chapter Text
John Byers was known around Hawkins as an unfriendly, reclusive man. He was most known for being a deadbeat father, one who left town often, for weeks and months and even years at a time.
People whispered about him behind his back more than they spoke to his face. He kept to himself, didn’t bother with neighbors, and disappeared often enough that half the town assumed he didn’t technically live there at all.
Everyone knew he’d vanish from Hawkins for weeks, sometimes months, and once even for a full year. No warning. No explanation. Just gone.
And then, like nothing happened, he’d show back up at the Hideaway bar or in the doorway of Joyce’s little rental house, smelling like the road.
When Joyce Maldonado had her first son, she had no husband, no partner, no support in sight.
She was barely out of her teens, living in a rented room above a hardware store, and her parents stopped taking her calls the moment she told them she planned to keep the baby.
It had been a one-night stand.
A stranger passing through Hawkins, someone she’d talked to for a few hours at a bar because she was lonely.
By the time she realized she was pregnant, he was long gone.
She did what she always did—she figured it out on her own.
She didn’t get his name. He hadn’t offered it.
Later, she’d see him again—same solemn face, same tired eyes—and this time he told her he was John Byers.
They had another son together, and she held onto the hope—quietly, stubbornly—that a family might anchor him.
It didn’t.
John drifted in and out of Hawkins the way he always had, and Joyce learned to raise two boys mostly on her own. She stopped asking him where he’d been. She stopped expecting explanations. She adjusted, because she had to.
And then later, much later, she’d find out his name hadn’t been Byers at all.
Joyce Byers made a lot of mistakes in her life, but her children will never be one of them.
It had been almost a year since John visited or contacted them when she got the news.
A man named John Winchester had died and left her in his will.
The name meant nothing at first—Winchester, some lawyer said over the phone, reading it like she should understand. But there was only one John who had ever left anything behind for her, and only one man who vanished so thoroughly and so often that an entire year of silence didn’t surprise her.
She knew instinctively who it was.
Of course she did.
Joyce hung up the phone, pulled out a chair, and sat heavily, elbows on her knees, hands hanging uselessly between them.
The boys were at school. The house was quiet. Too quiet.
For a moment she thought she might stand right back up and get on with her day, wash dishes or sweep or fold laundry—anything familiar, anything that didn’t require thinking.
Instead she stayed exactly where she was.
The lawyer’s voice repeated itself in her head, flat and practiced.
“Mr. John Winchester named you in his will.”
Winchester. Not Byers.
Not the man who’d shown up smelling like the road and left before breakfast.
Not the man who’d bounced in and out of her sons’ lives until she finally learned not to expect him at all.
She rubbed her palms against the worn denim of her jeans, grounding herself in the texture, the familiar roughness.
Her eyes drifted to the family pictures on the wall—Jonathan holding Will as a baby, both boys grinning with missing teeth, a crooked Polaroid she’d taken last summer at the Fourth of July parade.
None of them showed John. He’d never been around long enough to be in the frame.
Maybe that should’ve told her something.
She let out a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding, sharp and uneven and almost painful.
John Byers hadn’t just abandoned her. He’d never even existed.