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"A dinosaur could beat a monster truck!" Sam's voice rung out clear and indignant into the cold, morning air inside the Impala. John lifted his head slightly off the window and opened his eyes, his latest hunting injuries throbbing and his neck about to give him hell for at least the next three days. When he glanced in the rearview mirror, Sam and Dean were still there.
"Sammy, shush, dad's still asleep."
"But it could," Sam insisted at a slightly lower volume. John elected to feign still being asleep: once they knew he was awake they'd stop playing: theirs wasn't a world he'd ever been privy to, and God, for all the shit that they'd been through, that he'd done, that was still to come, sometimes it was nice to hear them being kids.
"A dinosaur is way slower than a monster truck, it wouldn't even be able to catch up," Dean stated.
"What about a velsosiraptor: they can go up to twenty-five miles per hour." They'd picked up a book about dinosaurs at a flea market, must have been about half the weight and height of Sam, and he'd read it pretty much non-stop since he got it: still couldn't pronounce most of the names.
"A car can go way faster than that."
"How do you know?" Sam asked, and John could imagine his scowl, brows lowered and bottom lip stuck out just slightly: he'd been on the receiving end of it a few times, usually before Dean told Sam off.
"Look at the car's speed dial, it goes all the way to a hundred-and-twenty."
"This isn't a monster truck," Sam observed.
"Yeah, but monster trucks are still cars, so they can definitely go over twenty-five miles per hour." There was a few seconds of silence.
"But what if a dinosaur stomped on the monster truck first?"
"No, that's what I'm saying, the truck would be too fast," Dean pressed, and John decided that was probably his cue to 'wake up'.
"You boys sleep alright?"
"No, I was cold," Sam answered matter of factly.
"He's being dramatic, it wasn't that bad," Dean cut in. The windows hadn't frosted over, just misted up, but John could see his breath forming puffs of mist, and he wasn't exactly warm either.
"You can still feel your fingers right, Sammy?" John asked, sitting up and feeling a sharp pain coarse up his back as well as the dull ache of cracked-ribs most of the way healed. He turned round in his seat to get a proper look at them, seeing Sam wrapped burrito-style and Dean with his blanket over his shoulders, pulled close: there were no blue lips, but there was a bit of shivering.
"Yeah," Sam affirmed.
"Not that cold then. Right, get out and move around, it'll warm you up," John instructed, starting the engine so he could de-mist the windshield. Sam grumbled, before slipping out the car after Dean: John noticed one of them (probably Dean) had drawn some very wonky protective sigils on the misted-up window.
It was a cold, sharp sort of morning, the world outside muted and glittering beneath a thin frost: John could hear it crunching underneath the boys' shoes as Dean cajoled Sam into a few laps round the Impala. He joined the boys outside a moment later to stretch before his knees got locked at a ninety-degree angle for the rest of time, and it smelt like the morning six years ago when he'd taken Mary and a tiny Dean to a Christmas fair. Mulled wine and artisanal tree ornaments seemed impossibly far away. He wasn't sure whether he hoped Dean remembered or not.
Once the boys had run around and the windshield was clear, they piled back into the Impala, John cranking the heating up as far as it would go, his own hands frigid and stiff on the steering wheel as he pulled back out onto the highway, still nursing a sore neck and sorer ribs. Sam and Dean had returned to huddling on the back bench, Sam immersed on what had to be at least the tenth read-through of his book, Dean watching out the window.
They passed a road sign advertising cheap Christmas trees, a farm selling turkey, another for lights. Grit cracked beneath the Impala's tires and the heating rattled. The land stretched out and out on either side of them, mile upon mile of flat, empty field covered in frosted shrubs beneath an unrelentingly blue sky. It would have been beautiful if it wasn't so damn cold, John thought.
Sam hassled them into starting a fresh round license plate game, and Dean had just recently scored a Canadian license plate (Ontario) when John spotted the sign for Pete's Diner (1/2 a mile, first right) by the side of the road. Slowing slightly since there was no one behind him, or ahead of him, and they'd probably seen about four cars total in the past half hour, the building drifted into sight. It was the kind of crappy place he could probably get two kid's breakfasts and a black coffee for less than ten dollars, which suited him.
John glanced back at the rearview mirror: Sam and Dean still had the blankets on over their jackets, and the heating took about an hour to actually reach the back of the car, so it probably wasn't such a bad idea. Besides, it was coming up on Christmas, and he could never stomach much more than staying for the day and buying the boys some fried chicken, so a trip to a diner might go some infinitesimal way to making up.
"You boys wanna go get a diner breakfast?" John asked, pointing towards the diner. Dean's eyes went wide and Sam shot up from where he was slumped against Dean, eyes trained on his window.
"Yeah!" Sam yelled at the same time as Dean's "yessir." John looked at Sam in the mirror.
"Sammy."
"Yes sir, please can we go to the diner," Sam intoned, but he was still grinning. John couldn't afford to let them get away with too much, but often Sam made it damn hard: sometimes the kid made him feel so fond it ached.
"Good."
"Thanks, sir," Dean added, smile more restrained.
"Yeah! Thanks!" Sam parroted, as John pulled into the parking lot, manoeuvring the Impala round a few potholes and a large puddle turned patch of ice.
There were only four cars parked outside the diner including their own, and some of those were probably staff, which set John a little more at ease. Only vague traces remained of the white lines that had at some point roughly a decade ago delineated parking spaces, and given how empty it was, he barely bothered to straighten up before the killing the engine, instantly feeling the lack of heating as the car went quiet.
"Alright, no wondering off, no talking to strangers, and if I say we're leaving, then no questions, just leave," John rattled off, and there was a drone of 'yes sir' from both Sam and Dean, before they all clambered out the car, though Dean did have to pause in order persuade Sam to leave his blanket behind.
The diner was everything John expected: the vinyl on the booth seats was split and peeling, the grouting between the tiles hadn't been white for years, and the whole place smelt of grease. Someone had taped some tinsel above the counter in some futile nod to festivity, but one of the pieces of tape had peeled off so one end was hanging limply down in front of the till. Sam and Dean were both excited anyway.
They regarded the dog-eared, coffee stained menu with awe, muttering amongst themselves, eyes wide. John caught snatches of their conversation between his surveillance of the other customers: 'look, you can have the breakfast sandwich, Sammy, it's only two -dollars-fifty', 'what's eggs Benedict?', 'reckon I could eat all of the Giant Sausage Breakfast?'.
John didn't usually take them out to eat, he didn't like how exposed it made them, how many people might see them, how many things that weren't people might see them. Still, it was a crappy diner in the middle of nowhere at eight-thirty in the morning, it was practically vacant, so he figured they could risk it for the hot food and heating.
Sam and Dean's whispering had picked up a bit, and John looked back over at them "What's up?"
Dean answered "nothing" at the same time as Sam saying "Dean wants the sausage breakfast but he says it's too expensive." John glanced down at the menu: five dollars.
"Dean's right." Sam gave him puppy eyes, which could ply Dean but John had always made a point of not letting it get to him. He couldn't let it get to him.
"But I thought you got all that money from the card game?" Sam pressed, and John felt himself bristle: there was no malice in Sam's question, not really, but Sam had always had a knack for catching him out.
"Well I'm telling you it's too expensive," he stated, going for firm and landing on defensive, seeing Sam blink in surprise. He'd had to pick up silver rounds for a werewolf he was going after next, so things were going to be tight without sausage breakfasts, never mind with them. Sam opened his mouth to reply, but Dean kicked him under the table.
"It's alright, I like hash browns," Dean replied brightly, and John felt the guilt settle in his stomach like lead, but all the guilt in the world wouldn't make an extra hundred dollars spontaneously appear in his wallet, so hash browns it was.
"Good, you can get those," John replied, silently willing Sam to drop it. He just wanted them to have a nice morning, one singular nice morning.
"What's the biggest dinosaur in your book, Sammy?" Dean asked, in a transparent bid to change the subject. Still, it worked, and a minute later Sam was rattling on about a 'argatintosaurus' and John was relaxing back into the squeaky vinyl seat. Maybe when he was done with the werewolf he'd scrape together some cash, get Dean his sausage breakfast some place else.
At some point, a waitress came over to take their order: a young girl probably still in high school. She smiled at Sam, and Sam beamed back until John shot him a look: chances were the girl was completely harmless, but anybody could be possessed or a shifter, so John never liked taking his chances.
"What can I get for you?" The waitress asked, trying to look unfazed. John was well past the point of caring what people thought about him.
"Can I get a black coffee, the hash browns—what're you wanting, Sammy?"
"Breakfast sandwich with egg, please sir. Can I get apple juice?" Sam asked, leaning across the table towards him. John fought the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose: Bobby always got them juice when John let him know ahead of time he was coming, and now Sam was enamoured with the stuff.
"The breakfast egg sandwich and two tap waters," John finished, and he wasn't sure if the waitress' overly bright smile was to cover up judgement, an indication she was a threat, or just standard customer-service procedure.
"Great, I'll have that over in a minute." John nodded, and the waitress left. Sam had slumped over with his head on the table, idly pushing a ketchup packet back and forth. Some festive jingle John half recognised pressed forth in the silence.
"You're such a drama queen, Sammy," Dean grumbled, and Sam glared.
"'M not."
"Yeah you are. C'mon, you can totally still see people's license plates from here, maybe you can break your losing streak." Sam opened his mouth in indignation, before fixing his gaze on the window with a determined scowl.
The continuation of the license plate game lasted them until their food turned up, and after that there was absolutely no complaining. Hell, the only talking was when Dean (mouth full of hash browns) reached over to hastily point at a passing '69 Ford Mustang with a muffled exclamation. John had said it was 'a nice spot' and Sam just said its license plate was from Arizona, and they'd already had Arizona, which earned him a bit of a lecture when Dean was (mostly) finished chewing.
Three cups of coffee and two breakfasts later, they left in relatively high spirits. Dean won the license plate game, Sam came in second, and John came in last which he reckoned he could just about live with. Tapes cycled through the Impala's stereo, there were some somewhat questionable renditions of various Beatles songs, before they stopped for lunch (and in John's case more coffee) at a gas station.
As the sun rose, the frost thawed, revealing brown shrubs shrivelled into themselves for winter, and warming up the Impala enough for John to turn down the heating. Sprawling planes that seemed to carry on to the edges of the earth gave way to rocky hills, pine and stone hugging the road so you could seldom see more than a few yards on either side. Sammy fell asleep just before five, as the sun slid down behind the mountains, her last traces turning everything honey gold before the cool night set in.
-
It was dark when they at long last arrived at the site of their latest case: a moderately sized town in Colorado. John heard Dean speak up for the first time following a few hours of silence: he used to be a chatty kid, John remembered.
"Sammy, wake up, look at the lights," Dean whisper-shouted, probably batting at his brother's arm. There was some tired grumbling, followed by a gasp.
Christmas lights adorned the street lamps: bells or holly or angels in rich jewel tones. When John glanced in the rearview mirror, his boys were pressed against the glass of the windows. The first decorated house was met with awe from Sam and a grin from Dean: someone had strung up coloured fairy lights around the edges of their roof and there was glowing, inflatable Santa in the front yard. They were on the nice side of town, so it was all people who could stomach the electricity bill.
It was going to be too late to make a real start on the case, and he still felt shitty about the diner, so John made an executive decision. "You boys want to drive around and see the rest of the lights?"
"Yeah!"
"Yessir!"
"Yes sir!" Sam corrected.
It wasn't like they hadn't see Christmas lights before, but Sam was still young enough to be impressed by basically anything, and it was more than worth the relatively small amount of gas to see his boys smile.
There were glowing reindeer-pulled sleighs parked atop roofs; various Santas ascending chimneys or waving or hauling sacks of presents, as well as front-yard Christmas trees decked out with coloured, blinking lights. They reflected gold, green and red in the boys' wide eyes, occasionally prodding at each other and whispering to look out the other window at some new, more extravagantly decorated house.
They must have spent at least ten minutes driving around the neighbourhood before finally reaching the end of it. The boys chattered in hushed tones as John tried to find them a motel, peering through the wet blur of the windshield and incessant slide of the wiper blades. The half-frozen drizzle had picked up into thick, slushy drops on the cusp of being snow, and John wasn't looking forward to vacating the car for the cold of an unoccupied motel room which may or may not have heating. Still, Sam and Dean were happy, so he couldn't earnestly be too pissed off.
He found a motel eventually, on the outskirts of town. There was a small, plastic Christmas tree in the corner of the reception area with plastic baubles shoved on onto its balding branches, but it was otherwise a lot like all the others they'd stayed at. The woman behind the front desk seemed unassuming, didn't flinch when John muttered 'christo' under his breath, just looked at him funny. John paid for that night and the next, really hoping he wouldn't need longer because that would mean another person dead.
The boys followed him in a trail to the motel room, Sam's feet dragging even with Dean carrying one handle of his duffle because it was way past five-year-old bedtime. Plain sheets, tacky wallpaper, stains on the carpet from John-didn't-want-to-know-what, both the nightstands with ring marks on them from mugs of coffee. The only real variety between motels were the weird showers: just when he thought they’d seen every permutation of water on, water off, hot and cold, they'd discover some new esoteric configuration of nobs and buttons, so sometimes John wasn't quite sure if he was doing it wrong or the hot water wasn't working.
He checked the closet and bathroom for intruders as Dean fiddled with the heater, because it was exactly as cold as John was expecting it to be, and he could see Dean clenching his jaw to stop his teeth chattering. Sam flopped down next to Dean and the heater, eyes half open. "Need me to put down salt, sir?" Dean asked, looking up as John exited the bathroom after confirming it was empty.
"No, not much protection we can put up this time." Dean nodded, before laying a hand against the heater, and Sam copied. Dean had gotten a lot more serious since the shtriga incident back in Fitchburg, and John thanked his lucky stars because he didn't think he could handle a repeat: he'd been a fucking wreck after he dropped them off at Jim Murphy's. There had been a brief period where John got so fucking scared leaving them on their own, unsure if he could trust Dean to keep Sam safe, and he hated how angry it had made him, both at Dean and himself. The first month after he picked them up had been a rough one.
"That heater working?" John asked.
"Not sure." John scrubbed at his eyes, which were dry after a day of driving.
"Give it a few minutes." Dean nodded as Sammy slumped against him, closing his eyes. Worst case scenario, they had the extra blankets in the Impala, they'd all had a lot worse.
They set about unpacking, though Sammy required some encouraging and mostly just seemed to want to curl up under the covers with his jacket on. The heater wound up not working, even after repeated rounds of unplugging and re-plugging, hitting the side of it, and plugging it into different outlets, so John ceded defeat, tossed Dean the keys, and told him to get the blankets out the trunk, because John seriously doubted they were going to get another room without any additional cost.
John wasn't planning on sleeping, felt like he shouldn't have slept in the car the previous night, so the blankets were piled over the boys' bed and he stayed up to read over newspaper reports and check his gear to the thudding of sleet against the window.
-
John left the boys early in the morning to talk to the cops. He'd spent most of the night listening out for any possible signs of the werewolf on the unhappy chance it decided to pay their motel a visit, but they'd only just arrived so they weren't at too great a risk. Still, it never hurt to make sure, especially with something like a werewolf. Dean woke up a few times - he'd started doing that again since Fitchburg - but the night was otherwise uneventful. Sometimes John worried Dean was turning into him, but it was better that than dead.
He woke Dean up before he left around six, patting his ankle and murmuring his name so he didn't wake Sammy up as well. Dean groaned as he cracked his eyes open, before he snapped mostly to attention, as much as he could at the early hour. "Do we need to go?" Dean asked, voice still rough from sleep.
"No, kiddo, but I need to go talk with the cops. I'm gonna leave you with the shotgun: it's got five silver slugs in it, and there's another five on your nightstand. I don't think anything'll come in during the day, but just in case." Dean rubbed his face and sat up, trying to hide the fact he was yawning.
"If anything comes in, shoot first and ask questions later," Dean recited without prompting.
"Attaboy. Just watch out for the recoil on that shotgun, it'll be pretty bad." Dean nodded, obviously trying to keep the apprehension off his face. "I should be back before midday. If I'm not back by six tomorrow morning, you know who to call."
"Pastor Jim." John patted Dean's shoulder, and Dean gave a tense smile.
"Yep. Right, I've got to go," he stated, getting up off the edge of Dean's bed. Sammy was still asleep behind Dean, comforter pulled right up to his chin so all John could see was a head of scruffy, brown hair.
"Stay safe, sir." John wished he didn't have to go, that he could stay in the motel room with his sons and not spend the next several hours of his life combing over a mutilated corpse, then talking to useless witnesses and even more useless cops, but then he'd be letting what happened to him happen to other people, and he physically couldn't do that.
"I'll do my best."
The cops were baffled, obviously. It was the usual story: they thought it was an animal attack but they didn't know what did it or why the heart had been ripped out. John managed to strong-arm his way into seeing the body, just to confirm he was looking at a werewolf, and his assumption was almost immediately confirmed.
The victim was Michael Trenton: seventeen years old, high school student, did track and field. John had seen a lot of dead kids on his life, more than he'd ever wanted to see, but it never got easier in any reliable sense. It was an effort to tear his eyes away from Michael Trenton's slack, wide-eyed face to focus on his chest, where his heart had been ripped out. He should have been used to it, but he still felt his hands shake, because it must have hurt, because he didn't have to imagine what Michael's last moments looked like.
John tried to detach, to look at the body and not Michael. The injuries were consistent with most werewolf attacks: the kid had been torn to ribbons. Hell, he probably saw his own guts before he finally died, after there wasn't a heart left to pump blood, and that was to say nothing of the great, arm-width hole in Michael's chest, through which John could see the stainless steel tray the kid was laying on. God, his parents had to be in hell. Dean briefly merged with Michael, and John abruptly decided he'd seen enough.
John barrelled into the bathroom to lean white-knuckled over the sink, taking hard, deliberate breaths in and out. He splashed water on his face, trying to quell the growing nausea as sweat built beneath his jacket and his fucking hands wouldn't stop shaking. Sam and Dean were alive, Michael was not, he needed to focus.
"Get it together," John muttered under his breath, leaning his head against the mirror. "Come on, you've got a job to do, get it together."
It was over for Michael, and there was nothing John could do for the kid or his family, but he could still save whoever was next, though in order to do that he'd need to stop losing his shit in the station bathroom. He still had to do interviews, talk to the kid's friends and family, see if he could predict the next attack. He needed to have his head in the game. Not for the first time, he resented that it had to be him.
Eventually, John dragged himself out the bathroom. He wasn't normal, but he reckoned he could hold his shit together enough to talk to people without anyone noticing something was off. The drive would help, he told himself, like navigating small towns with one way systems and on-street parking wasn’t a giant pain in the ass in its own right.
-
After rounding up testimonies from witnesses, family, and scouting out the area where the attack had been, John returned to the motel fucking exhausted: he'd done twenty mile hikes less tiring. He'd only been hunting five years, and he still wondered if he was getting too old for it.
Sam and Dean knew enough to keep quiet and to themselves as he set about spreading maps and photos and stolen police reports over the motel table. Tonight, another person would die if he wasn't smart. Another kid would end up dead in a reefer. Another family would never be the same. Tired or not, he needed answers.
He threw himself entirely into reading and marking up maps and scribbling notes until his eyes hurt and his head swam with details he knew were going to follow him whenever he was next forced to sleep. Dean made him coffee at some point, because he was a good kid, and for a second he couldn't get the image of Dean lying dead in Michael's place out of his head. He caught Dean's shoulder, still tiny and bony beneath John's hand, and Dean looked over in surprise. There were a lot of things he wanted to say: 'I love you', 'you know I'm proud of you, right?', 'I'm sorry', but he never said those sorts of things and he figured it would freak Dean out more than anything, so instead he just patted Dean's shoulder and thanked him for the coffee.
He sent Dean to the store and they ate box mac 'n cheese: John reckoned it would be a little while until he could stomach meat.
That night, he waited out in the same place the werewolf had killed the previous night, his hours of work having resulted in no better guess. The bastard never showed, and in the early hours he got a call saying a woman who worked at a local diner, Daisy Jenkins, had been found dead with her heart torn out. She was engaged, another few months off of being Daisy Price. He'd have been lying if he'd said he hadn't thought of Mary.
John trudged back down the hiking trail towards the Impala. His ribs were killing him as he struggled with the incline and undergrowth, he could barely feel his toes and all he could think about was that he'd fucked up, and now another person was dead. It was still dark on the drive back, so the Christmas lights were on, only they seemed inappropriately jovial, like a karaoke machine at a funeral.
He went straight to see the body, and it was basically what he was expecting: brutal, heart torn out. At least there was a body, thought a horrible part of him.
He stumbled back the hotel at around six in the morning. Knocked twice, paused, knocked twice more, and a few moments later he heard movement from inside followed by Dean unlatching the door. He'd clearly been asleep, but for a second he was looking at John unadulterated relief and joy, mouth open to ask something. One look at John's face, and Dean dropped whatever he was about to ask, expression serious again, locking the door once John was inside.
John dropped down onto the chair next to the table where a day's frantic work was splayed out, a day's work that had amounted to absolutely nothing. Daisy Jenkins' slashed up face was stuck in his head like a splinter. If he'd just... done something, she would probably still be alive. Maybe it was his scent at the werewolf's previous spot that had scared it off. Maybe it had never intended to return to that same spot, and there was a link between the victims.
John sunk his face into his hands. He was going to have to talk to Daisy's fiancé later, he was going to have to look that man in the eye knowing he should have saved his girl.
"You did your best," Dean said, eventually, and John pulled his face out of his hands, feeling wrung out and useless.
"My best doesn't always keep people alive, kiddo," John murmured into the dark motel room, the only light coming from the street lamps outside.
"Not your fault, it's the monster's fault." John smiled, eyes stinging with tears and chest even heavier with someone else's grief rested on top of his own. Dean looked much older than he should, sat opposite John one knee drawn up to his chest. He was a good kid, John wished he could explain that without it sounding strange.
"I guess so." John got up to rifle through his duffle, to find the cheap whiskey he usually kept for dealing with wounds. Just a bit, he reasoned, so Michael Trenton and Daisy Price weren't burnt into the backs of his eyelids. Dean looked so goddamn worried.
"Just... go back to bed, Dean. I'll be alright." Dean hesitated, but John had raised him to listen to instructions.
"Yes sir."
-
David Price was the werewolf, John was almost certain. He'd swung wildly from jumpy to aggressive the whole time John was talking to him, and there were deep shadows under his eyes from where he'd spent the night hunting rather than sleeping. When John pressed, he said he'd gotten mugged, or attacked, by something that he kept insisting was a person despite his description trending towards the animalistic.
More damning still, planning his wedding had been driving a wedge between him and his fiancée, and he had been Michael Trenton's woodworking teacher when the Michael was still alive: apparently, the kid had been a pain in the ass, however reluctant Price was to admit it in the wake of Michael's death. John could have been out of there in half an hour at most if he hadn't had to sit through Price having a breakdown.
It wasn’t a pleasant conversation, and between that, the whiskey, and the fact that he hadn't slept much more than Price had, he was nursing a headache by the time he got back to the motel room to find Sam whining about being hungry and Dean clearly trying not to look pleading. He gave Dean five dollars and told him to take Sam with him, which bought twenty minutes of peace.
John was restless the whole day, waiting for it to start getting dark so he could stake out Price's apartment. The boys were bored: Dean kept Sam entertained for a bit, but it was the second day in the motel and Sam must have read his stupid dinosaur book nigh on a hundred times, so he started hassling Dean. It was normal kid stuff, but John was at the end of his rope and he could just feel the frustration brewing inside him. The motel clerk banged on their door around eleven, telling them to either pay for another night or get out, and John nearly bit her head off
He tuned them out as best he could, tried to focus on making a plan, working out where Price was most likely to go, what gear he should bring. He could technically have shot Price then and there, but he wanted to be sure: he'd... he'd got it wrong in the past, been too hasty, and he didn't want a repeat.
The headache from earlier didn’t go away, just got worse as Sam and Dean started squabbling about god knows what, probably nothing. He could feel the pain spiking just behind his eyes, a mounting pressure like expanding foam inside his skull. He needed to make sure there was no third victim.
He'd have to leave the boys alone as well, and there was a not insignificant chance Price was going to follow his scent back to the motel, and that thought chilled him. Dean's aim had gotten a lot better since he started, but he'd clammed up going against that shtriga, and a werewolf was on a whole different level.
Finally, John heard scuffling from behind him, and when he twisted round in his seat he saw Dean pinning a crying Sam to the floor. Neither of them had noticed him looking, Dean was still yelling, something about food John didn't have the context for, Sam was just wailing, and all of it cut straight through John's head like an ice pick.
The words barrelled out of him before he had any time to temper them. "Dean, get the hell off your brother right now!" Dean's head snapped over to him, eyes wide, letting go of Sam barely a second later as he backed up. Sam's sobbing rapidly tapered off, and for the first time in nearly an hour, there was silence.
"Sam, outside." Sam, flinched, but hesitated long enough to throw Dean a backward glance. Dean gave a single nod, and Sam was out the door before John even had time to blink, leaving he and Dean alone. Dean, who was looking everywhere other than him, jaw clenched and body rigid as John advanced. He couldn't get the image of Sam and Dean dead at the hands of Price out of his head, and if Sam and Dean were fighting...
"Dean, look at me," John snapped. Dean sucked in a sharp breath, but did as he was told. "You're nine, you cannot be fighting with Sammy." Dean, just briefly, was about to open his mouth but one look shut him right up.
"Listen, because this is important: I'm going out hunting tonight, and I need to know you're gonna keep Sammy safe. It's a werewolf so it's fast, and I don't know that I'll be able to get back in time if it comes here, so you cannot be fighting with your brother, you hear me?" Dean nodded, but John needed to be sure, that what he was saying had sunk in. "Do you hear me?" He repeated, and Dean took another sharp breath.
"Yes sir." He was scared, and John hated himself but he knew that meant Dean understood. John backed off, opening the motel door.
"Good. Five laps round the motel. Do not let me catch you doing that again." There was a barely audible 'yes sir' before Dean followed his brother outside.
John shut the door then slumped back over the table, running a hand through his hair and scrubbing at his dry eyes. He didn't like scaring his boys, of course he didn't but he had to be sure Dean knew what was at stake, because he hadn't been certain since Fitchburg. Ultimately, he would rather they be scared of him than dead.
-
At six o'clock, John left for Price's house. It was a bit outside of town, and at the bottom of a long lane. John parked near the top, then went the rest of the way on foot because the Impala's engine wasn't exactly quiet, so would stick out a like a sore thumb without the sound of any other passing cars.
It was dark and slippery underfoot: most of the lane was gritted, so you could get a car down it if you went two miles per hour with your heart in your mouth, but in the dark it was hard to tell where you were safe to put your foot down and John nearly cracked his head open on the ice a few times. It was also fucking cold, the air itself damp and icy, sneaking in underneath John’s coat and cutting straight through his jeans.
Picking his way along the grassy verge, John crept down towards Price's house, nursing the shotgun and wishing he owned a thicker jacket. He guessed it was about seven by the time he reached the bottom, but he couldn't see his watch, nor could he exactly risk pulling out his torch just to check the time. The lights were on inside Price's house, and John could see him sat at the table with a bottle of something, brandy maybe, though it was hard to say from a distance. John crouched down in amongst the bushes, trying to get comfortable as he could in the wet, frigid weather. He really hoped it wasn't going to rain, otherwise he was in for a hell of an evening.
Technically, it was kind of early, it would likely be another few hours until Price turned. Unfortunately, as best as John and everyone else he'd ever asked could tell, there wasn't a whole lot of consistency to when werewolves changed, and John couldn't risk arriving too late. Better to freeze his ass off waiting for Price to turn than let another person die.
At eleven o'clock, he heard screaming, and John was out of the bushes like a shot. He made straight for the front door, not bothering with lock-pick, just blowing the latch to pieces with the shotgun before getting knocked flat on his ass by a snarling, wolfed-out Price.
The world turned a sharp ninety degrees before John slammed against the ground, knocking the wind out of him and eliciting a great jolt of pain from his barely healed ribs.
Werewolves didn't act like people, more like they'd been possessed by some rabid animal, and Price wasted no more time than any hungry beast would before leaping out the door and into the night with John. In seconds, Price had him pinned against the floor, and John thought earnestly this was how he was going to die. He'd gotten stupid and reckless, and now he was going to join Daisy and Michael in the morgue with a great bloody pit in his chest and a face barely recognisable enough for a death certificate. Fuck knows what was going to happen to his body or his boys, and he was never going to get the thing that killed Mary.
Then something metallic caught his eye: his shotgun, just within arm's reach. Bracing his knee against the David's chest to buy him barely a second, he managed to grab for it, but not before David got a good swipe at his shoulder.
John fired, David went limp, and John let him drop onto the ground, panting hard and ears ringing. Beside him, he heard a whimper, and instantly his attention snapped back onto the werewolf, but the fangs and inhuman eyes were gone, and instead he was looking down at a man with a bleeding chest wound.
David Price stared up at John, confused, scared. His lips trembled, taking in jerky breaths, but his heart wasn't beating anymore so it wasn't going to do shit. David tried to speak, but it was only stammers, could have been 'help' if John had to guess. "I've already called an ambulance. Just... take it easy until it gets here," John lied, before sitting up with a grunt. David's head twitched in what might have been a nod, before his eyes slipped closed and he stopped breathing. He was dead, and John didn’t feel vastly better for it.
John hauled himself up onto the doorstep and sat next to David, hands shaking, shoulder starting to sting something fierce, ribs throbbing every time he tried to draw a breath. He'd nearly died, again, nearly left his boys orphans when it was almost Christmas. For at least the two-hundredth time, he wondered if it was worth it, if he shouldn't just pack it in, make this hunt his last.
John looked over at David, seeing the first flake of snow since he'd arrived come to settle on the man’s slack face: the bastard had killed two people and didn't even seem to have known it. He would have got it, if John had only been able to explain. Snow began to fall proper, soon covering up David's body, covering up the lane down, probably covering up the roads.
He needed to go: gun shots carried, so he couldn't risk sticking around on the off-chance someone heard, his shoulder was bleeding, and he guessed his body was probably cold. He vaguely imagined what would happen if he got caught, the cops clipping cuffs around his wrists and forcing him into the car. Would he get the asylum or the electric chair, John wondered.
John dragged himself back up the lane, secured an old rag around his shoulder, and drove back to the motel with barely any conscious input. More perhaps than all the physical needs of not getting arrested and fixing up his shoulder, he needed to see his boys again, just to prove there something nice worth staying in the world for.
He knocked twice on the motel door, waited as long as could bear, then knocked again. A moment later, he heard clumsy movement from inside (he dreaded the day he heard nothing), before Dean undid the latch and opened the door, hair sticking up where he'd been lying on it and trying badly to hide the fact that he was yawning.
John knelt down and pulled Dean into a hug, feeling Dean stiffen momentarily in surprise, before a small pair of arms wrapped most of the way around his back. "Did it go bad?" Dean asked, or more whispered, really. John smiled, throat tight.
"No, the monster's dead, just a tough hunt."
"You're really cold," Dean murmured, and John pulled back and ruffled Dean's hair.
"Snowing outside."
"Are you hurt?" Dean asked, face too worried for a kid his age.
"Just a scratch." John followed Dean inside, shutting the door as Dean flicked on the lights and hauled over the first aid kit.
"Does it need stitches?" Dean has already fishing out the whiskey when John emerged after washing his hands.
"Looks like it." Dean nodded, sterilising the needle with the lighter then threading it without John even needing to ask. He was a good kid, John thought wearily.
John grit his teeth through pulling his shirt off, taking a few mouthfuls of the whiskey before rinsing the wound out with gritted teeth, and he'd just begun to highly unpleasant process of stitching his shoulder up when there was bleary 'is dad back?' from Sam.
"I'm back, Sammy. Just go to sleep: we'll need to leave tomorrow morning." It was matter of time before David Price's death was linked back to him, so he couldn't risk sticking around. He wished he could, he wished he could sleep in the next morning, take the boys out on one of the walking trails, find a job, but he also couldn't get arrested: for then at least his boys still needed him.
John slept about two hours before they were on the road again. He still felt off, kept getting caught up in his thoughts, and the sort of tired that made any higher brain functions borderline impossible. His shoulder was killing him. He admitted defeat about four hours in when he nearly got them T-boned pulling out of a junction.
Figuring they'd probably gone far enough, and that the news had said nothing about David's death meaning they had a head start, John found them somewhere to pull over. They got the blankets out the trunk again, and John lay down on the front bench, the early morning sun cutting pale and sharp through the Impala's windows. He'd sleep a few hours, hopefully wake up more with it, and drive until they were out of Colorado and he could find them a new motel.
As he lay back on the Impala's front bench, he imagined what it would be like to stop, to settle down in one place, get a job, put his boys through college. Sam and Dean would be able to make friends without the constant uprooting, John would be able to sleep in a bed without a torn open shoulder or cracked ribs or whatever other injury he'd sustained was. A few people (Jim Murphy and Bobby singer, mostly) had implied it would be a good idea. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine a world where he gave up and everything worked out.
John didn't dream, thank god, just woke up feeling barely any less tired than he had been when he went to sleep. Sam and Dean were chattering in the back, about how Sam couldn't say 'spaghetti' as best as John could tell. How they always found things to talk about, John didn’t know.
“Spag," Dean began.
"Spag," Sam mimicked.
"Get."
"Get."
"Ee."
"Ee."
"Spaghetti."
"Skapetti." John felt himself smile, as Dean started on about how Sam wasn't saying it right, and Sam argued he was, or at least he was saying what Dean was saying, and how 'spaghetti' was hard to say. Still half contemplating some pastoral life where he gave away his shotguns and picked up mechanic work again, John sat up with a grunt of pain. His neck and ribs ached, and he could feel every tiny shift of his shoulder like a knife. Hunting was doing none of them any favours, and the knowledge that he'd so nearly never seen his boys again the previous night was making him think more than he cared to about his path in life. Maybe, if he wasn't hunting, he could summon the willpower and time to give his boys some sort of Christmas.
"Morning," came Dean's voice from the back. John squinted at his watch.
"At two in the afternoon?" That was a lot longer than he'd meant to sleep for, but at least he'd slept, that wasn't a given.
"Yeah, well..."
"I'm kidding. You boys hungry?" Dean said 'a bit, sir' the same time as Sam said 'I could eat an entire dinosaur', followed by a delayed 'sir', probably after Dean nudged him.
"Right, we can stop by a gas station." John made himself get out to put the blanket back in the trunk and stretch his legs, then turned on the radio when he got back in, to check again if they'd found David's body.
"-Monticello resident, Brian King has been found dead in his apartment with no signs of forced entry. Local police are ruling the death a suicide, despite the extent of King's injuries. The mysterious death has put the renovations of the historic apartment building on hold." Dean made eye contact with John in the rearview mirror. Monticello was just a few hours drive, though a ghost hunt meant a lot of research and might well end with him working over Christmas. John scrubbed at his face. Maybe just this one last hunt, John was sure he could make it up to them.