Chapter Text
John watched the home Mary had made for him and his boys burn, and he knew two things. One: he would do whatever it took to keep the same thing from happening to either of the sons in his arms, and two: he was going to kill whatever had taken Mary from him. The police asked him questions he couldn’t answer and warned him he’d have to come in to ID the body tomorrow. He was numb when the fire marshal came over and told him he’d have to find another place to stay since the structural integrity would need a lot of work before anyone could safely live there. He didn’t feel grateful when the man told him the “good news” that they’d entirely saved the left side of the house. He gathered the meager items he’d been able to grab as he’d run from the house and got the boys into the Impala. The smell of the house would haunt him as badly as his time in Vietnam.
Both boys fell asleep fairly quickly once he’d checked into the motel he’d been exiled to on more than one occasion before, but John sat in front of the door to their room hands in fists in his lap, terrified. He’d seen her on the ceiling. There hadn’t been anything to start the fire on her, and it hadn't moved right. Hardly-there memories flashed through his mind as he tried to come up for an explanation for her gravity defying end. He didn’t know what to think. None of it made sense.
Reality came crashing down with Sam’s hungry cries four hours later. John moved automatically picking him up and preparing his bottle one-handed. When he turned around with Sam sucking away, he saw Dean staring silently at him. For a moment, his heart broke again, and it all felt like too much for one man to bear. Then he locked it all down, pushing himself back into his previous shock, because they needed him. They needed him to be strong. He put Sam back on the bed next to Dean once he’d had drunk his fill and dropped back off to sleep. He watched Dean snuggle close immediately, wrapping his small arms around his brother. John checked the clock and reached for the room’s phone.
Keeping a tight lid on his emotions, he typed in the number for the garage.
“Guenther's Auto Repair, you’re speaking to Mike.”
How can the world just keep spinning?
“You gonna say something?”
John shoved the thought from his mind and cleared his throat. “It’s John.”
“You gonna tell me why you aren’t here yet? It’s 6:30.”
Say it. You have to say it. Just fucking say it! “You seen the news today?”
“No, I’m still opening the place ‘cause I’m doing it on my own.”
“There was a fire. Mary’s dead. I need to leave the kids with Kate, so I can go to the station. They said they needed a statement from me.” His voice sounded flat and emotionless.
The line was silent and then he heard, “Jesus. Jesus! John are you okay?! The boys?”
“Yeah, not a scratch on us, but I gotta leave them someplace safe for a couple hours.”
“Goddamn! Yeah. Of course. I’ll call ahead. You just get ‘em over there.”
He let the phone drop back in its cradle and focused on the next step.
There were a lot of next steps. He made sure he thanked Kate as she took Sam from him, but leaving the boys there felt like tearing a piece of himself off. The interview at the station was demeaning and traumatic as he described things they clearly didn’t know what to make of, but he got through it without incriminating himself or crying. Mike showed up to be a second identifier for Mary's body and held his shoulder as the dam finally broke and tears streamed down his face at the sight of her burned out husk. There were papers to sign and arrangements to be made, but Mike made him go back to his house insisting they could make funeral arrangements tomorrow. Some of the dreadful tension twisting his organs eased once he had Sam safe in his arms and eyes on Dean again, but he was still choking back tears the rest of the evening. He didn’t sleep that night either.
The next day he moved on autopilot, forcing food down and following Mike as they went to a funeral home, back to the station, and finally to the store. He said the necessary words, made sure the arrangements would be convenient for relatives, and paid the necessary bills but didn’t let any of it mean anything to him. When he got back to Mike’s, sheer exhaustion pushed him into sleep, but he woke up a few hours later from dreams of flames and Mary’s screams to see Dean wrapped around Sam in his new crib. He cried helplessly, stifling his sobs as best as he could. How is this real? How can this be real? But he knew it was real. He’d just forgotten the smell of burning flesh and friends dying around him because they’d just happened to be two feet to his right.
Friday, he walked into the home he and Mary had chosen together and discovered the safe with everything valuable had been destroyed as well as most of the contents of their bedrooms. It felt targeted; it felt like something wanted to ruin him with extreme prejudice. He walked out with a small box of clothes, a few photos, and his father’s old diary which, luckily, had been on the other side of the house. It wasn’t enough. The loss of the jewelry and bonds hurt, but the loss of Mary’s journals was devastating. All that history was just gone, leaving him as the last living record of her memory for the last eight years. Mike offered for him to stay at their place, but he wasn’t sure if there were relatives that would be better for the boys. He called them all (not that they had many), took a set of clothes and some of the pictures to the funeral home, and put a piece about Mary in the local obituaries. All day he repeated over and over, “It happened so fast.” “I tried to get her, but the flames were too strong.” “Yeah, thank God the boys are alright.”
He didn’t thank God.
Saturday was hard. Dean still wouldn’t speak, and John felt pathetic standing there hearing condolences from people he wasn’t close to and couldn’t possibly understand his pain. A few cousins offered help in a vague way that left him unclear enough not to ask for it. The service the next day was even harder. He refused to cry for them, to put on a show. He clad his heart in iron, holding Sam close and letting Dean cry into his leg. They need strength.
After, there were whispered conversations and thinly veiled encouragements to hand off his sons to married relatives that would be able to give them a full home. John bore them in silence, part of him wondering if they were right. But the thought of losing the boys inspired near panic. The threat of it was enough that he wrote his first journal entry in his dad’s diary that night. He knew he needed to get a handle on his emotional state if he was going to come out of this with custody of his children, and he knew that he wouldn’t bear being without them. He needed them just like they needed him.
The next ten days John lived in flux. Mike didn’t push him to come back to the garage and still cut him a check when payroll went out. He vacillated between the motel and Mike's house while trying to figure out what to do with the half-burned shell he used to call home. There were a few more calls from aunts and cousins; but, when he made it clear he wouldn’t be parted from the remains of his family, they stopped. Every night he re-lived the nightmare, and every day he gnawed at the situation, unable to decide the best move without Mary’s advice. He drank to hide from the pain of it and to drown out Sam’s cries.
On the seventeenth, he went back to the house alone, one more time, and let himself feel the loss of her. He wandered the rooms remembering the places they’d fought, where they’d danced, the way she’d looked holding Dean the first day he’d come home after his birth, the walls they’d made love against. Then he reached the nursery, and new memories loomed large along with that awful, haunting smell. No. I won’t make them live here. I can’t. It just doesn’t make sense! He’d thought he was a civie again, safe from the insanity he’d experienced in the far east. More and more, it felt like the war had moved, like it had returned for him.
He went back to Mike’s; and, when they offered him their guest room, he said yes. He moved what little he’d wanted to save in and called a realtor for the house. He told Mike the real story of that night over whiskey, and his friend’s reaction was enough that he didn’t bring it up again. But saying it out loud had reminded him of the strangeness of it and his oath to find out what did it. He left the boys in Kate’s care more often, asking questions of the police, when he wasn’t working, and drinking like he had when he’d first come back from Vietnam whenever the restless sleep of his sons woke him. The half-remembered stories came back to haunt him, and paranoia set in even more. He knew the drinking wasn’t helping, but he didn’t know another way to get through the sound of Sam’s cries and Dean’s solemn, too knowing eyes. Fear kept him close to them, and they kept him drinking.
A third of the way through December, Mike’s subtle nudges to get back to ‘pull himself together’ became intolerable. He stopped going to the garage but stayed at their place at Kate’s insistence. He couldn’t lose himself to normal life when he had what felt like a threat hanging over his head, over his boys’ heads. He knew what he’d seen, it hadn’t been normal. Frustration with the police led him to take matters into his own hands. He knew he made a pitiful picture, desperately asking for any information, but that didn’t seem to make much of a difference to the people he’d once called neighbors. People started whispering again. Friends started avoiding him or outright calling him crazy, and the fire station cut him loose with a few last items they’d retrieved from the house and some bullshit explanations for the fire. But he felt the threat, and he knew Dean felt the threat. Something had come after his family, and there was no guarantee it was going to stop. The war had moved. The police irritably gave him what information they had, but they didn’t believe him. So, he went looking for someone who would.
Missouri Moseley was a Godsend. She believed every word. She knew. She brought his boys under her protection, and he got to hear Dean chatter away like he hadn’t for nearly two months. She was the only person who could have convinced him to step back into the house, and there she found a kind of an answer for him. The threat was real. Something Evil had come for his family, and it hadn’t left yet. She hadn’t been more specific and said she couldn’t be. She said it was something stronger than what she’d dealt with before, something dangerously supernatural. It felt like the answer he’d been searching for. A part of the cloud lifted, and he started to feel like maybe he could get a handle on this new war. At the very least, there were others who knew about it.
Mike questioned him. Kate questioned him. They kept pushing him to return to ‘normal’ life, to work a ‘normal’ job, or at least to leave the boys with them. Then they cast aspersions on the one person who’d made him feel sane again, and he had to leave. He had to know who had done this, so he could keep them from doing it again. It had been in Sam’s room. They stayed in the motel again while he researched whatever he could on the occult at the library and thought about next steps. There wasn’t much. Then Christmas came, and he tried for his boys, holding back tears while he bought the crappy plastic tree and putting on a smile while Dean opened his presents with a token amount of enthusiasm. His Christmas surprise was the detective working on Mary’s case calling to say the case was closed.
That night after the boys had gone to sleep wrapped around each other like they were more often than not now, a future played out in his mind. He saw himself getting an apartment and hiring a babysitter. He saw himself working in the garage surrounded by men who thought he was crazy in a place where his friends had abandoned him. He saw himself sending Dean to Kindergarten and maybe putting Sam in preschool. He saw himself standing on the side of a little league diamond carrying a screaming baby all alone while the other parents whispered about ‘that poor crazy widower, Bless.’ And all the while, day by day, the memory of Mary would drain from them; the angry, bleeding wound would scar over to be revisited on special nights when the boys wondered ‘where is mommy?’ or ‘why don’t we have a mommy like so and so?’ Until the mystery of her death became something to ruminate on until it came back.
As he wrote down his thoughts in a way he was quickly becoming accustomed to, he realized he didn’t want to follow that path. He couldn’t. Someday, it might come back; and, if he followed that path, he’d be as helpless as he’d been that night, the night he’d lost the one woman he’d loved with his entire being. Their marriage hadn’t been perfect, but he’d always loved her, always been faithful to her. She’d been the one constant light in his life since he’d met her. Her loss was a hole in his being, in his boys’ being. He couldn’t bring her back, but he could revenge her. And along the way he’d learn how to protect his sons; he’d make them safe. He’d prepare them for whatever war had come upon them.
The future he imagined over the next few days was dark and twisting, full of blind curves and roads shrouded in mist, but it was a future he could live with. For his New Year’s resolution, he decided he would find out what happened to Mary.