Archive of Our Own

An out-of-his-head cartographer draws an impossible map. —Rogue Valley, “Hummingbird”

…where the mapmaker sits bent over his slanted desk, touching the contours of the earth with the tip of his pen. —Billy Collins, “Mappamundi”

For days and days there’s silence, broken only by utilitarian grunts of Pit stop in ten or You take first shower. Under the wheels the sound of the road and nothing else. Lucky for them it’s easy, lucky for them they surpassed the need for spoken language long long ago. Dean understands, knows it’s exactly like his father to withdraw when he doesn’t get his way, when he’s grieving. Even so, on mile three hundred, on mile six hundred and twelve, on mile eight hundred and twenty-nine, Dean looks at John and longs to speak it out. He left me too. But I’m here. I’m still here.

***

Then, in a nameless bar off I-10, two and a half weeks after Sam left them, John starts talking. He starts and he doesn’t stop, not when the bartender kicks them out because it’s three a.m. and past closing, or in the car on the way back to the motel. He doesn’t stop at the motel, even after Dean shuts himself in the bathroom and starts running the tap. He talks about past jobs, he lists the names of other hunters who’ve screwed him over. He recounts the story of buying the Impala, how he’d been this close to blowing his hard-earned savings on a piece of crap VW bus. He talks like Dean hasn’t heard him talk in years. Animated, manic. He laughs. Dean sits down on the lid of the toilet and presses his palms over his ears.

In none of his talking does John ever mention Sam.

In his dreams his son still leaves. He leaves in a hundred different ways. He leaves in the middle of the night or he walks away as they’re stopped at a gas station. He leaves without warning or he tells them he’s going in three weeks and then counts down the days. Sometimes he takes his brother with him. From those dreams John wakes up sweating and terrified, the weight of his aloneness like a boot on his windpipe and he chokes and cries out until he remembers, until Dean, across the room, says Dad? It’s okay. It was just a dream.

One morning after a particularly bad night Dean wakes to John sitting at the small table by the door, already dressed, duffle packed and ready at his feet.

“Okay,” John says. He wrings his hands. “This is how it is now. We got work to do, so let’s do it.”

The room is freezing cold. Dean pulls the matted fleece blanket to his neck, and for the length of a breath allows himself to wonder what Sam’s doing at this exact moment. Goosebumps break out over his skin, then he pushes the thought away. Away, away.

He stands up out of bed, wraps his arms around his stomach, nods to his dad. “Yes, sir.”

Rising dawn on a barren stretch of I-90 East toward Cody. These days John plans out hunts two, three in advance; downtime does neither of them good and anyway there’s always someone who needs saving. Dean doesn’t complain. He obeys every directive John gives him and at night he cleans John’s gun till it shines in the muffled light of the motel room.

John pushes eighty-five miles an hour, then ninety, then ninety-five. Registers Dean’s anxious gaze on him and right before the gauge ticks over a hundred he eases off.

Dean holds a newspaper article open in his lap. “So you’re thinking werewolf?”

John shrugs. “Vics’ got missing hearts.” He waits for the voice from the backseat to chime in demanding reassurance that they aren’t wasting their time on a guess and of course no voice comes. His eyes flick to the rearview mirror for the thousandth time and for the thousandth time it reflects back only empty space.

“Yeah,” Dean says. “Looks like.”

Merle Haggard sings low on the radio but this far out the station’s mostly static. The fuzz fills John’s head, makes him antsy. He reaches forward and shuts it off. “Wyoming’s already gettin’ cold this time of year. Thinking we’ll drop by Salvation Army in Bozeman, pick up some gear. Gloves, thermal socks. Mine aren’t warm for shit.” He can’t remember the last time they bought new clothes.

“Okay.”

John looks over at his son and holds there a second and then turns back to the road. “Hey,” he says. “You been up all night. Why don’t you get some sleep. I’ll wake you when we get to Bozeman.”

Dean’s shoulders sag like he’s been waiting all along for permission. He folds the newspaper and leans his head against the window and their eyes meet briefly and John nods. Feels the familiar clench in his gut that comes always when he looks at his boys.

***

Two days later they track the pack to a cave on Rattlesnake Mountain, an alpha with three malnourished betas who look barely eighteen and who hold their hands up in surrender when Dean points his gun toward them. Earlier John had agreed to let him have this one but now Dean’s wide-eyed and frozen and John says, “Do it, Dean,” but still he doesn’t and John sees the way his finger twitches a hairsbreadth off the trigger and without speaking he moves his son gently aside and takes each one of the pleading wolves out.

Into the dark of the room he says, “I’m sorry.” He knows his dad’s awake because he keeps flipping from his stomach to his back and his breathing is a little bit ragged. “I don’t know why I—” Dean digs his fists into his eyes but it does nothing to dispel the image of those kids with their hands up, begging him not to shoot. We’re starving. You don’t understand. They’d looked so much like just kids. They’d cried. He’d never seen a monster cry. “I would’ve done it,” he says, some futile attempt to reassure himself that he isn’t actually this fucking weak.

John stills in his bed but for a long minute doesn’t say anything. Then, “Sometimes monsters don’t look like monsters. Doesn’t mean they’re not.”

Dean absorbs that for the admonishment it is and nods his burning cheek against his pillow. “Yes, sir.”

“But that’s also why we do this as a team. Okay?” This time when John speaks his voice is soft, more gracious than Dean’s used to, than he deserves.

“Okay.”

“Okay. So you gonna let it go?”

He feels a pull at his throat and swallows hard. He knows why he can’t forgive himself this but neither can he admit it out loud. He rolls over onto his side, listens to his dad’s breaths until they slow and even out.

There was the time Sam got real sick with a fever and bad shakes. He slept fitfully for two nights and sweated all over the sheets and wouldn’t eat or take a sip of water from the paper cup John held to his lips and John had thought it was bigger than he could handle and that he’d have to take him to the emergency room. Dean was spending some time with Pastor Jim because he’d done some shit that would’ve gotten him arrested had he not been under eighteen and John had told him No son of mine will act like that even though what it was he’d done he’d done for the three of them. Truthfully Dean had always been a better doctor than John and on the third day when Sam’s fever peaked John folded over and said I need you here into his knees. Then he laid a cool wet cloth on Sam’s forehead and brushed his wet hair back and Sam opened his eyes with effort and looked right at John and in the look was unmistakable fear and naked trust. Everything is moving he’d said and John had lifted him from the bed and brought him to the backseat of the car and told him he was going to be just fine. On the way to the hospital Sam threw up all over the floor. He said I’m sorry I’m sorry Dad it’s everywhere I couldn’t help it I’m sorry. And John’s anger had burst from him and he knew even then that it wasn’t toward Sam but toward everything else, all the circumstances of their lives. Dammit, Sam! Coulda warned me and I would’ve pulled over. John turned in his seat and he saw Sam hunched halfway to the floor with vomit on his chin and he was crying.

Endless hours in the car when there’s nothing to do but remember.

There’s a bone-burning to celebrate, bitch of one, so they stop at a bar on the way out of Lincoln. John orders for them and then picks up the conversation where they’d left it in the car. “So I get it, I do.” He’s amped, on edge, hiding a gash under his shirt. Dean had seen it happen, the ghost-thrown hammer lodging in John’s side. He’d knocked it out quick and turned away but not before Dean caught the blood soaking through. “Someone says they’re being haunted I’m inclined to believe ‘em too. But you gotta use discernment.” He massages his forehead, smears the dirt there. The smell of smoke on his jacket, in his hair. Dean could set his world to rights by the smell of burn on his dad. “Point is, you can’t be soft when it comes to this job. Those people woulda died if we had trusted that woman’s bullshit. You gotta...you gotta be able to see through the attention seekers.”

Dean nods, takes a long swig from the bottle in front of him. He knows this conversation because they’ve had it before. He knows his line. “The cry-wolfers.”

“Exactly,” John says, and drinks from his own. “Exactly. They’re everywhere, too. They’ll say anything. Produce anything. Any way they can make a buck. And it’ll be convincing as hell, suck you right in. Manipulation is what it is. But you know better. You and—” he breaks off abruptly and the phantom remainder of that sentence stabs through Dean. “You’d never fall for that shit.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Exactly right.” Another drink, half the bottle down already. “Anyway. Discernment, Dean. You remember that.” John turns to the game on the small TV hanging behind the bar.

“I know, Dad,” Dean says, just to shut him up. John’s back on his chatty streak but Dean doesn’t need the fucking lecture, like he’s still sixteen and doesn’t already know all this shit. He just wants his dad to tell him he’s hurt and ask for his help. But he won’t. Dean chugs the rest of his beer, waits till he goes easy in the head. Not drunk, not even halfway there, but braver than he’d otherwise be. “Dad,” he says, and then lets that float there a minute. He can sense the moment his dad’s attention is back on him, though John keeps his eyes on the TV. “You’re hurt.”

“What?”

“I saw.”

John shakes his head. “I’m fine.”

“At least let me look at it.” He reaches out, paws at the edge of John’s jacket.

John flinches, sucks air through his teeth. Good an admission as any.

“We got stuff at the motel. Please?”

He looks at Dean then and Dean’s heart rate kicks up. He’s starting to get clammy and pale around the mouth. They’re gonna be in deep shit if John needs blood. “Dammit. Fine, okay.” John groans to standing, nearly buckles. Dean catches his elbow, pulls John’s wallet out of his pocket and drops a ten on the counter.

By the time they get back to the motel John’s holding his side and not talking anymore. Dean leads him inside and sets him on the bed. He finds the first aid kit at the bottom of his bag, takes both towels from the rack in the bathroom and crouches on the carpet in front of John.

“I’m gonna cut your shirt, alright?”

John nods jerkily.

The shirt is soaked through but starting to dry, which Dean takes as a good sign that the bleeding has mostly stopped. He runs the small scissors up the fabric and then pulls both halves aside and examines the wound. “Okay,” Dean says. “Okay. It’s not so bad. Not as deep as I thought and doesn’t seem like it’s bleeding much anymore. Just a couple stitches.” He says it for his dad’s benefit as much as his own. He’s fine, gonna be fine. They’ve dealt with way worse before.

Dean wipes up most of the blood with one of the towels and starts threading, gentle as he can. John’s eyes are shut and his lips are drawn in but he doesn’t make a sound, just holds tight to the sleeve of Dean’s shirt as he works.

Two stitches from the end John says, “Sorry, kid.”

Dean shakes his head. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Nah, shoulda told you right away.”

Without looking up Dean says, “Why didn’t you?”

“I didn’t wanna…” he sighs. Dean watches the way the breath balloons his bare stomach. “I don’t know. Didn’t think it was that bad, I guess.”

“Doesn’t matter if it’s a scratch, Dad,” Dean says, the strength of his voice belying his anxiety, his fluttering nerves. “I need to know about it. I can’t help you if—” He lets his gaze flick up to meet his dad’s. John’s eyes are glassy, his expression contrite. Dean turns back down and finishes the stitches, then unwraps an antiseptic wipe and dabs the excess blood and water still left around the wound. He lingers when he’s done, doesn’t stand up, counts the scars all across John’s chest and arms and stomach. John stays still, breathes quietly. Dean catches on the wendigo scar bisecting his left shoulder and down his chest, remembers vividly the day it happened. How scared he and Sam had been. Without thought he reaches up and runs his finger down the mottled ridge of tissue, nearly six inches long and so so so close to his heart. He thinks You are all I have left.

“Number one indicator of a good partner,” John says, the words exhausted and thin. He tugs once on Dean’s sleeve. “He never takes his eyes off you.”

Dean’s chest swells, because he knows this is his dad’s way of saying sorry, of saying thank you. Also because it’s true, and it’s the first time John’s acknowledged it; Dean doesn’t take his eyes off him, not ever. He watches his dad—used to watch both of them—like he’ll disappear if Dean isn’t there to root him to ground.

At Dean’s insistence they rest the whole next day at the motel so John’s stitches can set a bit. Dean checks them every couple hours and dabs them with antibiotic ointment and changes the dressings and brings John cups of tepid water. John knows he should be grateful. It was beyond reckless of him to hide that he was hurt and he doesn’t even have a good reason for doing it. Could’ve landed them in a much worse spot if Dean hadn’t called him on it when he did. Number one indicator of a good partner, he’d said, he never takes his eyes off you. He’d meant it in the moment but by nightfall he’s claustrophobic and pissed off and still in pain despite four doses of ibuprofen and he can’t handle the way Dean just sits there and watches him like he’s an invalid, like five fucking stitches is the end of the world.

He pushes up on his hands and inches his legs over the side of the bed and just that little bit of movement hurts like a bitch and he holds back a groan. “Alright, I’m good now,” he says. “Let’s go.”

Dean looks alarmed. “Are you sure? Wouldn’t hurt to just sleep some and we can leave in the morn—”

“Been sleepin’ all day. Can’t stay here anymore.” He tosses stuff into his bag and steps into his shoes.

“Well—at least let me look at it one more time.”

John sighs and lifts his shirt and pulls the gauze away from the wound. Dean squats in front of him and touches the skin around the stitches with gentle fingertips. “Am I cleared for discharge, Doctor?” It comes out more biting than John means it to.

Dean replaces the gauze and stands and turns toward the door. “Yeah, whatever. I’ll get the bags.”

Dean starts keeping track of their route on the Rand McNally, logging each leg with a pen he finds in the glovebox. He doesn’t know why other than they’ve never moved like this in his life and he wants some record of the places they stop, even if it’s only for three hours to sleep. East on 90, south on 75, then 65, west on 30, south on 45 all the way to the gulf. Dean reads the frenzy in John’s white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel and it frightens him but he says nothing, just lets his father volley them across the country, away from one ghost and toward every other.

***

The house in Portland, Texas smells like seaweed. No furniture left behind by whoever lived here last so they roll out sleeping bags in the middle of the living room.

Dean runs a hand across the floor and it comes away gritty with sand and salt. “Look at that. House comes already ghost-proofed,” he says.

John scoffs. “Salt ‘em anyway.”

“I know.”

“That smell.” John makes a face. “Now I remember why I never come this far south.”

Dean walks the perimeter of the house, pouring salt across every threshold. He thinks of the last time they stayed near the coast, six years ago, the summer before Dean dropped out of school. Three days in Clearwater while John and Caleb chased a revenant through Tampa. He and Sam had found a secluded stretch of beach within walking distance of the motel and that first day they’d gotten so sunburned they could barely walk. They’d spent the next two days lying on their stomachs at the motel, Sam sorting the shells he’d collected by size and color and shape and pushing the larger ones against Dean’s ear so they could hear the ocean right there in their room.

When he’s done he comes back to the living room and kicks off his boots. John’s got jerky and a can of baked beans out on a napkin. The smell and the thickness of the air and the residue of the memory have killed Dean’s appetite so he eats as much as he can and then puts the rest aside. He says, “Remember that summer in Clearwater? Me and Sam got sunburned bad?” It’s a risk, bringing stuff like this out into the open, but neither of them has spoken Sam’s name out loud in weeks and Dean can’t fucking take it. “You were so pissed when you got back.”

The saltwater-bloated walls of the house creak and resettle. Dean waits and waits for his dad to say something and the longer the silence stretches out between them the more he regrets opening his stupid mouth.

“If you’re done eating, pack it up,” John says finally. “We’re out first thing in the morning.” He lies down on top of his sleeping bag, shoes and jacket still on, and turns his back to Dean.

The food turns in Dean’s stomach. He holds his breath while he wraps the jerky and tosses the can of baked beans into a trash bag. Then he drops the bag clanging to the floor, right by John’s head. John doesn’t flinch. Dean stares at his back, only a couple feet away but it’s like he’s not even in the room anymore for how far he burrows into himself.

That day he got back from Tampa he’d found the boys laid out on the floor, backs red and blistered. They were both in good moods, relaxed and smiling despite how much pain they were surely in and when they saw him walk through the door Sam winced his way to sitting and held up a handful of seashells and he said Come listen to the ocean! John was beat to hell and pissed because Caleb had flinched at the last second and let the revenant slip from his grasp and the thing had come at John and almost taken a bite out of his fucking neck.

The hell did you two do? The question was for both of them but he looked at Dean as he asked it and he knew Dean would take the blame even if it wasn’t his.

We found a beach and just lost track of time, Dean said, my fault.

And John had watched the ease and lightness leach from Dean’s body, had watched his shoulders creep up to his neck but in that moment John had no energy to deal and no mercy to spare. Woulda thought you were more responsible than that, he’d said.

Yes, sir. We are.

Sam had looked back and forth between the two of them and then lifted his cupped palms to John again. Can we take a few of them with us?

Leave them, he’d said. They’ll just get sand in the car.

Now John feels the press of the hard floor in his shoulder and his hip and his knee and he thinks he’s gonna be hurting like a bitch tomorrow and he thinks it’s nowhere near punishment enough.

He waits until John falls asleep and then he crouches down and pulls the gun from where John’s clutching it to his chest. He stirs but doesn’t wake.

Dean lays out the rag and bore brush and oil on the floor and strips the gun down to parts and he oils each one. His hands shake. Jabs once, twice, three times before the brush finds the inside of the barrel. He doesn’t try to still the shaking. He lets the gun have his anger. He moves slowly over every piece. It doesn’t matter. He has all the gaping night.

Tara laughs when she sees him. She closes her shop early and he follows her in the car a few miles down the road to a bar called Aces.

“I’d insist you buy,” she says, nodding at the bartender, who winks at her, “but I drink here free and that means tonight you do too.”

John watches her in awe, much like he’d been five years ago. “Got it made, then.”

She shrugs. “Can’t complain.”

They sit down in a booth next to a window and the cold night air seeps through the glass and chills John’s skin. For a few moments they’re silent, appraising each other, and then Tara says, “What are you doin’ here, John?”

“We were in the neighborhood.”

Before he saw her name in the journal he hadn’t thought about Tara in years though the weekend they’d spent together after they dusted that rugaru was one of the better he’d had in recent memory. Boys had been with Bobby and he’d let two of their calls go to voicemail. He’d felt guilty as shit about it later, for his fleeting moment of happiness, for putting them second, and he thinks that’s probably why he never called her again, never linked up for another hunt even after his fallout with Bob when he was hurting bad for allies. But he’d seen her name leafing through the journal that day cooped up in the motel after his stitches, entry headed San Antonio ’96, and he’d remembered the sure way she spoke and her hands on him just as sure so after Portland he drove them north and told Dean only that he wanted to visit an old friend.

“We?”

He swirls the whiskey in his glass. “My son.”

“Oh that’s right. Them kids. So they’re in this too then?” She whistles through her teeth.

“Just the one anymore.”

“And the other?”

John shakes his head. “He left.” He debates elaborating on that and then doesn’t. He fixes his gaze on the table and Tara watches him for a long time and just like back then he gets the sense that she can read everything he’s not saying.

Finally she says, “What is it?”

“I wanted to ask—” John starts. He sighs and scrubs a hand over his face and downs the rest of his whiskey.

Tara smirks. “Knew there was somethin’. You showing up out of the blue.”

“How’d you get into the life?”

She raises her eyebrows. “That’s what you wanna ask?”

“I just don’t think you ever told me.”

“Yeah, because I don’t like to talk about it, same as you.”

It’s a bit after ten. The bar empties out as they sit there drinking. John takes a breath. "My wife died,” he says and the words are so easy and they take so much from him still.

“You don’t have to—”

“My boys lost their mother. That was all we had. So I didn’t have a choice.”

“Yeah.” Tara nods as if that isn’t at all surprising to her. “Reckon I thought I didn’t either.” A minute goes by before she speaks again. “But all these years and everything I was chasin’…one day I just realized that I could pack it up right then if I wanted. Turns out I didn’t want, but. We had a choice, John. I’m not asking you to defend yours, I’m just sayin’ you had one. Your boy, one who’s gone, he did too. You can’t begrudge him that.” She leans forward and lays her hand on top of his.

He wants to say How can you know, how can you know anything about what it’s like to bring kids up in this life, he wants to say I never wanted this for them, I wanted them to have everything, I wanted us all to be together and to be happy but that was stolen from us so how can that be called a choice?

There is so much he came here to say to her, the only person he thought could understand and might absolve him so that the crushing guilt might lessen enough to let him breathe.

Instead he flips his palm over and squeezes her fingers in his own.

It’s colder, Dean thinks, than Texas should ever be.

He picks up a burger from the diner next to the motel his dad dropped him off at and takes it back to the room. He settles on the bed, lays the food in front of him, tries to find something on TV to take his mind off of where his dad is and who he’s with. I wanna stop in on an old friend, he’d said, and then refused to answer any of Dean’s other questions, which Dean took to mean it was a woman. John had always been weird about that. There’d been some, Dean was certain, but John never told him their names or talked about it at all and if Dean ever dared to ask he’d get told to mind his own shit.

He eats the burger and it sits heavy in his gut and makes him nauseous. He leaves the TV on a black and white movie he vaguely recalls having watched with Sam but he can’t focus on anything the characters are saying so eventually he shuts it off and lies back on the bed and counts the cracks in the ceiling. He pictures his father in bed with a woman. He remembers the way John used to rest an arm across his shoulders on long days in the car, hand on Dean’s neck and with his thumb brushing over the nape of his hairline. If he closes his eyes he can feel the hand still on him.

John doesn’t come back that night.

Dean’s dozing upright against the headboard, arms folded over his chest, when John gets back just after six-thirty. Tara had woken with him and didn’t protest as he dressed and told her he had to go. She didn’t say goodbye, just said Don’t be a stranger and he said he wouldn’t though he didn’t know if that was true.

He stands for a long time and looks at his son sleeping and at the gun on the sheets next to him.

***

A day and a half later they’re back north, Fort Dodge, Iowa, on their way to some tourist trap haunted hotel where three couples have died in as many weeks.

“If you wanna split up when we get there, I’ll hit the library,” Dean says.

Time gone past when that offer would’ve been unheard of. When the boys were younger Dean had made no small show of his hatred for the library, would pout down through the passenger window as the car idled outside the building and he would say Why do I have to do the research, this is exactly what I have a geek brother for and John would get on his case for believing any part of the job was beneath him. But this is how things have changed in the last three months. Now it’s always Dean volunteering for the research and Dean navigating them through the tangle of interstates that John can never keep straight and Dean doing every other job that had once been Sam’s.

“Might be a lot to sort through, fair warning. Place has been around for like a hundred years.”

“Awesome,” Dean says flatly.

“Once I talk to the hotel owners I’ll meet you there, we’ll tag-team it.”

“Just another raunchy Friday night then.”

***

After the hotel there is a vampire and a banshee and another ghost and another ghost and another ghost.

He’s digging around the trunk looking for a hex bag when he sees the black and white corner of a composition notebook jammed behind a stack of heavy hardbound lore books. He yanks it out and the cover tears off. “Shit.”

And then he catches on the words written in blue Sharpie across the top. SAM WINCHESTER’S NOTEBOOK. Underneath that, in parentheses, aka DEAN Keep Out. Dean makes a sound that’s half-laugh, half-choked grunt because he remembers this, remembers finding the notebook on a nightstand one day when Sam wasn’t around and being so annoyed at that snotty fuckin’ message, DEAN Keep Out, so he’d taken a leftover red marker from the drawer of the nightstand and under Sam’s words, just to spite him, had written, what’s even so secret in here anyway nerd. Then he’d put the notebook on their bed so Sam would see it and after that they’d gone back and forth with the conversation for days.

None of your business.

ok ill just take it when ur not looking then

Good luck finding it.

please i know all ur hiding spots

No you don’t.

At that point they’d run out of room on the front. Dean grabs the rest of the notebook and flips it over to the back.

under your mattress in the crack between the seats folded in ur shirt in ur duffel admit it sam you suck at hiding stuff

Whatever. I’ll tell Dad.

neeerrrrrrrrddddddd

That’s not an insult, you know.

ok nerd

Sam kept the notebook for years. Dean would catch him scribbling in it all the time, sometimes late into the night, holding a flashlight up to the pages, and he’d wonder what Sam could possibly need to guard from him so heavily. He never asked and he never opened it either, even though he’d had plenty of chances to.

Now he goes inside the motel room and flips through it, figures the statute of limitations on reading his brother’s diary has long since expired.

But it’s not really a diary. It’s mainly sketches of trees and clouds, a couple crude faces that he thinks could possibly be his and John’s. A lot of math problems that take entire pages to complete. Toward the back there’s a poem copied out in pencil. “The Afterlife” by Billy Collins. Dean reads it slowly; it’s long and weird as hell and he probably wouldn’t be able to make any sense of it if it weren’t all right there in the title.

One line in particular has been underlined with such force that the page under it is torn.

ready to begin another life in a more simple key

Dean reads it over and over and he’s not good at this shit but he gets the message loud and fucking clear. The pages aren’t dated so he has no way of knowing when Sam had written this or exactly how long he’d been imagining another life someplace else.

He goes back to the car and shoves the notebook behind the books and guns and wooden stakes and boxes of ammo. Feels tears threatening angry and hot and doesn’t let them fall.

John stands at the window and watches the storm roll in. Heavy grey clouds, nimbostratus, which he knows means snow, which he knows because of Sam. How many nights he’d return to a motel room to find Sam crosslegged in front of the TV studying the weather channel like he’d be tested on it. One of those nights John’d muttered to Dean You oughta flip for it every once in a while but Dean had only shrugged and said I don’t mind, it’s kinda interesting.

“You wanna turn on the TV, see about this weather?” John asks. They’re in South Dakota not far from Bob and he has the fleeting thought that maybe he should call him but dismisses it just as quick.

From his spot on the bed Dean picks up the remote and clicks through till he finds the local news station.

—up to eighteen inches expected across Faulk, Potter, and Sully counties, with temperatures forecasted to drop to single digits later tonight—

“Eighteen inches? Jesus,” Dean says. “Shoulda stayed south. I hate the fucking snow.”

John eyes the clouds again and assesses that they have probably an hour, maybe a little more. “Might get stuck for a couple days. I’m gonna do a run. Need anything?” But Dean’s got his focus on the weatherman and doesn’t answer. John stands awkwardly and watches the TV, watches Dean, for a few more seconds. He thinks there’s something almost wistful about the look on his face. Then he takes his keys and says, “Alright, I’ll be back,” and Dean nods absently and John heads into the cold.

By the next morning Dean can’t even get the motel door open. They crank the heat and it groans and shudders in protest but manages to hold at 63 degrees. John cooks hotdogs in the microwave, warms up water for instant coffee. After more than three months of constant movement it feels wrong to stay still and neither one of them knows what to do. For a while after they eat they sit at the table and stare at the snow falling outside.

“Seems like more than eighteen inches to me,” Dean says. Snow buries everything in sight, leaves the Impala a vaguely car-shaped blob in the otherwise empty parking lot.

“Oh,” John says suddenly, goes to his bag and comes back with a small deck of cards. “Pulled these outta the trunk.”

Dean huffs a laugh. “Man, when’s the last time we could just—” he gestures at the cards and tries to remember when things had last been easy enough for stuff like this. Then he sees his dad’s expression draw shut and tries to backtrack. Still every conversation between them is a landmine and hell if Dean isn’t a pro at triggering every fucking one. “Never mind, nothing.”

John takes their empty plates to the trash. “We don’t have to play. Just thought it’s somethin’ to kill time.”

“No, no, I wanna play,” Dean says quickly, slides the cards out of the box and shuffles them.  “Spades?”

“Okay. Deal ‘em. Four-handed.”

“Not gonna let me win are you? I wanna fair game.”

“Hell no. You ain’t seven years old anymore.”

Dean wins one round and John wins the next. They make more coffee and find an old rerun of M.A.S.H on TV. Dean’s been wondering, with them so close to Sioux Falls, if John would make any mention of Bobby. Dean’s talked to him on the phone a couple times but he hasn’t seen him since the day John drove him and Sam away from the scrapyard, yelling out the window that they wouldn’t ever be back. He never told them what the fight was about and Sam and Dean knew better than to ask. But honestly Dean misses Bobby, little bit. Misses the humid summers he spent under the rusted belly of a car, misses fishing in the river behind the house, way Sam would scare off all the fish with his endless fucking yammering.

He misses it now even though there were moments during those long stretches at Bobby’s when all Dean wanted in the entire world was for his dad to come get him and Sam and for the three of them to be back together on the road. The only thing that ever felt right.

He dreams of that night and of the things he’d said and of his son’s face wet with tears and he jolts awake to Dean lying next to him with a hand around his wrist. He says, “You were making noises,” and he says, “Are you okay?”

They loop back west and south toward the desert. His dad’s been quiet ever since the last dream and they put miles and miles and miles on the odometer without a word uttered. But for now it’s okay. Dean could sit in the passenger seat next to his dad watching the dry brown country and the blue sky clotted with clouds forever and never tire of it. Out here even music seems an intrusion so they leave the radio off. Dean sits with the McNally in his lap, finger dragging along the red line like an artery through the country. Navigating used to always be Sam’s job, and once when they were camping in the woods of Long Hunter State Park he’d told Dean that he could feel true north in his bones. Sure, buddy Dean had said. And Sam in that way of his had raised his eyebrows and taken their only compass and stomped it underfoot and said Well we’ll just see then won’t we and then of course had led them straight back to their campsite without breaking a sweat.

The road is long and straight in the afternoon sun and if it were summer the blacktop would be shimmering and puddling with heat. 40 West into Arizona across Jacks Canyon and through Flagstaff and John drives them into the Coconino National Forest where in the distance Humphreys Peak stands shrouded with snow. At the trailhead John pulls off and stops the car.

“Dad?” Dean says. “What’re we doin’?” They don’t generally stop to sight-see. There hadn’t been another case yet but Dean figured they’d pick one up on the way.

“What’s it look like? Hiking.”

“Okay, uh. Hiking. Okay.” Dean unclips his seatbelt and follows John around the back of the car. John puts water bottles and jerky and a first aid kit and towels into a crumpled backpack and slings it over his shoulders. “What made you wanna hike?” Dean asks. “I mean it’d be good to stretch my legs. I’m not complainin’.”

“Sometimes that car is like—” John says. “I don’t know. Get so goddamn claustrophobic.”

Dean says, “Yeah,” even though he never feels like that. He feels safe in the car. Held.

“Couple miles and back. Should have enough daylight.”

“Okay,” he says, because what else can he say.

They walk across a flat meadow and the wind slices hard and cold across Dean’s face. He pulls his jacket tighter around him, shoves his hands in his pockets. John keeps a few paces ahead. Every couple minutes he turns back to Dean as if to make sure he’s still there. They pass a few people with hiking poles and athletic-looking dogs who give them terse one-handed waves.

Dean jogs to catch up with his dad, tries to match his stride. “Dad, wait—” he says, already out of breath and aching in his lungs. “Just—can you slow up a bit?”

John stops, turns halfway. “Sorry.”

“It’s just cold.”

“You want my jacket?”

“You don’t need it?”

His dad shrugs.

“I’m fine.”

“Tell me if you change your mind. You good?”

Dean looks at him, brown hair disheveled in the wind and graying at the temples and hairline. Crow’s feet carving through his skin, lips pale and dry. Those bright fucking eyes. Piercing through him always. He thinks about the way his dad jerks awake in the night, the only time Dean ever sees him afraid.

He’s about to nod, about to keep walking, but then he says, “Who’d you see in San Antonio?” By now Dean’s mostly let it go but what he really wants to ask won’t get an answer and he just needs fucking something from him.

“You serious? Right here? Can we finish our fucking hike?”

“Just tell me. What’s the big deal, why’s it such a secret?”

“It’s not a secret,” John says. He takes a step forward. “It’s just also not your busi—”

“Yeah, not my business. So you’ve said.”

“Jesus, Dean. What’s it matter anyway?”

“It just—it matters.”

A couple passes, eyeing them wearily. Dean smiles and nods at them and they keep walking.

John sighs and his shoulders sag on the exhale. “She’s a hunter. We worked a case together a few years ago. That’s it.” He says it quickly, like he can’t wait to get the words out of his mouth, and then he looks down and runs a hand through his hair. “Okay?”

Dean takes that in. A woman he’d been expecting. A hunter he hadn’t. “A hunter?”

“What I said.”

“Why…why just one case?”

“All the fuckin’ questions suddenly. Right here, middle of the trail.” John shakes his head and turns and starts walking. “Come on.”

They gain elevation and it gets colder and windier and at the tree line just before the trail inclines sharply up the mountain they turn around. Dean breathes heavily and wipes cold sweat from his forehead.

Nowhere on earth lower than a Vegas motel. He doesn’t want to stop and Dean offers to drive but his eyes are hooded and glassy and John knows they both need sleep so he pulls off the interstate and into a parking lot glowing red and crawling with women in short skirts and lipstick all over their chins.

They sit in the car a minute watching. Two of the women clock them immediately and make their way on swaying legs over to Dean’s window. They paw at the glass and purse their lips. “Hey, baby,” one of them says. “Look how pretty.”

John leans over him. “He’s not interested.”

“You can come too, baby,” the other one says. “Both fuckin’ pretty, my lucky day. I’ll give you a deal if it’s both of you.”

“Just ignore them,” John says. “They’ll go away.”

Dean snorts. “You afraid of a couple hookers?”

He reaches for the door handle and John says, “Just wait—” but Dean opens the door and steps out and the women fall on him like they haven’t eaten in days and he’s a prime rib hand-delivered.

“Sorry, ladies,” he says, some crooning tone in his voice that turns John’s blood cold. “We’re real flattered. But we’ve been drivin’ a while and we’re just here for some shut eye. Maybe next time, though.”

The second woman titters a laugh and puts a hand on Dean’s shoulder, slides it up his neck. “That your old man?”

Dean nods. “It is.”

“Damn. Woulda made you boys real happy. Always thought that’d be hot.” She pouts and pops the tip of Dean’s nose with her finger. “Father and son and so fucking pretty too. Damn. Well, you change your mind, I’ll be here.”

“We know where to find you, sweetheart,” Dean says and then John’s had enough. He gets out of the car and moves to Dean and takes his elbow hard. Dean yelps. John drags him toward the office and the women whistle behind them.

“The fuck was that?” he says when they get to the room. Two singles and a rusted sink hanging from the wall. Dean tosses his bag and collapses facedown onto the far bed. “I told you just wait ‘em out.”

“They’re harmless,” Dean says muffled into the mattress. “Want attention more than anything.”

“What, you some hooker shrink now? The fuck, Dean.” He yanks the thin curtains shut over the window. He’s too goddamn tired for this and shaky with it and he just wants to go to sleep and get that tone of Dean’s and the hungry way those women looked at him out of his head.

Dean pushes up on his forearms and cranes his neck toward John and there’s something like mirth in his eyes. “It’s Vegas, Dad. You wanted to stop. I said I was good to drive.” He flops back down. “Getting propositioned with my dad, though,” he mumbles, “that’s a first.”

“That’s not funny.”

“Well. It’s a little funny.”

“Whatever. I’m gettin’ in the shower. I swear to God if you let one of those women into this room—”

“Dad. I won’t.”

In the dim light of the room with his cheek smushed against the flat pillow and his hair getting long around his ears Dean looks impossibly, devastatingly young. John feels a pinch at the back of his eyes and turns to the doorless bathroom.

The water is lukewarm and shoots at haphazard angles out of the shower head and he stands under the spray and remembers them splashing in the tub at two and six, filling and emptying and refilling the plastic cup he’d given them to play with while he scrubbed dollar store 3-in-1 soap into their hair. He remembers the unforgiving press of tile into his knees and how soft and warm his boys were all wrapped up in towels. He’d hold them like that, each over a shoulder, and pat their backs and breathe in the clean smell of them and after a minute Dean would squirm to be let down.

When John comes out of the shower Dean’s asleep, mouth open and arms crooked under the pillow. For just a second he allows himself to cradle Dean’s warm cheek in his palm.

John sleeps the whole next day. For a while Dean stays around, cleans the guns and plays a game of solitaire, shaves days’ worth of stubble over the little sink on the wall. He listens to the snoring. He would wake him so they could get a move on but John sleeps peacefully so rarely these days so Dean lets him be. Around noon he scribbles a note on the pad on the nightstand and takes the keys.

The parking lot’s empty, the women gone. In the light of day he feels incredibly pathetic for having entertained them even a little bit, especially knowing how much it’d bothered his dad; though exactly why he’d been so bothered Dean can’t figure.

He drives out to the desert with the windows down, sticks his arm out into the wind and imagines he can touch California with the tips of his fingers; it’s the closest they’ve gotten in their aimless pilgrimage around the country.

Though all the land looks the same he finds a spot he likes and turns off the two-lane road. The tires kick up sand that cloaks the car in a cloud of dust. He takes the map and finds where he is and marks it with his thumb and then finds Palo Alto and marks it with his pinky. The distance is nothing, he thinks. He thinks it’s empty and flat enough out here that he could shout Sam’s name and be heard in the echo. And then he thinks no. No, I’d shout till I was hoarse and the desert would swallow it whole and my voice would never make it to you.

He digs his cellphone out of his pocket and scrolls through his contacts till he lands on S. Once it had been Sammy but not too long ago he’d made Dean change it. He could change it back now but for some reason he doesn’t. He stares at that letter for a long time and then he tosses his phone onto the passenger seat and knocks his head hard against the steering wheel.

“Why do you care?” he says. “Why does it matter what I have you in my phone as? You don’t want us to call you Sammy anymore, okay, whatever. But even in my phone? It’s just my phone.”

It feels good, he realizes suddenly, to talk out loud. How much silence there’s been. He rolls the window up though there’s not a soul to overhear him.

“You were always fucking like that. So…so. You were always saying some shit like It’s the principle of the thing, Dean. No idea how much that pissed me off. The principle of the thing. Like I want your name in my phone a certain way because it doesn’t matter. And you sat there and stared me down until I changed it. Fucking stupid. The smallest things. Sam Winchester, king of taking a motherfucking stand. Bet you’re sitting in your boring ass classes, Philosophy 101, guarantee it, and you’re not letting a single one of those pretentious fuckers win an argument. Even the professors. Bet they can’t stand it any time you raise your hand. I can see them, rolling their eyes and sinking down in their seats like Oh here we go. Bet you’re giving them hell, Sammy.”

He scratches absentminded circles around Palo Alto on the map with his fingernail and he talks and talks.

“I don’t think I ever told you this. First time we got wasted together. You were fourteen, somethin’ like that. You didn’t want to but I said Quit being a pussy and held the bottle right up to you and you just did it. That threw me, ‘cause like I said, you never—if you didn’t wanna do something. But you drank. A shit ton. We were in that awful house in Pennsylvania and both so scared. Dad had been gone longer than he said. We were always so scared, weren’t we? I was. I was. We drank the rest of that bottle and a whole second one. Where the hell did we even get it? It wasn’t Dad’s. Maybe I used a fake. Can’t remember. Anyway, you were so drunk so quickly and you were all over me. Like, rubbing my arm and trying to hold my hand. It was freaking me out and I kept pushing you off and wishing I hadn’t made you drink so much and then I thought, well, by then it was just you drinking because you wanted to. You liked it after a while. And then you passed out on the couch. I just sat there and watched you. Felt like forever. You were drooling like a fuckin’ waterfall. Making a wet spot on the couch. I was drunk too and I just watched you.

“And then I heard Dad pull up and I panicked. Holy shit, I’ve never— We were upstairs and I heard him come through the door. He was gonna be so furious and I had to do something and so I hit you. I’m sorry. I hit you hard, but it wasn’t the same as— It was with an open palm, okay? It didn’t count. I just had to get you to wake up and you did finally and you looked at me squinting and then you leaned over the side of the couch and puked all over my legs. Jesus. It was so bad. You didn’t remember a thing the next day. Not one thing. And it was my fault. Guess that’s why you always took your fuckin’ stands, right? ‘Cause if you didn’t, I’d— Well, yeah. If you didn’t then you’d listen to me and I’d fuck everything up.”

Before he goes back he digs the notebook out of the trunk again and flips through the pages worn thin with time. He brings it to his nose and breathes in and tries to catch the smell he’d know dead but it’s just graphite and rubber and dust. He looks at the drawings, reads and rereads the poem.

You go to the place you always thought you would go,

the place you kept lit in an alcove in your head.

He says, “Why couldn’t you just tell me? Why couldn’t you tell anyone? Did you tell Bobby?” There were days during their summers in Sioux Falls when Sam and Bobby would go off into town for an errand or they’d take a long walk in the woods behind his house, and for reasons Dean couldn’t understand at the time Bobby wouldn’t let Dean come with them. “Sammy? I would’ve—you could’ve told me too. I would’ve listened.” He says it but the words feel false in his mouth and he knows it’s not true. It wouldn’t’ve mattered when Sam told him. The outcome would’ve been the same.

He thinks it’s been years since he’s talked this much, this long, no one to stop him and all the words he’s held to himself tumbling out and filling the car and filling the desert and filling probably the whole world.

***

A couple days later when they’re in a library in Reno Dean breaks off from John to scout the stacks for the poetry section. He drags his finger down the line of C authors until he finds one thin volume called Questions About Angels and pulls it out and sits in a chair in the back corner of the library. He reads every poem in the book. Half of them are nonsense and he scoffs his way through, thinks What a fuckin’ twerp. He wonders how many of them Sam has read.

But toward the end of the book there’s a poem called “Mappamundi” that seems to be about the world as it was millions of years ago when all the continents were pushed together, what was it, fuckin’—Pangaea? The one thing Dean retained from history. It talks about sea beasts and ships and a mapmaker trying to make sense of it all. He reads it three times and then glances around to make sure no one’s watching and then he rips the page from the book, folds it and stuffs it into his pocket.

***

They cross the state line into California and stop near Bakersfield just before Christmas. Dean asks his dad where they’re going, if there’s a case, if they’re going north. He asks point-blank if they’re going to see Sam.

Dean fingers the poem in his pocket. He wants to have something to give him. If—

John says, “Quit that. Let me fuckin’ think for a minute.”

***

Three days later he watches the motel manager set up a Christmas tree outside the front office. His dad still hasn’t said a thing. Dean remembers the silence of those first days, how it had felt like letting his dad have his space was the only thing Dean could do. But it’s been months and they’re in California and John won’t acknowledge it and Dean’s sick to fucking death of silence.

John knows exactly what Dean’s doing. They’re in California and that means whatever it means in Dean’s head. Two or three times he says, “Hey, remember when—” and John pretends not to hear him. His own mind is a brutal enough place as it is. He can’t talk about Sam. He can’t.

***

He says, “Remember the first time Sam won a sparring match against me? I didn’t even care about losing ‘cause I was so proud. And you were too. And we were both slapping him around, going Aw our little Sammy’s all grown up. But you remember? He was—he was angry. Or…disappointed, somethin’. I can see his face, that little line between his eyebrows. He said I don’t want to be good at this. Man. I thought he was such a little shit. I mean, God. We should’ve seen it. Dad. We should’ve seen it.”

***

They’re standing in the bathroom brushing their teeth and Dean says, “That one time—” and now John’s listened to too much and every word Dean speaks yanks at the hook in his chest that led him here, led them west. He pushes a hand into his sternum like the hook is a physical thing he can ignore or redirect by telling himself things are better this way but they’re not. Not one thing about this is better.

“Enough.” It comes out loud and crackles off the tiled walls and rings through the room.

Dean pulls his toothbrush from his mouth. “I was just—”

“Yeah, I know what you’re doing. I don’t want to fucking hear anymore.”

Dean goes still and it’s a long time before he speaks. “You can’t just pretend he doesn’t exist.”

John says, “Careful.”

He thinks something in Dean must snap then because he slams his hand down on the counter and when he looks at John his eyes are wild, furious. “Does it make you feel better or something? Just lock it away and you’re good to go? Do you have any idea how fucked up that is?”

John puts his toothbrush down and wipes his hands on the towel to mask their shaking and he knows Dean’s too far gone now but he says it anyway. “You let this go right now, Dean. I mean it.”

“We’ve been driving all over for months. Months. I haven’t said a word. I haven’t— We’re in California, Dad. You think I wasn’t gonna notice? Why did you bring us here if we’re just gonna sit on our fucking hands?”

“I told you I’m working it out.”

“Bullshit, I’m working it out. Bullshit. Why is it so hard for you to just say it? He’s your fucking son.”

John walks into the room, folds back the covers on his bed. “Conversation’s over. Go to sleep.”

There’s a long pause when John thinks Dean might actually listen. But then, from the other side of the wall: “He asked me to go with him, you know.”

John’s heart starts up hammering against his ribs. He takes a breath. “You knew, then? Before that night?” The question that’s been eating him.

Dean rounds the corner. “No. I didn’t.”

It genuinely shocks him, that Sam could’ve kept a secret like that from Dean. How he could keep a secret like that at all, way they lived. So close that they shared beds and meals and clothes and air and smells and breath. He knew them. Knew every single quirk of their faces, lost so many nights of sleep for looking at them. He knew when they were angry, when they were scared, when they were embarrassed, when they were annoyed. Thought he knew when they were happy. He thinks of what Dean had said. We should’ve seen it. Or maybe Sam just shouldn’t have fucking lied to them in the first place.

“So, what? He just thought you were gonna pack up and follow him right then and there? Jesus.”

Dean recoils. “Yeah, and maybe I should’ve. Have a normal fucking life for once. But I chose to stay here with you because—because— And then you just shut me out.”

“I have not—”

“Are you kidding me? Are you fucking serious? We used to talk, Dad. We used to—” Dean shrugs helplessly. “But now you refuse to even say Sam’s name. You go off to see some secret hunter chick I’ve never heard of and you don’t tell me shit about it and I just let it go ‘cause you’re…whatever. You have nightmares all the time. I hear them, Dad. I wake up to you crying out in your sleep and I try to help and you won’t let me. So yeah. Maybe I made the wrong fucking choice.”

There is a world where both his sons leave him and he is alone against every dark and lurking thing. “You wanna leave too, then leave.”

Dean’s eyes blaze. “Oh, fuck you.” He scoffs and shakes his head. “It’s our fault. I know you know that. It’s our fault.”

The words hit him square in the chest. He reaches up and digs his nails in. Dean stares at him, shoulders heaving with each breath. Maybe it’s true. “This isn’t on me,” he says. “Take the blame if you want. See if it brings him back.”

John watches Dean flinch and then Dean shoves past him and walks out the door.

Every night since they crossed the state line Dean’s dreamt of the werewolves in Cody. But in the dreams they don’t cry or plead for their lives. They’re vicious, bloodthirsty. Dean isn’t fast enough. They come at John and they tear at his throat, dig their claws into his chest and pluck out his heart like it’s the pit of a cherry. They look Dean straight in the eye as they eat it still beating. They laugh. He holds his gun up with both hands and screams and even then, with his dad crumpled at his feet, he can’t pull the trigger.

What he couldn’t say to John was that he froze in the cave not because he was afraid or because he didn’t believe those wolves were really monsters. He froze because when he looked at their tears and their surrendered hands and their eyes begging him for mercy he saw—

***

Your brother tells you he’s leaving and you punch him in the face.

Well, it’s more like he tells you he’s leaving and you think you must’ve misheard him. You say What? What?

But you didn’t mishear him.

Your brother says he got into Stanford and he didn’t know how to tell you and he didn’t mean to keep it a secret so long and he says Can you be there when I tell Dad? He says he’s leaving tonight. He asks you to drive him to the bus stop. He says Come with me.

That’s when you punch him.

You punch him and you expect him to punch back and he doesn’t. He just holds his cheek and looks and looks at you.

A little while later you’re there when he tells Dad but you don’t stand next to him. You stand next to Dad, so close your arms touch. You know your brother knows what it means.

There’s yelling. There was always yelling between the two of them but this is different. Your dad says horrible things you never dreamed you’d hear him say and you almost consider moving over to stand beside your brother. But then your brother says things equally horrible, maybe worse. He says I don’t know how to be happy here. I promise I tried. He cries like a child. You’ve never seen him cry like this. You’ve only heard, across years, his muffled whimpers in the middle of the night.

Later still he turns around at the door and his face is blotchy and his eyes find yours and they beg. Say something. Take my side. He gestures at you to come on. Come on Dean come on.

You say nothing. You don’t move. You think this anger is the only thing you’ve ever known.

***

He leaves his dad in the motel room and finds a fight in a bar decorated with pine garland and plastic reindeer and twinkling lights. He downs three scotches and then hustles five hundred bucks off a polo-shirted moron with a gelled side part and he has the presence of mind to wonder why the fuck a guy like this would even blink at losing that kind of money before he comes at Dean with a fist to his jaw.

Dean lets him get three solid punches in before he starts fighting back but by then the bartender’s there and he’s wrenching them apart and saying, “Hey, hey, hey! Take it the fuck outside or I’m calling the cops.”

They take it outside. Dean’s cheek pulses where the skin’s split. It feels good. It feels so fucking good.

The guy grabs his wrist and yanks his arm around so hard Dean feels his shoulder leave the socket. The guy says, “You think you can take shit from me?” And then the coiled spring of Dean’s anger flings loose and he turns on him and knocks his hands away and cuts up once hard to his nose, hears the crack of cartilage and the guy goes down covering his face and he says, “Alright! Alright, enough,” but it’s nowhere near enough. Dean whales on him, blind with it, he punches and punches and his fist slides through blood and he says, “I gave you everything.”

Long after the guy’s lost consciousness Dean sits over him, knuckles swollen and bloody, shoulder throbbing. He says it again. “I gave you everything.” He thinks this anger is the only thing he’s ever known.

One year for Christmas when there was no money for gifts he drove them to a fancy neighborhood of large two-story houses with big lawns and wide porches heavily and gaudily decorated with lights and blow-up Santas and wooden manger scenes. He rolled the windows down even though it was cold and he found a radio station playing Christmas songs and he drove slow enough that the boys could take their seatbelts off to lean out into the air. He said Look at all this, huh? It’s really somethin’. He watched them through the rearview mirror, glowing light reflecting off faces that were not smiling, that were not happy. He turned up the music and started singing in imitation of Bing Crosby because his impressions usually made the boys laugh but they ignored him, stared dead-eyed at the passing spectacle and didn’t say a word. He craned around in his seat and saw where Sam’s hand held onto the hem of Dean’s shirt. Dean leaned over and whispered something to Sam and Sam shook his head and frowned. Isn’t this great? John said. A few minutes later Dean said It’s cool and Sam gave a small nod and then turned away from the houses and back down to the book in his lap though it was too dark to read.

Now, John paces the room and hears like an echo in a cave some of the last words Sam said to him before he left. I don’t know how to be happy here. I promise I tried. John’d said It’s not my job to make you happy, it’s my job to keep you safe. But he thinks of that Christmas with the lights and he thinks What about that? I fucking tried too, don’t you think I tried?

***

The clock’s blinking just after one a.m. when Dean stumbles through the door, bloody and swollen and with his right arm hanging odd and too long at his side.

John’s up and over to him in a second, relief flooding his gut because for a while there he thought Dean might actually take what he’d said to heart and leave him. But the relief gives way to flaring anger just as quick. He tries to keep his tone even when he speaks. It doesn’t work. “What the fuck happened to you?”

Dean tosses a bloody wad of bills on the bed and then brushes past him into the bathroom. “I’m fine.”

John actually laughs. “Jesus Christ, Dean.” Dean slams the bathroom door and turns the faucet on. “Tell me what happened.”

“What do you think?”

“So this is the way you choose to deal with your problems? Getting beat to shit?”

“Real fuckin’ rich coming from you.”

“Just tell me if someone’s gonna come lookin’ for you. If we gotta go.”

Dean doesn’t answer. John sighs, too fucking tired to deal with Dean’s obstinance. He leans against the door and listens and when he hears Dean under his breath say, “Fuck, fuck!” he swings it open, finds him struggling to get a wet cloth up to his face with his dislocated arm. John puts a hand lightly on his shoulder.

Dean jerks away. “Don’t touch me.”

“Did someone follow you back?”

Dean makes a frustrated noise at the back of his throat. “Asshole was fucking unconscious, okay? No one’s following me anywhere. Now leave me fucking alone.”

“You know I have to make sure—”

“Yeah, I got it, Dad.”

“You coulda been hurt worse,” he says, softer.

“He was wearing a polo shirt and fuckin’ docksiders. I had it.”

John takes Dean’s wrist and swings it a little and Dean buckles. “Well.”

“Ow! Fuck! I said don’t touch me.”

“Dean, that shoulder needs to be set. And you’re bleeding. Just let me help.”

“Don’t need it.”

John lifts his shirt and points at the crude scar where Dean had stitched him up. “Not the way we do things, remember?” He reaches out and takes the cloth from Dean and Dean gives up the fight easier than John was prepared for and lets him. “Sit down,” John says, jutting his chin at the toilet. Dean sits and John kneels in front of him and for a second lets his gaze rove across his son’s face. Bloody bruise clotting on the edge of his jaw and another on his cheekbone. His right eye is nearly swollen shut. He blinks the other eye rapidly, staring down at the floor and leaning as far away from John as the back of the toilet will allow him. His left hand is swollen too, knuckles split and crusted with blood.

John anchors one hand on Dean’s knee and with the other brings the towel to his face, rubs in small circles, tries to keep it gentle. A thousand other times just like this. Putting his boys back together. The way they ran to him. Always he’d want to say I’m sorry that there is anything in this world that can hurt you and always he’d clamp down on the words. And even now he can’t help himself, can’t ever seem to get out what he knows he needs to.

“Real stupid thing to do,” he says, and without warning Dean collapses forward into his chest with a wrenching sob. It startles John so much that he jumps and drops the towel onto the floor but Dean just presses his forehead harder into him and sags off the toilet until he’s practically curled in John’s lap. John stays there frozen, feels Dean’s trembling body all the way to the bone.

Dean mutters something, watery and muffled by John’s shirt and John can’t make it out at first or else he must be hearing incorrectly because he thinks Dean’s saying, “Daddy, daddy,” but he hasn’t called John that since he was four years old.

“Dean?” he says. He cups a palm around the back of Dean’s head. “Hey. Alright.”

And then Dean says it again, “Daddy,” and he grips the bottom of John’s shirt, pinches his stomach in a fist and doesn’t let go and he weeps.

John runs his fingers through the hair at Dean’s neck. He holds him there, right against his heart. He says, “Okay, honey. It’s okay. You’re alright.”

He lets his dad lead him into the room and onto his bed and he lets his dad pull the covers up to his chin like he’d done when Dean was a little boy. His face aches terribly and his shoulder and inside him he feels a hollowness unfillable.

In the dim light Dean finds John’s eyes and waits till John finds his and then he says, “I miss him. So bad I think sometimes I’m gonna die.”

His dad nods. He says, “Me too.”

That night John sleeps without dreams.

In the morning Dean goes into the office of the motel and asks the girl at the desk for an envelope and a stamp and for the phonebook. She hands them over and he pages through until he finds the address he’s looking for and then he copies it down across the front of the envelope. He folds the torn library page inside.

On the back flap he writes This is for Sam Winchester. I don’t know his dorm or anything. Please make sure it gets to him. 

Then he drops it in the mailbox at the corner of the parking lot.

***

In the morning there is the road. Muted sunlight and wispy clouds and a couple deer grazing off the highway that perk their heads up curiously when the car passes by. His dad asks him where he wants to go. He opens the map.