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Title: What A Father Would Do
Fandom: SPN
Pairing: Gen, John POV
Rating: Adult themes
Word Count: 2,824
Spoilers: None
Disclaimer: Don't own, don't sue, no offense, no money.
Notes: John POV to What A Brother Wouldn't Do. Stand alone.
Summary: There is one hunt John Winchester never wanted to go on. For his sons.
John is on the phone to Missouri chasing up a lead when she goes silent for a second and then says, “Oh John.”
John, who was scribbling notes on a legal pad lets it and the pencil he was using slide from his fingers as he grips his phone.
“What’s happened? What’s happened to them?”
There’s more silence, much more telling than any words and then Missouri finally says, “Call Dean. Call him now. John, it’s going to be bad.”
~~~
When Dean answers the phone on the third ring, sounding exhausted but not surprised, John thinks he knows what’s happened.
“Is he dead?” he asks slowly, not wanting to really hear it but needing to know. Not Sammy, flashes through his brain, leaving only pain behind.
There’s more damnable silence but then Dean huffs a breath and with tears in his voice he says, “No Dad, he’s not.”
What strikes him is that Dean doesn’t sound sure.
“What’s happened?”
“There was… god, it sounds so stupid out loud. There were vampires and there were too many and in the fight I lost… I lost track of him.”
There aren’t just tears in Dean’s voice now, he is actually crying and this chills John Winchester to the core. Dean doesn’t cry. Dean never cries. Even when small he would march up to his Father with scraped raw knees or hands and say, “Ow, Dad. Fix please.”
“Dean, you know what you have to do.”
There are muffled sounds over the phone, probably Dean rubbing a sleeved arm over his face and getting it together. “Fuck that,” he says, with more venom than he probably means to. It takes a lot for Dean Winchester to swear at or even in the vicinity of his Father and so John knows he’s toed up to the raggedy edge.
“You know you have to do this,” John says mildly, like he is calming a wounded animal.
“You know I can’t.”
“Dean, don’t let me lose two boys. I need you to come out of this on the other side.” John has always been good at compartmentalising and right now he shoves his grief for Sam aside so he can deal with a more immediate threat. To save Dean, possibly from himself.
“Dad, we have Elkins’ journal. He mentions someone that may be able to help.”
“Dean I love… I loved Sammy but he’s gone. You need to finish it.”
There is another shaky breath, but this time John recognises anger. “When everyone told Sam I was going to die, he didn’t lie down and take it. Neither will I.”
“Dean-“
“No, just… no.” There is a click and the line goes dead. John realises this is the first time Dean has hung up on him.
Ever.
~~~
Missouri can’t or won’t tell him where his boys are, but she gives him an idea where to start.
Where it happened, whatever it was.
It’s a little nothing town like hundreds he’s passed through before but John checks it out beforehand. This was not a Hunt or a location he sent his boys to so either they were chasing something of their own, or they just got unlucky.
It happens.
He makes his way to the local bar first, knowing it is probably the last place Dean and Sam were if he knows his older son. Sam would’ve tagged along, probably grumbling the whole way and John feels pain lance through his heart again but he closes himself off to it.
There’ll be time for grieving later.
A couple of locals, early drinkers by the look, eye him suspiciously but open up when free beers are passed in their direction. It seems there are a lot of disappearances for such a small town, more than is normal and mostly young people. The town is dying as a consequence, scared people just packing up and going. He’d noticed that most of the stores were dark or boarded up on his way in.
This leads John to believe that his sons were actually chasing something down but the something got wind of them first.
Despite the information, the trail is cold at the bar so John makes his way to the only motel. He asks about two young men taking a room and inwardly curses himself for not having any recent pictures and also wondering just how that happened. Luckily, the girl behind the desk is young enough to have been appreciative of both boys and remembers them well.
She looks at him oddly when he asks for the same room. She explains that the single maid is off so they haven’t had a chance to clean out the room but there are five others because business is so slow. When John says that he really needs the same room, she passes over the key, probably just wanting to get him the hell out of her office. He would normally flash a badge, but he prefers that she think he’s creepy than associate Dean’s face with the law.
John knows Dean is usually meticulous when cleaning out a room that he leaves, but John also knows that this is no ordinary circumstance and that Dean probably left in a hurry. His instinct is correct and he finds the room in a mess, papers and some clothes strewn over the beds and half-eaten meals left on the single table.
On the bathroom floor is a dark blue sweatshirt with a darker red stain covering most of the front. John holds the shirt for a second, knuckles going white as he grips it fiercely.
He needs to find his sons but there is something he needs to do first. John quickly cleans out the room, removing any trace of Winchester, stowing the clothes in his truck and burning the papers. The sun is going down as John pulls the sweatshirt over his head, stained with his youngest son’s blood, knowing that he won’t have to find the vampires.
They will find him.
~~~
Dean calls when John is back on the road and sounds surprised that he actually answers. John knows it won’t do any good but asks anyway.
“Where are you?”
“On our way to get Sam help,” is all Dean will answer.
“Dean, there’s no help for Sam. You must know that.”
“You don’t know everything. God, Dad, can’t you just give me a chance?”
John would like nothing more than to say, “Yes, Dean, of course I will,” but instead he listens intently behind Dean’s voice, any giveaway sound that might give him a clue to Dean’s location. Instead he says, “You have to end him, son.”
“How can you be so-“ Dean bites off the last of the sentence and John suspects it would have lead to him into saying something irreversible. John can take a guess at what it might be.
He’s been waiting for years for one of his sons to say that they hated him.
Funny how he always assumed it would be Sam.
~~~
He misses them by only a day in a little town called Willow Springs. He asks for the same room in the motel again, itching to get on the road and after them to close the gap but knowing that as tired as he is, he’s liable to end up in a ditch rather than catching up to them.
The clerk at the counter will have none of it this time and puts him in the furthest room away possible, forcing John to break in after midnight.
This time the room has been cleaned, both by housekeeping and probably Dean himself, but John still finds some ragged fragments of nylon rope under one of the beds. He strips this bed and finds a small, dark stain on the mattress just under the pillow.
It’s blood.
There isn’t enough for John to be worried but he still does.
John is getting desperate and knows it’s time to make some calls, pull in a few favours. He doesn’t know a lot about vampires, every hunter has his specialty and demons are his of course. Elkins would have been the man to ask but him being gone, John in a weird twist of fate is compelled to track down the man’s only son, knowing that Taye Elkins followed his Father’s footsteps much like Dean.
Then left, like Sam.
~~~
He can see Taye internally debate closing the door in John’s face before he grudgingly steps back, allowing entrance.
“What brings you to darken my doorstep?” he asks, making his way into the kitchen. John follows and pauses when he sees a small girl sitting at the sunny kitchen nook, eating Fruit Loops by painstakingly picking out one loop at a time, balanced on the end of her spoon and regarded, before being swallowed.
“Can we-?” John motions towards the lounge room but Taye shrugs.
“Libby is deaf, we can talk here,” he says, pausing by the kitchen nook to run a hand over the girl’s dark haired head.
“First off, I’m sorry about-“
“Don’t do that. If you’re going to start that you can just get the hell out now,” Taye snaps, pausing with a kettle poised over a coffee mug. His back is a tense bow and his shoulders are shaking and Libby looks from John to her Father with big eyes as if she can sense the tension.
“Look, Taye, I wouldn’t bother you if I wasn’t desperate.”
“That’s good to know,” Taye snorts, pouring coffee and bringing it to his mouth as he turns. He doesn’t offer John any, like he doesn’t offer him a seat and John understands that Taye needs him to feel unwelcome.
“Sam’s been… turned and Dean thinks he can help them. Damn boy is running from me.”
Taye puts his mug down with a clatter, lips thinned down to a white slash across his face. “God-dammit!” he grits out, jamming the heels of his hands into his eyes. “I’m sorry but I don’t want to know that.”
“All I want-“
“What? Dragging Sam back in and getting him killed not enough for you? You have to drag in other people’s kids too?”
John startles, not sure how Taye would know that Sam had left, but presses on. “Dean said something about your Dad’s journal. Someone that could help. I just need… I just need a place to start. Is there such a person? Is something like that even possible?”
Taye moves to Libby and scoops her out of her seat, setting her down on her feet and pushing her gently towards the lounge room. She goes with a small wave to John and moments later there is the sound of a toy box being turned over.
“Dad had some crazy theories and knew some even crazier people.”
“You more than most people should know that what your Father was doing wasn’t crazy,” John chided but Taye huffed a derisive breath.
“I more than most people understood that it was. I guess that’s probably why you and my Dad got along, you were both on the warpath, everything else be damned.”
“You don’t know a damn thing about me,” John growled, knowing he needed this kid’s help but not being able to keep his hackles from rising.
“You and my Dad, you were the same. When we lost Lindsey he was just so angry. He couldn’t think of anything other than killing what had killed her. All that anger did was end up killing him.”
“Your Father helped a lot of people.”
“And I guess that’s what you guys keep telling yourselves, isn’t it?”
“If you can’t help me, just say so and I’ll go.”
Taye scrubs a hand over his face and then leans down to paw through a drawer by his leg. He comes out with a battered brown address book with yellowed pages and flips through it. “There was this one woman…Dad said she could help sometimes, help bring people back. I’m thinking if he wrote about her in his journal then that would be where Dean is headed.” Taye seems to find the page he is looking for and holds it out, open for John. “I’ll bet you the address is even the same. People like her never move.”
John takes the proffered book and makes to write down the address, but Taye shakes his head. “Just take it. I don’t know why I kept that thing anyway.”
“Okay. Thanks,” John says, pocketing the small book.
When he has a hand on the front door, he hears Taye’s voice behind him.
“I don’t know about Dean, but Sam and I… was it so bad for us to just want to be someone’s kid, not their soldier?”
John pushes the front door open and steps through because really, he doesn’t know how to answer.
~~~
John is surprised that Dean answers when he rings again. However, he doesn’t get a hello.
“You’re going to have to go through me,” Dean growls instead.
John takes a moment, listening to Dean’s ragged breathing on the other end of the line, trying to memorise the intake of air because he knows for better or worse, this may be the last time he talks to Dean.
There are a million things he wants to say, but he settles for the simplest.
“Please don’t make me do that.”
~~~
John makes it to the house of Madelyn Lane fifteen hours later, eyes gritty and muscles trembling from exhaustion. He makes it just in time to see Sam stumbling out the front door, looking like he’s going to collapse any second. He fetches up against the Impala and after a couple of tries, gets the door open and drops into the passenger seat.
John’s eyes tick back to the doorway and he sees Dean there, head bowed and talking to a small woman with dark hair. The woman presses a package into Dean’s hands that makes him smile and then she kisses him on both eyelids and lastly his forehead, releasing him as she steps back across her threshold.
John watches the Impala as it peels away from the curb and disappears around a corner. He’s still sitting in the exact same spot an hour later when someone raps on his passenger side window and he turns and sees the same small woman looking at him over the edge of the window. He can only see her brow and her eyes because of the height of the truck.
“You might as well come in instead of sitting there like a lump all day,” she says, her voice muffled through the glass.
“Oh, no, that’s okay. I was just leaving,” he says and just blinks when she pulls open the door and hops up into the seat next to him. She’s got a package in her hands that looks the same as the one she handed Dean and when she puts it down on the seat between them, he sees that it’s cookies.
“He’s angry but he’ll understand. He just needs to get some distance,” she says.
John tightens his grip on the steering wheel in front of him. “Is Sammy-?”
“Fine. He’ll be a little groggy for a few days and the memories will fade with time which is always a blessing.”
John lets out a breath he hasn’t realised he’s been holding. “I guess I should thank you,” he says and the woman cants her head.
“Don’t put yourself out,” she grins.
“I should’ve listened to him. I just didn’t want to believe…”
“No, you did the right thing for you. Dean just did the right thing for him. Was no wrong here that I can see. Besides, it’s a miracle he made it all this way intact. From what I could tell, it was a close call a few times.”
“He’s never going to forgive me for this.”
The woman eyes him for a moment. “Ain’t nothing to forgive. He knew deep down that you would be here to do what he couldn’t if it came to that. He’ll realise it, probably sooner rather than later. Your family is stronger than this. Circumstance has made you stronger.”
“That’ll be a cold comfort.”
“I’m not here to comfort you,” the woman smiles again. “I’m here to tell you that if you stay parked here much longer one of my less tolerant neighbours is going to call the police.”
John snorts and turns the key in the ignition as the woman opens the door and slides her legs out. She pauses, turning back. “John Winchester, you’ll find what you’re looking for, but that rarely if ever turns out to be what you really want.”
His phone, resting on the dash, rings and John looks at the caller id, noting that it’s Dean.
Even though it kills him to do it, he lets it go to voicemail.
Fandom: SPN
Pairing: Gen, John POV
Rating: Adult themes
Word Count: 2,824
Spoilers: None
Disclaimer: Don't own, don't sue, no offense, no money.
Notes: John POV to What A Brother Wouldn't Do. Stand alone.
Summary: There is one hunt John Winchester never wanted to go on. For his sons.
John is on the phone to Missouri chasing up a lead when she goes silent for a second and then says, “Oh John.”
John, who was scribbling notes on a legal pad lets it and the pencil he was using slide from his fingers as he grips his phone.
“What’s happened? What’s happened to them?”
There’s more silence, much more telling than any words and then Missouri finally says, “Call Dean. Call him now. John, it’s going to be bad.”
When Dean answers the phone on the third ring, sounding exhausted but not surprised, John thinks he knows what’s happened.
“Is he dead?” he asks slowly, not wanting to really hear it but needing to know. Not Sammy, flashes through his brain, leaving only pain behind.
There’s more damnable silence but then Dean huffs a breath and with tears in his voice he says, “No Dad, he’s not.”
What strikes him is that Dean doesn’t sound sure.
“What’s happened?”
“There was… god, it sounds so stupid out loud. There were vampires and there were too many and in the fight I lost… I lost track of him.”
There aren’t just tears in Dean’s voice now, he is actually crying and this chills John Winchester to the core. Dean doesn’t cry. Dean never cries. Even when small he would march up to his Father with scraped raw knees or hands and say, “Ow, Dad. Fix please.”
“Dean, you know what you have to do.”
There are muffled sounds over the phone, probably Dean rubbing a sleeved arm over his face and getting it together. “Fuck that,” he says, with more venom than he probably means to. It takes a lot for Dean Winchester to swear at or even in the vicinity of his Father and so John knows he’s toed up to the raggedy edge.
“You know you have to do this,” John says mildly, like he is calming a wounded animal.
“You know I can’t.”
“Dean, don’t let me lose two boys. I need you to come out of this on the other side.” John has always been good at compartmentalising and right now he shoves his grief for Sam aside so he can deal with a more immediate threat. To save Dean, possibly from himself.
“Dad, we have Elkins’ journal. He mentions someone that may be able to help.”
“Dean I love… I loved Sammy but he’s gone. You need to finish it.”
There is another shaky breath, but this time John recognises anger. “When everyone told Sam I was going to die, he didn’t lie down and take it. Neither will I.”
“Dean-“
“No, just… no.” There is a click and the line goes dead. John realises this is the first time Dean has hung up on him.
Ever.
Missouri can’t or won’t tell him where his boys are, but she gives him an idea where to start.
Where it happened, whatever it was.
It’s a little nothing town like hundreds he’s passed through before but John checks it out beforehand. This was not a Hunt or a location he sent his boys to so either they were chasing something of their own, or they just got unlucky.
It happens.
He makes his way to the local bar first, knowing it is probably the last place Dean and Sam were if he knows his older son. Sam would’ve tagged along, probably grumbling the whole way and John feels pain lance through his heart again but he closes himself off to it.
There’ll be time for grieving later.
A couple of locals, early drinkers by the look, eye him suspiciously but open up when free beers are passed in their direction. It seems there are a lot of disappearances for such a small town, more than is normal and mostly young people. The town is dying as a consequence, scared people just packing up and going. He’d noticed that most of the stores were dark or boarded up on his way in.
This leads John to believe that his sons were actually chasing something down but the something got wind of them first.
Despite the information, the trail is cold at the bar so John makes his way to the only motel. He asks about two young men taking a room and inwardly curses himself for not having any recent pictures and also wondering just how that happened. Luckily, the girl behind the desk is young enough to have been appreciative of both boys and remembers them well.
She looks at him oddly when he asks for the same room. She explains that the single maid is off so they haven’t had a chance to clean out the room but there are five others because business is so slow. When John says that he really needs the same room, she passes over the key, probably just wanting to get him the hell out of her office. He would normally flash a badge, but he prefers that she think he’s creepy than associate Dean’s face with the law.
John knows Dean is usually meticulous when cleaning out a room that he leaves, but John also knows that this is no ordinary circumstance and that Dean probably left in a hurry. His instinct is correct and he finds the room in a mess, papers and some clothes strewn over the beds and half-eaten meals left on the single table.
On the bathroom floor is a dark blue sweatshirt with a darker red stain covering most of the front. John holds the shirt for a second, knuckles going white as he grips it fiercely.
He needs to find his sons but there is something he needs to do first. John quickly cleans out the room, removing any trace of Winchester, stowing the clothes in his truck and burning the papers. The sun is going down as John pulls the sweatshirt over his head, stained with his youngest son’s blood, knowing that he won’t have to find the vampires.
They will find him.
Dean calls when John is back on the road and sounds surprised that he actually answers. John knows it won’t do any good but asks anyway.
“Where are you?”
“On our way to get Sam help,” is all Dean will answer.
“Dean, there’s no help for Sam. You must know that.”
“You don’t know everything. God, Dad, can’t you just give me a chance?”
John would like nothing more than to say, “Yes, Dean, of course I will,” but instead he listens intently behind Dean’s voice, any giveaway sound that might give him a clue to Dean’s location. Instead he says, “You have to end him, son.”
“How can you be so-“ Dean bites off the last of the sentence and John suspects it would have lead to him into saying something irreversible. John can take a guess at what it might be.
He’s been waiting for years for one of his sons to say that they hated him.
Funny how he always assumed it would be Sam.
He misses them by only a day in a little town called Willow Springs. He asks for the same room in the motel again, itching to get on the road and after them to close the gap but knowing that as tired as he is, he’s liable to end up in a ditch rather than catching up to them.
The clerk at the counter will have none of it this time and puts him in the furthest room away possible, forcing John to break in after midnight.
This time the room has been cleaned, both by housekeeping and probably Dean himself, but John still finds some ragged fragments of nylon rope under one of the beds. He strips this bed and finds a small, dark stain on the mattress just under the pillow.
It’s blood.
There isn’t enough for John to be worried but he still does.
John is getting desperate and knows it’s time to make some calls, pull in a few favours. He doesn’t know a lot about vampires, every hunter has his specialty and demons are his of course. Elkins would have been the man to ask but him being gone, John in a weird twist of fate is compelled to track down the man’s only son, knowing that Taye Elkins followed his Father’s footsteps much like Dean.
Then left, like Sam.
He can see Taye internally debate closing the door in John’s face before he grudgingly steps back, allowing entrance.
“What brings you to darken my doorstep?” he asks, making his way into the kitchen. John follows and pauses when he sees a small girl sitting at the sunny kitchen nook, eating Fruit Loops by painstakingly picking out one loop at a time, balanced on the end of her spoon and regarded, before being swallowed.
“Can we-?” John motions towards the lounge room but Taye shrugs.
“Libby is deaf, we can talk here,” he says, pausing by the kitchen nook to run a hand over the girl’s dark haired head.
“First off, I’m sorry about-“
“Don’t do that. If you’re going to start that you can just get the hell out now,” Taye snaps, pausing with a kettle poised over a coffee mug. His back is a tense bow and his shoulders are shaking and Libby looks from John to her Father with big eyes as if she can sense the tension.
“Look, Taye, I wouldn’t bother you if I wasn’t desperate.”
“That’s good to know,” Taye snorts, pouring coffee and bringing it to his mouth as he turns. He doesn’t offer John any, like he doesn’t offer him a seat and John understands that Taye needs him to feel unwelcome.
“Sam’s been… turned and Dean thinks he can help them. Damn boy is running from me.”
Taye puts his mug down with a clatter, lips thinned down to a white slash across his face. “God-dammit!” he grits out, jamming the heels of his hands into his eyes. “I’m sorry but I don’t want to know that.”
“All I want-“
“What? Dragging Sam back in and getting him killed not enough for you? You have to drag in other people’s kids too?”
John startles, not sure how Taye would know that Sam had left, but presses on. “Dean said something about your Dad’s journal. Someone that could help. I just need… I just need a place to start. Is there such a person? Is something like that even possible?”
Taye moves to Libby and scoops her out of her seat, setting her down on her feet and pushing her gently towards the lounge room. She goes with a small wave to John and moments later there is the sound of a toy box being turned over.
“Dad had some crazy theories and knew some even crazier people.”
“You more than most people should know that what your Father was doing wasn’t crazy,” John chided but Taye huffed a derisive breath.
“I more than most people understood that it was. I guess that’s probably why you and my Dad got along, you were both on the warpath, everything else be damned.”
“You don’t know a damn thing about me,” John growled, knowing he needed this kid’s help but not being able to keep his hackles from rising.
“You and my Dad, you were the same. When we lost Lindsey he was just so angry. He couldn’t think of anything other than killing what had killed her. All that anger did was end up killing him.”
“Your Father helped a lot of people.”
“And I guess that’s what you guys keep telling yourselves, isn’t it?”
“If you can’t help me, just say so and I’ll go.”
Taye scrubs a hand over his face and then leans down to paw through a drawer by his leg. He comes out with a battered brown address book with yellowed pages and flips through it. “There was this one woman…Dad said she could help sometimes, help bring people back. I’m thinking if he wrote about her in his journal then that would be where Dean is headed.” Taye seems to find the page he is looking for and holds it out, open for John. “I’ll bet you the address is even the same. People like her never move.”
John takes the proffered book and makes to write down the address, but Taye shakes his head. “Just take it. I don’t know why I kept that thing anyway.”
“Okay. Thanks,” John says, pocketing the small book.
When he has a hand on the front door, he hears Taye’s voice behind him.
“I don’t know about Dean, but Sam and I… was it so bad for us to just want to be someone’s kid, not their soldier?”
John pushes the front door open and steps through because really, he doesn’t know how to answer.
John is surprised that Dean answers when he rings again. However, he doesn’t get a hello.
“You’re going to have to go through me,” Dean growls instead.
John takes a moment, listening to Dean’s ragged breathing on the other end of the line, trying to memorise the intake of air because he knows for better or worse, this may be the last time he talks to Dean.
There are a million things he wants to say, but he settles for the simplest.
“Please don’t make me do that.”
John makes it to the house of Madelyn Lane fifteen hours later, eyes gritty and muscles trembling from exhaustion. He makes it just in time to see Sam stumbling out the front door, looking like he’s going to collapse any second. He fetches up against the Impala and after a couple of tries, gets the door open and drops into the passenger seat.
John’s eyes tick back to the doorway and he sees Dean there, head bowed and talking to a small woman with dark hair. The woman presses a package into Dean’s hands that makes him smile and then she kisses him on both eyelids and lastly his forehead, releasing him as she steps back across her threshold.
John watches the Impala as it peels away from the curb and disappears around a corner. He’s still sitting in the exact same spot an hour later when someone raps on his passenger side window and he turns and sees the same small woman looking at him over the edge of the window. He can only see her brow and her eyes because of the height of the truck.
“You might as well come in instead of sitting there like a lump all day,” she says, her voice muffled through the glass.
“Oh, no, that’s okay. I was just leaving,” he says and just blinks when she pulls open the door and hops up into the seat next to him. She’s got a package in her hands that looks the same as the one she handed Dean and when she puts it down on the seat between them, he sees that it’s cookies.
“He’s angry but he’ll understand. He just needs to get some distance,” she says.
John tightens his grip on the steering wheel in front of him. “Is Sammy-?”
“Fine. He’ll be a little groggy for a few days and the memories will fade with time which is always a blessing.”
John lets out a breath he hasn’t realised he’s been holding. “I guess I should thank you,” he says and the woman cants her head.
“Don’t put yourself out,” she grins.
“I should’ve listened to him. I just didn’t want to believe…”
“No, you did the right thing for you. Dean just did the right thing for him. Was no wrong here that I can see. Besides, it’s a miracle he made it all this way intact. From what I could tell, it was a close call a few times.”
“He’s never going to forgive me for this.”
The woman eyes him for a moment. “Ain’t nothing to forgive. He knew deep down that you would be here to do what he couldn’t if it came to that. He’ll realise it, probably sooner rather than later. Your family is stronger than this. Circumstance has made you stronger.”
“That’ll be a cold comfort.”
“I’m not here to comfort you,” the woman smiles again. “I’m here to tell you that if you stay parked here much longer one of my less tolerant neighbours is going to call the police.”
John snorts and turns the key in the ignition as the woman opens the door and slides her legs out. She pauses, turning back. “John Winchester, you’ll find what you’re looking for, but that rarely if ever turns out to be what you really want.”
His phone, resting on the dash, rings and John looks at the caller id, noting that it’s Dean.
Even though it kills him to do it, he lets it go to voicemail.