Chapter Text
THEN
The man in Missouri Moseley’s living room was coming apart at the seams.
Missouri saw plenty of clients who were in trouble, and not just the kind that came from their own negativity and self-doubt. She’d seen many nasty things in her days as a psychic - human, inhuman, and sometimes something in between. But none of it quite compared to what had come for John Winchester’s family, or what now resided in his soul. There was a knot of darkness in the pit of that man. There was little else left to keep him from flying into pieces.
Missouri shook her head, mind swirling with grim and terrifying thoughts as she busied herself with making tea. She was already second guessing her decision to tell John the truth. Maybe she should have told him a nice lie, set his mind at ease, let him go back to his ordinary life and try to scrape the shards of it together into something livable. Only, whatever had been in that house that night, it had been dangerous. Missouri couldn’t guarantee that it would never come back. John deserved to know that.
And also...she’d been afraid. When she’d sensed the remnants of it there, lingering in that nursery as a thick miasma of malice and hate, she hadn’t wanted to be alone. She’d needed someone, anyone else, to know that evil had touched that place. There was no other way to stand it. Perhaps that had been selfish of her. She was already beginning to feel guilty.
If it had just been John up against the thing that had killed his wife, that would have been one thing. Missouri wouldn’t apologize for showing a man the thing he’d come looking for. But the children changed things.
“Do you like sugar with your tea?” Missouri asked the little boy sitting at her kitchen table, a baby cradled in his arms.
Dean Winchester shrugged.
He was young enough, Missouri thought, that he might never have had tea before. She sighed and tried not to let him see her misgivings. Children were sensitive to those sorts of things.
“I’ll put a little bit in for you,” she said. “Careful - it’s hot.”
She set the cup down in front of Dean. He hesitated, then tentatively reached for it with one hand.
“My dad…” he started to say, then stopped.
Missouri could see what he’d meant to ask.
“He just needs a little bit of time,” she said. “He’s got to figure out what to do next.”
“About what happened to Mom?” Dean asked.
“Now what do you know about that?”
Dean shrugged again. He was eyeing her warily, like he wasn’t sure if he could trust her or not. What he must have seen and heard in the last few days to make him so worried…
“Something bad happened,” he said. “That’s all I know.”
He’d picked up much more than that, Missouri could tell. Perceptive little boy. It might save him some trouble in the long run - or get him into more. Only time would tell.
“You just keep looking after your brother,” Missouri said. “You’ve done a good job of it so far. Leave the worrying to the adults. Alright?”
Pleased at the compliment, Dean nodded, and set his tea back down so that he could pull Sam closer to his chest. The baby stirred and cooed in Dean’s arms, but was otherwise quiet. They were both good boys. John was lucky. It was unlikely that he knew it.
“Sit tight,” Missouri said. “We won’t be much longer.”
She picked up the tray with the teapot, cups, and sugar, and took them back out into the living room.
John was still sitting hunched over on the couch, a cloud over his thoughts so dark that Missouri could practically see it with her bare eyes. He stared into the middle distance, hands clenched together over his knees. From an outsider’s perspective, he could almost be mistaken for a man deep in prayer. Missouri knew better. He was planning.
“I know I’ve told you a lot tonight,” Missouri said, setting the tray down in front of him. “Maybe more than you wanted to hear.”
“No,” John said. “I needed to hear it. Thank you. For the truth.”
“Yes, well,” Missouri said. “I’m sorry to have given you more questions than answers.”
“That’s alright,” John said. “This is enough to start with.” He held his hand out to refuse the cup that Missouri offered him. “No, thank you. I’m afraid there’s one more thing I need to ask from you.”
“You won’t share a cup of tea with me but you want me to do you a favor?” Missouri asked sharply.
John gave her a flat look.
“Take it,” Missouri said, offering it to him again. “Maybe it’ll calm you down. Make you think about things a little harder.”
John frowned, but took the tea.
“I’ve thought all I need to,” he said. “It’s nearly all I’ve done since...since Mary was killed. It’s time to do more than think. That’s why I came to you.” He took a sip, grimaced, then glanced away, toward the kitchen.
“John,” Missouri said warningly.
“My sons,” John said. “Can you watch them for a little while?”
“They’re your children,” Missouri said, and meant - don’t leave them here. Not like this.
“Just for a few days,” John went on. “If you can’t, then tell me someone who can. Someone who knows about what’s out there and can protect them from it.” He looked pained. “I can’t protect them, not where I’m going, and they need to be safe. They’re all I have now.”
“They are,” Missouri agreed. “So why are you in such a hurry to hand them off?”
“It’s Mary,” John said helplessly. He shook his head, momentarily wordless, as if he couldn’t imagine needing to say anything more. “It took Mary from me, Missouri. If you had met her, you would understand.”
But Missouri had already met the love of her life. She had lost him, too. She knew both sides of that terrible devotion - the security and the grief. She also knew something else. She knew her son - James, fourteen years old now - was crouched at the top of the stairs just out of sight, inconspicuously listening in.
“Your boys need you,” Missouri said.
John shook his head again.
“This is no life for them,” he said. “Dean’s only four. Sam’s only a baby! I can’t take them where I’m going. It’s too dangerous.”
“Then don’t go,” Missouri pleaded. “Whatever it was that did this -”
“I’ve made up my mind,” John said, voice like steel. “I need answers. I need to know what happened that night and - and I need to make whatever did it pay.”
Missouri looked down at the dregs of her tea through the still steaming water. It was too soon to read them. They hadn’t settled yet. There was still tea left to drink, still time for things to become something other than what they were becoming. But she watched them swirl and felt something ominous in their movements, like the omen that came before the omen.
“What will you do if I say no?” she asked.
“Take them with me,” John said at once. “I don’t want to. But if it’s what I have to do to keep them safe, then I will.”
Missouri sighed and set her cup back down on the tray. She reached up to rub at the pain in her temple, tried to ease it, but her head was filled with aches - those of the past, those of the present, and those of the future. They were all tangled up in one another, dense, and all of it painful.
“Alright,” she acquiesced at last. “I’ll watch them for you. But only for a little while, John. Do you hear me? Whatever fool errand you’re thinking of, you’d better come back from it quick.”
“I swear to you, Missouri,” John said.
But Missouri had heard plenty of men swear to her before. They’d all meant it, too. It hadn’t made a difference in the end.
“You’d better explain to them where you’re going,” she said, picking up her cup to take a steadying drink. “Lord knows I’m not going to do it for you.”
John sagged in relief.
“Thank you,” he breathed.
“Don’t thank me yet,” she muttered.
She felt like the weaver who makes the rope for the hangman’s noose. Not her fault. Not her crime. Even so - inescapably party to the execution.
John stood and went to the kitchen, leaving his tea sitting on the table, still mostly untouched. He’d hardly had more than a sip. Missouri resisted the urge to lean over and see what his tea leaves were doing. Her curiosity wasn’t great enough to overcome her trepidation.
For several long minutes, she sat quietly in the living room, finishing her own tea, studiously not listening to the low conversation happening in her kitchen. What was she going to do with these two boys? She could hardly mind the one she had. And James - James wasn’t going to be happy about this.
But the thought of John dragging those two after him on his hunt for revenge…
In her cup, the water dwindled. The leaves swirled. Omens flashed before her eyes. This she knew about tea leaves and omens alike: You could ignore them all you wanted to, but if you did, it would all go bitter from oversteeping.
When John came back out, his eyes were wet. Missouri didn’t let that fool her into feeling pity. He was still leaving, after all.
“You have my number,” Missouri said, following him to the door. “Don’t you lose it.”
“I’ll call,” John promised. “Every night.”
For how many nights, though? Until John was swallowed up in some rabbit hole, tumbling down into a place that couldn’t be reached? Until the days slipped together into one long, sleepless marathon, each hour indistinguishable from the last? Sure, he would call. When he remembered that time had passed.
“You do that,” was all Missouri said.
John nodded and shook her hand one last time.
Once the door had closed, Missouri picked up the tray from the table in the living room and took it back into the kitchen. Setting it down on the counter by the sink, she reached out to push aside the curtains over the kitchen window just in time to hear an engine roar to life and to see a set of tail lights flicker on, burning red like the cherries of a twin pair of cigarettes.
Missouri watched the car pull away from the curb, listened to its rumble as it disappeared down the street and around the corner, off into the night and the universe at large. Then she turned to look back at the two small children still sitting at her table. Dean stared up at her, his small face filled with uncertainty.
“Is Dad coming back?” he asked.
Missouri tried to give him a comforting smile. She mostly failed.
“I’m sure he’ll try, sweetpea,” she said. “That’s all any of us can do, really. Try our best.”
Dean said nothing to this, only looked down at the baby sleeping quietly in his arms.
“It’s okay, Sammy,” he murmured. “I’m going to take care of you.”
Missouri glanced back out the window one more time, then let the curtains fall closed. John was long gone now, even the sound of the Impala nothing more than a distant memory. Whether or not he came back, whether or not he died out there doing who knows what foolish, headstrong thing, she felt certain it wouldn’t really matter. Tonight, Sam and Dean Winchester had lost their father.
She only hoped that it would be the end of their losses. They didn’t have much left.
][
NOW
The first night Sam woke from a nightmare of fire and death, he lay panting for a long time in his bed, hearing nothing but his own heartbeat in his ears and the echo of his own screams. His skin was slick with sweat. Spots danced in front of his eyes as his gaze darted here and there across the ceiling, as if to ensure the vision from his dream hadn’t been real. But there was nothing more sinister than the overhead light.
Slowly, he began to calm back down. He swallowed, and then had to do it again when he found his mouth was bone dry. He was just sitting up to reach for the glass of water on his nightstand when there was a knock on the door - almost deafeningly loud in the ringing silence.
“You okay there, Sammy?” Dean asked from the hall. “You were yelling in your sleep.”
“Yeah,” Sam said. “Just - just a bad dream.”
There was a pause. Then the door was creaking open, and Dean was standing there with a steaming mug in hand.
“What’s that?” Sam asked.
“Tea,” Dean said, entering Sam’s bedroom and crossing toward him. “Sounded like you needed it.”
Sam accepted the drink gratefully. He wondered how long the nightmare had gone on that Dean had had time to be woken by it and then to go boil water. It had felt like only a few minutes, but now that he was awake it wore on him like it had been years. Sam shook himself and took a sip.
“Thanks.”
And he meant it. The tea settled him. It filled his stomach and bones with something stable and secure and warm. The comfort it brought tingled in his fingertips and curled up like a cat in a sunbeam at the base of his spine. Dean’s cooking always did something like that. Sam knew better than to ask what was in it, though. The answer was obvious - a pinch of cinnamon, a splash of alcohol, and a measure of something that Dean would furiously deny was magic.
“You want to talk about it?” Dean asked, still looking down at him warily. “You haven’t had one that bad since -”
He didn’t finish the thought. He didn’t need to. They both knew what he was referring to - that long month of torment after Sam’s stupid teenage foray into a darker kind of magic. Each night he’d been plagued by horrific dreams of suffering in a bloody and shadowed realm where dark, insubstantial shades whispered his name. No doubt that was why Dean was so concerned. He was probably wondering what it was that Sam had done now.
“It wasn’t like that,” Sam said, shaking his head. “This was too real, too lifelike. I didn’t know that I was dreaming at all until I woke up.”
“What happened?”
Dean sank down to sit on the edge of Sam’s bed. Sam took another sip of his tea, focusing on its heat, its soft spice, and not on the crawling dread that the nightmare had brought him.
“I was closing up shop,” Sam said. “Then I came upstairs. I was looking for you, I think. I wanted to talk to you about something - I can’t remember what - but I couldn’t find you anywhere. There was a sound, in my room, and I went in, and…”
He trailed off.
“What, I was going through your shit?” Dean asked. “You know I think your crap’s too lame to mess with.”
Sam scoffed.
“No, shut up,” he said. “You weren’t there. I turned around to leave, except something dripped on my shoulder. I looked up and.” He left out a shaky breath. “You were on the ceiling. And then you caught fire.”
Dean stared at him for a moment.
“You mean like Mom,” he said.
“Yeah,” Sam said. “That’s how Dad always said it went down, anyway.”
“Huh,” Dean said. “So why are you dreaming about it now?”
“No idea,” Sam said. “Something I ate, maybe?”
Dean scowled. He cooked most of what Sam ate, and he’d never given anyone nightmares before. Not accidentally, anyway.
“Or it was something else,” he said tersely. “Are you sure it was just a dream?”
“What else could it be?” Sam shrugged.
“I don’t know,” Dean said. “But we better not take chances. You and I have both seen what ignoring omens can do.”
And they had. Having spent their formative years in the parlors and kitchens of psychics and hedge witches, Sam and Dean had seen plenty of thoughtless souls receive signs that they chose to ignore to their own detriment. They had shaken their heads, rolled their eyes, and gone back to making houses out of tarot cards, all the while thinking - you could lead a horse to spiritual intervention, but you couldn’t make it drink. They’d hardly make the same mistake themselves.
“Yeah, I guess,” Sam said.
“We’ll ask Missouri about it when we go over for dinner tomorrow night,” Dean resolved. He stood up. “Try to get some shut eye. God knows you need your beauty sleep.”
Sam slumped back down into his bed with a groan.
“You’re such a jerk,” he complained.
“Bitch,” Dean tossed back, slipping out into the hall.
The door snapped shut, and Sam was left alone to sip his tea and try to forget the dead-eyed look on dream Dean’s face just before the fire had consumed him. He hoped that it really had been just a nightmare. The alternative was that they were in trouble. Dean was in danger. And if it involved the thing that had killed Mom, then…
Sam’s gaze slipped from the mug he held, down to the hands that held it and then up, along his bare arms, both of them covered in colorful tattoos of intertwining sigils and magical designs - the little green snakes that twisted up to his knuckles; the string of wide, staring eyes that climbed up his left forearm, each one paired with a single letter; the menacing, many-headed dragon that stretched itself along his right bicep, its shining scales imbued with something frozen and burning. The large set of black ink seals that sat on his shoulders like brands.
If the thing that had killed their mom had finally come back, then that meant, inevitably, their dad would be back, too.
And that was a mess that Sam could live without.