John
I had three days.
I knew that because I knew my body like a gun I'd used for too long. I knew the click when the mechanism started to jam. The scrape when something stopped catching. And I knew the sound when the last round was gone from the magazine—that quiet metallic click that said: That's it. You don't have any more.
Three days. Maybe four if I was lucky. But Winchesters didn't have luck. That was the one lesson life had taught me, over and over, until I'd stopped fighting it.
It was morning. Light fell through the dirty curtains of the motel room and painted stripes across the carpet. Dean slept on the bed beside mine, on his back, one hand resting on Johanna's stomach. She lay beside him, wedged between his arm and a wall of pillows he'd built so she wouldn't fall. Her mouth was open, fists beside her head, and she breathed with that soft whistle babies made when they slept so deeply the world could cease to exist and they wouldn't notice.
Sam sat at the table. Laptop open. Of course. The kid couldn't stop researching, even if the world was burning. He had three tabs open—I could see them from here. One about baby care. One about formula brands. And one he quickly minimized when he realized I was awake.
I knew what was on the third tab. He was searching for what was killing me. For a cure. For a deal, a ritual, a miracle. Because Sam Winchester couldn't accept that some things just happened. That some things didn't have an enemy you could fight. That sometimes death wasn't a monster, but just death.
“Morning,” he said. Carefully. Like I was something that could break.
“Morning.” I sat up. Slowly. Everything had gotten slow over the last few weeks. Getting up. Breathing. Thinking. As if the world were moving through syrup.
Johanna made a sound. Not crying. More like cooing, content and warm. Dean moved in his sleep, his hand brushing over her stomach automatically, without waking. And Johanna went quiet again.
I watched my oldest son soothe my daughter in his sleep, and something in my chest tightened. Not pain. Not this time. Something else. Something I hadn't felt often enough in my life because I'd been too busy hunting and fighting and taking revenge and all the things I'd thought were important, while the most important thing had been right in front of me.
Pride. That was it. Pride so big it hurt.
I'd gotten a lot of things wrong. Most of them, if I was being honest. I'd raised my sons to be soldiers before they were allowed to be children. I'd put the responsibility for Sam on Dean when he was four—four, damn it—and told him: Look after your brother. As if that were a reasonable job for a kid who still believed in Santa Claus.
And now I was doing it again. I was putting a baby in his arms and saying: Here. Do better than I did.
The difference was, Dean would do better. I knew that. Not because I'd taught him how, but in spite of everything I'd taught him.
Sam brought me coffee. Black, too hot, in a Styrofoam cup that smelled like gasoline. Motel coffee. I'd drunk more motel coffee than water in my life.
“Thanks.” I took the cup. My hands were shaking. I tried to hide it, but Sam saw. Sam saw everything. That was his curse—seeing too much, understanding too much, feeling too much.
“Dad.” He sat down across from me. His eyes were red. He hadn't slept. “We need to talk.”
“I know.”
“About Johanna. About—all of it. Who was her mother? What made you sick? Is it supernatural? Can we—”
“Sam.” I raised a hand. “Her mother was named Claire. She wasn't a hunter. She was—normal. A waitress at a diner in Nebraska. I got stuck there after a hunt. Longer than I'd planned.” I took a sip of coffee. It tasted like nothing. Everything had tasted like nothing for weeks. “She didn't know what I was. What I did. I wanted to tell her, but—”
But what? But I was a coward? But I thought I could protect her by keeping her in the dark? I knew how well that had worked. Claire's grave was proof.
“What happened to her?”
“Wendigo. Three days after the birth.” My voice was calm. Too calm. The voice I used when I gave reports. Facts. No feelings. Feelings were a luxury I couldn't afford. “I was too late.”
Sam was silent. He knew what “too late” meant. He'd experienced it often enough himself.
“And you?” he asked. “What's killing you?”
I looked at him. My youngest son. The boy who'd left for Stanford, away from me, away from everything—and I'd hated him and loved him for it, at the same time, with the same intensity, because Sam had done the one thing I'd never been able to do: leave.
“Nothing supernatural,” I said. “Nothing you can hunt. Nothing there's a ritual or a deal for.”
“Dad—”
“It's my body, Sam. It's done. Thirty years of hunting, injuries that never healed right, things I've swallowed and inhaled and touched that no human should touch. Sooner or later, you pay the bill.”
I watched it working inside him. How he didn't want to accept it. How he searched for a way out, a loophole, a solution. That was Sam—the kid who believed there was an answer to everything if you just searched long enough.
“There is no answer,” I said. More gently than I was used to. “Not this time.”
Dean woke up. I could tell by the way his body changed—one second he was still, the next he was awake, completely, instantly, like a switch had been flipped. Purgatory. That was what it had done to him. Sleep was no longer a transition, but a jump.
The first thing he did was check on Johanna. His hand felt over her stomach, her chest, counting her breaths. Only then did he open his eyes.
“Morning,” he said. Hoarse.
“Morning,” I said.
He sat up, picked Johanna up, and settled her against his shoulder. She made a contented sound and burrowed her face into his neck. Dean stood, walked to the window, and the morning light fell across both of them.
And I saw it.
Johanna's eyes were open. She blinked into the light, and for the first time I saw her eyes clearly. Not in the half-darkness of night, not in the flicker of the neon sign. In daylight.
They were green.
Not the murky, indistinct blue-gray most newborns had. Green. Clear. Bright. Like Dean's eyes. Like my eyes when I was young, before life had worn them dull. Winchester eyes in a face so small it fit in my hand.
And on her head—that fine fuzz babies had, soft as spider silk—her hair was blond. Light. Golden in the morning light. Not like Mary. Not like me. Like Claire. Claire's hair, Claire's smile, but my eyes. Our eyes.
“Dean,” I said.
He turned.
“She has your eyes.”
Dean looked down at Johanna. And I saw it hit him—not like a blow, but like a wave that came slowly and flooded everything. He stared into those green eyes that were his own, in a face that wasn't his, and his mouth opened, but nothing came out.
Sam stepped beside him. Looked down. “Wow,” he said softly. “They're—”
“Yeah,” Dean said. Hoarse. “Yeah.”
Johanna reached for Dean's nose. Her tiny fingers closed around it, and she pulled. Dean let her. He let that three-week-old baby tug on his nose, and he smiled, and it was the most honest smile I'd ever seen on his face.
I drank my coffee. Watched my children. And I thought about all the things I still had to tell them before the three days were up.
That I was sorry. For everything. For the stolen childhood, the guns under their pillows, and the Christmases that never happened.
That I was proud. Of Dean, who was stronger than I'd ever been. Of Sam, who was smarter than I'd ever be. Of what they were together—more than the sum of my mistakes.
That Johanna was the best thing I'd ever done. Not because I'd made her. But because I'd brought her to the right people.
But I didn't say any of it. Not yet. I had three days. And John Winchester always needed until the last second to say the things that mattered.
So I sat there, drank my coffee, and watched the morning light turn my daughter to gold as my sons looked at her like she was the only thing left in the world that made sense.
And maybe she was.