InsaneJournal

FIC--The Path of Most Destruction
title: the path of most destruction
author: lisa roquin
rating: 15ish
fandom: supernatural
series/sequel: universal truths
characters/pairings: Bobby, Dean, Sam
disclaimer: all copyrighted characters and their "universes" belong to their respective authors, writers, creators, production companies, producers and long lists of people that are so very much not me. Quite simply, if you recognize it, it isn't mine. No profit made, no harm intended, just having fun.
summary: he held these truths to be pretty much self evident. Fire burned. Demons were evil. And if you followed the path of most destruction, there’d be a Winchester in the wreckage at the end of it.
warning: angst
author's note: veers of canon after AHBL 1 & 2, no S3 spoilers. Have no idea if there's anything more to this, cleaning out files, sorting through and trying to catch inspiration back for things that need finishing. This was sitting there.
word count: 2249
Previous fics: the truth about universes



Bobby Singer splashed water on his face, stared blearily in the cracked motel mirror. Not a minute more sleep than he absolutely had to have to function. He had to get his ass on the road meet John’s boys.

If John was still among the living, Bobby just might beat the hell out of him. It was nearly, very nearly worth making his own deal just to have the chance to take a swing or thirty at John with a crowbar for this shit. Shit years in the making. The boys’ damn lifetimes in the making.

But Bobby had sworn ages ago, he’d never make a deal. Not even for those boys.

The sun rising in the east and setting in the west wasn’t the surest of bets these days since the Devil’s Gate had been opened. Neither was the sky blue or grass green, shit happened when you dealt with demons after all, and almost anything could change. It wasn’t the end of the world yet, not quite yet, but damned if the natural order of a lot of things wasn’t at risk. And if things weren’t stopped it very well could be the end a lot sooner than later.

Three things he was betting would never change. Simply because not even the end of the world could change them. Fire burned. Demons were evil. And if you followed the path of most destruction, there’d be a Winchester in the wreckage at the end of it.

He’s seen what John had done right by those boys.

Damn.

Any man would be proud to have Sam and Dean for sons. Least any man with half a damned brain, despite the urge to try to beat their daddy’s damage outta them. Or beat their daddy.

A man couldn’t have asked for a better friend than John Winchester. A man also couldn’t find a friend that he just wanted to take a goddamned tire iron to their thick skull as often either.

The first time he’d met the boys, really done more than caught a quick glimpse of them sleeping or John’s talking…well a damned few things had fallen into place. Bobby had nearly taken a tire iron to John then. Those boys needed their daddy though, and Bobby didn’t think he’d care all that much for prison. He’d also been scared to hell that the damned stubborn ass would take off and not come back, get himself killed and leave those boys fuck knows where hidden away on their own.

John had been four years in the hunt then. The worst of the fire from Mary’s death had burned itself out, and most of John with it. He held onto his vengeance like it was the thing that kept him drawing breath.

Dean had been just eight.

It’d taken about ten minutes in the boy’s company to get why John was so eaten away, why his threads to sanity and living were made of vengeance even if the reasons he had to not had hazel eyes and skinned knees and the littler clung to the older with all the ferocity of any baby with their security blanket or toy. And the older, half grown in front teeth and wary eyes and a damn mama bear about both his daddy and his little brother.

Sam. He was his daddy’s son through and through. Same goddamned stubborn single minded fire. Fire hadn’t burned out of control and hollowed him to nothing yet, even with everything those boys had been through, it could, and Bobby was pretty sure he’d watch it do just that eventually. In oh, fifty weeks and change probably.

Most might think Dean was the one like John. He wasn’t. Not a damn bit like his father. Oh he was what John raised him to be. A hunter, a soldier, but that boy…he was his Mama’s son in everything that mattered. Even if John hadn’t spat that out drunker than fuck on the second of November once, Edna Singer hadn’t raised a fool, Bobby’d seen with his own eyes what that boy was made of, and it wasn’t John, not like Sam. There were miles between made of and made into and most only saw the made into when it came to people.

Seeing that little boy, knowing Dean and watching him grow up--that was what saved John from Bobby’s tire iron more than once.

The boys. Both of em.

Damn.

John Winchester was a man who got noticed. Big. Bigger than most with his broad 6’1 frame but more than that, he…even among the misfits and cowboys of the hunting world, he’d stood out. Something even more maverick, more…more something than most.

People didn’t hunt without reason. Something brought em to the hunt. Something personal, something painful. Something that hit the right buttons in the right person that they couldn’t explain it away, couldn’t walk away, couldn’t forget. Every hunter had a story, one that usually ended with a loved one’s funeral of how they got in the hunt. There were other constants. Hunters were mostly men. A few husband and wife teams, but usually men, and lone wolf cowboy types who didn’t play well with others, maybe they had before what ever set them to hunting happened but they didn’t after. Suspicious and superstitious. Now and then they actually had families. That usually didn’t end all that well, but it happened. Ellen Harvelle wasn’t the only Hunter’s widow. And if not for Jo, Ellen mighta been doin’ a lot more than playing unofficial information and dispatch center at the roadhouse. She had way back. How she met Bill, clashed with him on a hunt they came at from different angles, crossed paths, damn near killed each other then wound up married. Then came Jo.

John Winchester had been noticed. He’d been so..fire burned in that man. The only time that the fire and brimstone and vengeance and pain eased off was when he talked of the boys. And half the hunters that knew John had speculated the boys were gone and he was half mad until Jim and Caleb and Bobby had seen them, and as time wore on there were newer pictures John would occasionally show, the boys older in them.

The Winchester Brothers were half goddamn myth before Sam was shaving. John pissed people off and he knew it. He really didn’t give a goddamn, but he was smart enough to keep his boys back. Taught them, trained them, their reasons to hunt weren’t a damn thing they remembered. Dean, a little maybe, but not much. Not the starting reason. They may have found reasons over the years, Sam had with his girl dying at least, but..why it started, why they started…wasn’t their reason, it was their reality.

The Winchester Brothers, part legend before they made their own name, both good and bad.

Bobby’d been asked more than once when he was down to the Roadhouse before…what those boys were like.

Bobby had asked Jim when he’d first met the boys.

John had had a torn up side and a fever. Dean had gone through John’s journal and found Jim’s number. Boy had been all of six. John out of his damn mind with fever, and Dean had pulled a gun, on Jim, who swore the pistol looked as big as the little boy holding it. Snarling threatening terrifying little shit, and Jim had wanted to simply beat John then and there regardless of the fact John didn’t know his own name at that moment. Dean had sized him up, then Sammy came out of the bathroom, promptly sent back to wash his hands. And got three very carefully rationed M&M’s for being a good big boy and not having an accident during his nap.


Bobby doubted anyone would ever believe him, except maybe Jim and Jim was gone. Dean was the homebody of the two. The one who liked the comfort of home and the safety of familiar. Sam was the adventurer, wanting to go out in the world the one who burned for things, wanted things. Dean was happy at home. Just home for Dean was a 67 Impala with a trunk full of weapons and charms and miles of open road. Home was John and Sam and that damn car those boys clung to. Sam could go anywhere, go to college and leave it all behind if home was still there--home being Dean, and that Impala loaded with an arsenal roaring down some blacktop back road.

Even hunters tended to judge folk on the ‘normal world’ the lives they came from before they hunted. Thing was, the Winchester boys had no lives before they hunted. They were raised in that old Impala loaded down with an arsenal and flasks of holy water. John taught them weapons and exorcism rites when every other hunter Bobby’d ever met was mastering to tie their shoes and write their names and ride bikes without training wheels.

They learned how to melt down silver into bullets from their father when other men taught their boys to throw a baseball or a football or maybe even bait a fishing hook. The Winchester Brothers had no before like every other hunter. Sam had a few years of ’away’ but neither one had before.

Bobby’s first sight of the boys wasn’t all that different from Jim’s. God only knows how John had managed to drive them to the Salvage yard. Especially with 38 awkward crooked stitches in his right thigh, stubborn stubborn son of a bitch. Thirty eight stitches, most of them so poorly done they looked down right childish. And they’d been the most impressive stitches Bobby Singer had ever seen in his life. And he held the one who’d done the stitches while he heaved up his guts after John and Sam were asleep, safe in bed, then fed him a dish of ice cream with Hershey’s syrup on top and showed him how to make an assortment of protection runes before convincing the would-be crisis medic to crawl in bed with his little brother and trust Bobby to take the watch just a little bit.

Bobby had chased John off at gun point, threatened to shoot him if he came back. The reason they’d fought was the boys. Boy. Dean.

He hadn’t been happy to see the boys again, oh happy to see them, but he knew they’d come for a reason. They were what they were, raised how they were raised. They were John’s sons and for them to have first come to the Salvage yard knowing John wasn’t welcome, Bobby had known it had to be bad, and it was. And it hadn’t been good since. But Bobby couldn’t complain. He could still fight, and he could watch over the boys.

Bobby wonders if he’ll still be standing when the destruction is all said and done in fifty weeks’ time.

There’s worse things. Far worse ways to go than going down fighting along side John’s boys. Worse would be burning and salting a pair of corpses out back of the house. The worst would be one corpse to salt and burn. One corpse would mean there was only one Winchester, insane and dangerous, still left breathing.

He pushed away the maudlin. Maybe one day he’ll have time for a good ol’ pity party and drink to Daniel and Bill and Jim and Ash and John and his boys. Drink himself stupid and sick and scare his dogs into pissing themselves and hiding from him under the porch for a few days. His mother swore he’d live to see a ripe old age, live even longer than his grandmother had. Considering his grandmother had lived to ninety-two, and Bobby was just fifty this year, that wasn’t a real comforting thought these days. Hadn’t been for a good long time, if it ever had been.

He sighed and glanced at the seat. The little sticky note sitting there on top of the books he’d grabbed.

Hell, there wasn’t anything to lose really. The fella that his long lost Uncle Ernest’s wife thought the sun rose and set outta his ass wasn’t that far, wasn’t that far at all from where they were meeting as it was. Desperate times and desperate measures even if he wasn’t too comfortable with dragging some poor clueless bastard into the end of the world. Aw, hell if it was just the end of the world he wouldn’t worry too much. The boys were wrecked enough, and they were conscientious enough to be worse off than they already were if they went after the poor bastard even verbally.

He was more worried about keeping the boys moving than the demons, and he sure as hell was worried about the demons and the world ending. The boys were more immediate. He knew too damned well the damage a Winchester could leave in their wake when they had a focus, somewhere to aim that burn John had been consumed by and had somehow instilled that fire with less direction in his sons. Nope, too damn many demons on the loose to wonder what the hell a Winchester without a direction would do, that kinda wreckage Bobby didn’t want to see.

He might purposely be sending himself on the path of most destruction at the moment, but he knew what was at the end of it. A Winchester, or two, and that was good enough for now.