WHO: John & Mary Winchester WHERE: Winchester & co house WHEN: Sunday, March 7, 2006; early a.m. WHAT: From rock bottom, the only place is up. RATING: TBD STATUS: thread; in-progress
While John's main desk/workspace was in the master bedroom, he also had a small desk in the weapons storage room off the garage for working when Mary was sleeping, so he didn't keep her awake. Lately, he'd taken to working there even more to hide the fact he rarely slept and his early morning doctored coffees had turned into doctored drinks during other parts of the day or night. Try as he might to keep it together while his sons struggled through their own internal struggles, while Alastair harassed more and more of his family and friends, while dracu-vamps ran amuk in this city with a host of other bad guys, John was slipping lower. He could recall, with sickening clarity at times, what he had done in those years of Hell, how, in the end, he was no better than that bastard demon plaguing them, how he'd been down the path to becoming a demon as his humanity was stripped away by every pain he inflicted on another soul.
But he couldn't afford to lose it all, to disappear and drink himself into a place he didn't have to remember anything, because it wouldn't get this ritual figured out, it wouldn't stop his loved ones from being targeted, it wouldn't kill Alastair. Once, the mission to avenge his wife, and the safety of his sons, had been the only thing keeping him from drowning in booze until it killed him. Now he had the safety of even more to worry about, and a mission that changed with each new bad guy. But Alastair, he'd made this the most personal by abducting Mary, by nearly getting Ben, by harassing and threatening his sons.
However, right now with the threat of Alastair having God in his clutches and all that might mean, John didn't have enough willpower to stay sober, which made focusing pretty damned hard. The liquor bottle mostly empty next to him, and other ones entirely empty in a waste basket next to the small desk, John rubbed his eyes and tried to focus on another entry in the journal in front of him.
There were two journals set out right now on the desk, John having yet to get around to moving more than a handful of hunt-relevant entries out of the old one into the new journal Sam had gotten him for Christmas. He had, however, put back the pages he'd torn out all that time ago, when he'd left the journal for Dean and taken off to find the Azazel. Some of those entries had been too personal to leave for his son, but after pulling them out of a compartment in the truck weeks after being here in LA, he had kept them and eventually put them back in the journal where they'd once been.
The old journal would soon stand as a personal testament to all those years while the new journal would hold all the information John had learned in his own world and well as all he was learning here. Somewhere in all of this had to be the answers to figuring out that ritual. But the alcohol eventually overrode the desire for a time, leaving John passed out on the desk.