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setaripendragon · 19 days ago

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Trapped in the Amber - John Lives AU

So, I wrote this in a bit of a fugue state after thinking too long about how much I enjoyed writing Meira and John interacting. This may end up going up on Ao3, because it's way more than just a drabble, but it's very definitely not canon for this fic, so... Yeah. AU of Chapter 1 of With Wings Made of Wax (IE: Season 2 Episode 1) where Meira dares to tell the truth and John bends enough to give her the benefit of the doubt, and it's enough to change everything.

Middle of Nowhere, Missouri – Tuesday 1st August 2006

John wakes to a ringing silence that can only come on the heels of cacophonous noise. Right. Meira had driven them right into a truck. He opens his eyes barely a slit, and sees the girl – if that is what she is – shift across the front seat, reaching out to check Sam’s pulse with an arm that goes from looking like mincemeat to whole and hale in seconds.

The satisfaction of being right is really rather bitter in these circumstances. It ought to be reassuring that she seems to give a damn that his boys survive, but… Given what he knows about the yellow-eyed demon and his plans, it’s not. He closes his eyes again and holds himself lax and still when Meira gets done checking Dean and turns to him. Her fingers on his neck makes his skin crawl, but he endures it. Best not to give away the only advantage he has right now.

When he hears the sound of the car door opening, he opens his eyes fully and digs a gun out from under the seat – good, at least Dean isn’t getting sloppy in that – without moving enough to attract any attention. He probably needn’t have worried, Meira is entirely focused on the truck that hit them, and the figure approaching, but better safe than sorry.

John doesn’t jump when Meira shoots the figure, but he does have to go very still to keep himself from reacting. He shuts down all the thoughts about why she’d do that. He can ask questions later, for now, all he needs to focus on is that it’s one enemy less on the field.

He shoves the door open and hauls himself up so he can aim at the thing that’s been travelling with his boys for over eight months over the top of the door. Meira turns just as he gets the gun level, and she goes still the moment she spots him.

“Put the Colt on the ground,” he orders.

“John,” Meira says in an infuriatingly placating tone.

“Oh the ground. Now,” John repeats. He’s not going to tell her a third time. He’s not sure he has much longer before his body betrays him, honestly, so he needs to get this over with, needs this threat neutralised so that he can focus on getting them all some goddamn medical attention.

Thankfully, Meira obeys him. “Step back three paces,” John orders, and she does as she’s told. He wonders why, when he’s pretty damn sure a gunshot wouldn’t actually stop her. Well, maybe to the head. He remembers how badly she’d reacted when she’d hit her head before. Not as badly as a human should have, but it had put her on the floor for a few minutes.

“We don’t have time for this,” Meira tries to distract him, tries to draw his attention away from her and onto his boys. He is goddamn aware of how badly injured they are, and he refuses to be baited like that.

Instead, he puts all his focus into staggering out of his minimal cover to go and get the Colt, snarling out an absent-minded “Shut up.” He turns the gun on Meira the moment it’s in his hand, and she stares back at him with wide, wet eyes.

“John, I swear, I’m not your enemy,” Meira pleads. John doesn’t buy it, not because she isn’t a damn good actress, but because he knows he simply cannot afford to be wrong. “I can-”

He shoots her.

Not with the Colt. As interested as he is in finding out if it can kill whatever she is, he’s more interested in getting answers. Information is more vital than bullets in this war. She collapses and swears at him, but John focuses on where he can see the wound closing up through the hole in her jeans. By the time he manages to force his body across the space between them, it’s already gone like it was never there.

He brings the butt of the Colt down on the back of her skull before she can do more than get to her hands and knees, and sends her back to the ground. She’s still moving, though, so John drops to his knee and hits her again, with as much force as his body is capable of right now. It’s enough force that a normal human would be dead in hours.

He’s banking on her not being that human.

After taking a moment – just a moment – to catch his breath, John shoves back to his feet, ignoring the way the world wavers around him at the sudden change in elevation. He needs to get himself and his boys some medical care, and it’s going to have to be a hospital, because he doesn’t even know how to begin figuring out what the demon did to Dean.

He also needs to get Meira somewhere secure. And he needs to do both things fast, because the demons already found them here once, they can do it again. Reluctantly, he gets out his phone and calls an ambulance. He gives the barest description of the crash, leaves the call connected for them to track to his location, and then puts the phone in Dean’s hand and goes to haul the bodies away.

Only to find that the demon isn’t dead.

Well. The demon is dead, John discovers by splashing holy water on his face, but the host is alive. He won’t be for much longer, but there’s an ambulance coming and he’s not John’s priority, so John leaves him where he is and drags Meira into the truck.

Kansas City, Missouri – Wednesday 2nd August 2006

The industrial park storage that John finds is full of junk, but there’s a big enough space for a full signum dei vivi in the middle, and that’s good enough for him. He paints that one in blood and then, because he learned that trick from Meira herself – even if the lore did check out – he adds another devil’s trap on the ceiling, just to be sure. He puts a solid metal chair in the middle, and ties Meira to it with steel-cored rope.

Dean had told him about the shapeshifter, and how it had used steel rope for her but not him or Sam. John doesn’t know if that was coincidence or if it knew something, but given that demons can recognise her on sight, he’s erring on the side of caution. He’d like to bolt the damn chair to the floor too, but he doesn’t really have the time or the equipment for that.

So he makes do with what he has, and settles in to wait for her to wake up.

It doesn’t take as long as it should. Realistically, she shouldn’t be waking up at all, but after only an hour or so, her breathing picks up and her expression contorts as pain begins to register. “You know,” John comments blithely before she’s fully got her bearings, “I hit anybody else that hard on the head, they’d be dead in hours.”

Meira makes a quiet, pained noise as she tries to open her eyes and immediately shuts them again. She doesn’t say anything in response, sniffing the air like a goddamned animal before she tries opening her eyes again with far more care. Her eyes flick around, then up, then down, and that’s where she stalls, blinking rapidly. John doesn’t know if that’s because her vision is still messed up from the repeated knocks to the head, or if it’s because she’s struggling to comprehend what she’s seeing and the situation she’s in.

The first words out of her mouth are; “Where’s Dean? Sam?”

John can’t tell if her concern is sincere or not and he really doesn’t like that. He takes note, however, of the clear order of her priorities. Dean comes first, which is not what he’d expect of someone potentially in league with the yellow-eyed demon. It does track with what he’s observed of her in the past, however; she defers to Dean, and that could simply be because he’s older, but John doesn’t believe that’s all there is to it.

“Do you really think I’d tell you that?” he asks her, poking the beast and watching it closely for its reaction to the provocation.

Meira peeks out at him, squinting. “Please tell me you took them to a hospital,” she says, instead of demanding information or poking back like she so often does with him. It’s perhaps the best answer she could have given, and John distrusts that on principle.

“They’re safe.” John can give her that much, at least, because if this is a very clever dig for information, all it will tell her is that she’s failed. But she reacts as though her concern is truth, head tipping back and features going slack in evident relief.

Within moments, however, she tenses back up again, expression contorting with distress. As she slides towards an outright frown, John goes in for the kill: “So. What the hell are you?”

Meira laughs at the ceiling, thick and unhappy, like she’s half an inch from sliding over the edge into tears. “I already told you,” she snarks half-heartedly, not bothering to lift her head to actually look at him as she says it.

“You offered a bullshit dodge,” John retorts. “I want the truth.”

It takes Meira long minutes to decide what answer she wants to give, and the longer she takes, the more certain John becomes that the next words out of her mouth will be a lie. Then she heaves a sigh, coming to a resolution, and says the most ridiculous thing John has ever heard; “The truth. The truth is… I’m your granddaughter from the future.”

“That’s really the best you’ve got?” John can’t help but ask. It’s so weak compared to the rest of her lies that it shocks the question out of him before he’s thought over whether that’s actually the tack he wants to take.

Meira shrugs and laughs fatalistically. “It’s the only thing I’ve got, because it’s the truth. Meira Samantha Winchester, born June fourteenth 2018, at your service, Grandfather.” She goes so far as to dip her head to him like some kind of old-fashioned gentleman. It’s galling.

But it’s also telling. Samantha; no doubt meant to imply that she’s Dean’s daughter. And Meira… like Mary, perhaps. The idea of someone profaning Mary’s memory like that curdles like rage in his gut, but he tamps down the burning of it into a steady smoulder and focuses. He can’t think of any significance of June fourteenth, or 2018, but perhaps it’s merely her real birthday, shunted forwards?

He snorts. It’d almost be funny, if she weren’t such a blatant yet unknown threat to his boys. “Go on, then,” he mocks, seating himself on the edge of a ruined desk and making a show of settling in for a long tale. “Explain that one to me.”

Meira blows out a breath, puffing out her cheeks like a chipmunk in an exaggerated expression of consternation. “I don’t even know where to start,” she confesses. “Ask a question; I’ll give you the whole and unvarnished truth, I promise.”

That promise is worth less than the breath it took to say, and she has to know that. Still. The uncertainty of where to begin rings as genuine; a lie is usually better planned out than that. Usually, but Meira has already proven she’s very good at lying. He hasn’t yet worked out what she gets out of a lie this outrageous, though, so he plays along and challenges her to commit to the bit and give him enough rope to hang her with. “Time travel?”

Meira cocks her head at him, an unsettlingly inhuman gesture, and returns the challenge instead of meeting it. “Tell me you don’t see the resemblance between Dean and the guy who convinced you to buy the Impala.”

What?

Despite himself, John casts his memory back. He had been planning to buy a van, a family car, hadn’t he? But then there’d been that guy… Van Halen? No, that couldn’t have been his name, that was…

Dean does have a bad habit of using rock musicians as his aliases.

John feels a chill go down his spine. It’s probably just because Meira already drew the connection and it’s such an old memory, so he’s filling in the blanks with the pieces she’s provided instead of what he actually remembers, but the only face his memory can conjure up is Dean’s.

And it’s such a specific memory.

“How do you know about that?” he asks sharply.

“Dad told me,” Meira answers with no small amount of ‘duh’ in her tone, and it rolls off her tongue so fluidly that it rings, once again, as truth to John’s instincts. That chill tiptoes right back up his spine and sets the hairs on the back of his neck on end.

He doesn’t believe her. He doesn’t, but he’s a lot closer to it than he’s comfortable with. He can’t help but study her face, searching for a family resemblance, and now that he’s looking for it… Fuck. She does look like Mary. She could be Mary’s sister if this were thirty years ago.

But he still doesn’t believe her, because none of this explains what she is and how she does things no human should be able to do. There is no way – no possible way – that Dean would have a child with something inhuman. He’s raised his boys better than that.

Feeling like he’s watching himself move from a very long way away, he gestures at Meira’s leg. “The healing?”

“My other two parents are angels,” Meira says, which catches John beneath the ribs like a jolt of electricity. It explains everything, and yet nothing. He’s aware she claims three dads – which is another reason her claim to be Dean’s daughter is bullshit – but why would both the others be relevant?

That’s a much easier thing to think about than angels.

John has never once seen proof that angels exist, except for the simple fact that if any biblical lore about the devil is true – and quite a lot of the stuff about demons is more accurate than not, so John has to give the sources some credence – then at least one must exist. And more are heavily implied to exist, as it’s very hard to be banished if you’re the only one of your kind.

Mary had never been particularly religious, but she’d believed in angels, John remembers suddenly. It’s a shock, a deep pang of grief at the realisation that he’d nearly forgotten that – nearly lost that part of her – in the onslaught of evil that followed her death, but she had. She’d believed in angels fiercely.

Meira takes his silence as a cue to keep talking. “My qaada is the Angel of Thursday, and my pabbi is the archangel Gabriel. And also kinda the trickster god Loki?” she says, a touch sheepish, like she knows she’s making her story even more ridiculous, even harder to believe, and is doing it anyway because…

“I’d accuse you of lying to me,” John begins, flattening out his tone to keep it from rasping, “but honestly this is getting too ridiculous to be a believable lie.”

Meira shrugs helplessly. “And, dude, you are just scratching the surface of how nuts my life is.”

The words are almost flippant, except they’re too heavy with irony to really be call that, and it makes John incredibly uncomfortable. It rings true, yet again, and he’s starting to wonder. What if she’s not that good an actress and has simply been talking around this insanity? He wants to shy away from the thought, but forces himself to pin it down and consider it with all the discernment twenty years of hunting evil has taught him.

He crosses his arms and keeps his stare level as he watches Meira and turns this all over in his head. “So. You’re a nephilim,” he states, once again poking her to try and find the holes, to try and find the rope he’s going to use to hang her. That he wants to find, because the alternative is… difficult to even contemplate.

“Uh, technically, no,” Meira says, and John narrows his eyes at that. Is that her tactic? Refusing to take the easy answer, the believable answer, specifically in order to add verisimilitude? If so, she’s taking it a bit damn far. His clear suspicion makes her wince, but she doesn’t retract her answer, only elaborates. “A nephilim is created when-” Meira pauses, coughs, and visibly changes tack with a smirk she can’t quite hide. “-through very human methods of reproduction.”

She looks like Dean, John can’t help but think, when he’s about to make a crass innuendo and then thinks better of it in his father’s company. It’s not a thought John likes at all, and he can feel his breathing pick up in alarm as he realises he’s actually very nearly convinced. He forces himself steady with sheer force of will, and focuses on the rest of Meira’s answer.

“My birth was much more angelic in nature,” she’s explaining. “There isn’t really a name for what I am, honestly, because I’m literally only the second of my kind. At a stretch,” she adds the last with a touch of bitterness that, once again, rings true. ‘An abomination’ she’d said, the last time he’d asked her what she actually is, because that’s the only simple and honest answer she has.

If John were a softer man, that might have moved him to sympathy. As it is, it’s still a devastating blow against his conviction that she’s lying to him. “Do you actually have proof of any of this?” John challenges, and makes sure it comes out far more sceptical than he’s actually feeling.

Meira visibly thinks about it, and then leans forwards. John tenses, immediately braced for an attack, an attempt to flee-

All rational thought abandons him for several crucial seconds as the air is suddenly filled with feathers. He recoils with a curse, but Meira doesn’t lunge, and she doesn’t run, just sits there and smiles and offers a cheeky little “Tah-dah!” like this isn’t breaking John’s brain a little.

The wings – wings – are huge, thirteen or fourteen feet across, if he’s any judge, and a brilliant, pristine white on the underside. Sharply angled and narrow, like a raptor, but the patterning he can see over the top of the wrist and elbow joints are most similar to a barn owl, if barn owls could ever look quite that metallic and iridescent.

They are undeniably, irrefutably flesh-and-blood wings. They move when she breathes, rustle and flex when she rolls her shoulders, curl in a little around her the longer John stares.

He can’t-

He is going to need a minute to fucking process this.

Wings.

Angels.

…Fuck.

John puts that all in a box to think about later, and goes back to trying to figure Meira out. He’s not even going to contemplate how this factors in to how much he believes her. “The demons?” he asks instead.

Ire flashes through Meira’s eyes, bright and scalding, and it’s – irritatingly – reassuringly familiar. “For some dumb reason, my grace looks a lot like Lucifer’s. I don’t know why the fuck that happened when it should have been identical to my qaada’s, but maybe Granddad just has a shit sense of humour,” she bites out, and she’s so casual about it, it takes John a good few seconds to catch up to what she actually said.

“Grandad?” he asks on autopilot, and then realises who that has to mean, if any of this has been true, and he nearly chokes on it.

“Capital-G God,” Meira confirms brightly, full of schadenfreude. “But yeah, that’s why the demons trusted me. Because they thought I was the Antichrist or something. I let them think that because then they told me shit like where they were taking you.”

Oh, good, something John can poke without having to think about the girl who calls him grandfather calling God Himself granddad. “You didn’t know that from the future?” he pokes.

Meira snorts at him, and pokes back. “You think Dad’s changed that much? Like fuck he talks about the shit that hurts him more than he’s absolutely got to, and if you think the events that led to your death didn’t hurt him, you’re an idiot.”

John straightens, entirely and thoroughly distracted from his sudden crisis of faith. “My death?” he demands.

Meira’s expression twists, her lower lip catching between her teeth in a clear and futile attempt to disguise her sudden distress. “Dad’s dying,” she tells him, in a voice that suggests that maybe – just maybe – it’s as devastating for her to say as it is for him to hear. “I don’t know if it was the crash or the demon, but… You make a deal. The colt and your soul, for Dean’s life.” Her lips twist in a grim mockery of a smile. “That’s why I’m telling you any ofthis, you paranoid fuckwad; it’s my hail mary pass.”

The attitude is the thing that convinces him that, whatever he thinks of anything else she says, this part is definitely true. She has consistently shown a near aggressive concern for Dean’s well-being, and she has consistently given John lip. The one rather reinforces the veracity of the other.

Still, that’s not going to stop him verifying it for himself.

“I’ll be back,” he informs Meira, as a courtesy, and heads out of the storage shed and towards the car he rented after he ditched the truck. Behind him, just before the door swings shut, he hears a bitterly furious “Motherfucker,” tossed after him.

He very studiously thinks of nothing at all as he drives to the hospital, and thinks of nothing all the way through the gauntlet of staff trying to get him admitted when all he wants is to see his sons and assure himself… He goes to Dean’s room first, and finds Sam up and awake and sitting at his brother’s bedside.

“Dad,” Sam breathes with abject relief when he sees him.

“Sam,” John replies, then looks to Dean. “How are you boys doing?”

“I’m fine,” Sam says dismissively. “But Dean… Dad, they’re saying he might not wake up.” He says it straight out, ripping a band-aid off, and John was half expecting it, but it still hits like a knife to the guts.

Meira was telling the truth about this. What else was she telling the truth about?

No.

He can’t think about that right now. First things first, he assures Sam as best he can, clapping him on the shoulder and promising they’ll do everything they can for Dean. “Where’s Meira?” Sam asks.

“I’ve got her looking into some things,” John deflects.

Sam raises an eyebrow. “And she just did what you said?” he challenges dubiously.

John snorts. “No,” he agrees darkly, “but no matter what she thinks of me, she clearly values Dean’s life, and that’s enough for now.” Sam nods, looking very tired all of a sudden. “Get some rest, I’ve got to-” The pile of things John needs to take care of before he can even begin to start really thinking about everything Meira said threatens to overwhelm him for moment, and he determinedly pushes it all away to focus on just the next thing on his to-do list. “I’ve got to make sure this whole thing doesn’t end up on anyone’s radars.”

“Can I help?” Sam asks, almost eagerly. “What can I do?”

“Rest,” John repeats firmly. He knows as soon as he’s said the word that it’s not going to go over well. Sam de-ages about ten years with the expression of petulant defiance on his face, and John wants tocry. Instead, he gives Sam a task to keep him occupied. “And keep watch over Dean. We don’t know how that demon found us on the road, they could find us here.” Sam’s expression firms, and he nods.

Then John goes and lets himself be admitted, gets treated, spins a bullshit yarn for the police that turn up about a second man in the truck who abducted him, but he fought his way free, gives them the most generic description he can, and gets himself discharged.

He goes and empties the Impala’s trunk before anyone can see the arsenal, and has to double-down on his compartmentalisation as he looks at the car. The memory of Dean leaning on the damn thing and saying “Trust me, this thing's still gonna be badass when it's 40,” floods his mind and he has to pause and brace himself on the extremely dented hood to just breathe.

No.

He has things to do. He loads the weapons and other hunting paraphernalia into a couple of duffel bags, and ignores all the thoughts that threaten to spill over as he encounters the neatly organised collection of knives, because his boys have never favoured them, but Meira- No. He hauls everything off to a motel, where he books himself a room, and sets his alarm for exactly seven hours later.

Kansas City, Missouri – Thursday 3rd August 2006

In the morning, John sorts through everything he pulled out of the Impala, and loads himself up with anything useful. Holy water and markers, mostly, since the Colt is already on his person and isn’t going to be anywhere else for a good long time if he has anything to say about it.

Then he heads back to the cabin.

He circles the area warily, but he sees no evidence of demons or demonic activity, so he dares to approach the actual building, only to stop in his tracks when the damn thing comes into view. The whole thing looks like it’s been split in half down the middle, and one half promptly collapsed, while the other half was torn from the ground and scattered across the surrounding area. There is absolutely no chance that yellow-eyes is actually still in there.

For a moment the rage threatens to swallow him whole. He burns with frustration that Sam hadn’t just taken the damn shot when he had the chance, because he would rather be dead if it meant that thing could no longer walk the earth. In the back of his mind, he hears “your fucking revenge-boner jerk-off buddy” and that very effectively douses the worst of his anger.

It also reminds him of the last item on his to-do list. So he gets back into his rental and drives back to that little storage shed. Meira looks remarkably well for someone who’s spent over twenty-four hours tied up with neither food nor water. The- the wings are still there, but settled like a cloak and mantle around her shoulders instead of spread wide for dramatic effect.

“The demon is gone,” John snaps by way of a greeting, because he is still angry about that, even if it’s not so all-consuming anymore, and he wants to see how she reacts to the implicit accusation.

“What?” Meira asks, wings flaring slightly in her alarm.

“I went back to the cabin,” John informs her, and the utter horror on her face is… something. It’s something. “The place looks like a hurricane hit it, and the demon we left trapped there is gone. You want to explain that?”

Meira gapes at him for several seconds, before bursting out into a familiarly spiteful little rant. “A demon managed to find us bare minutes after we got out of there and ran us off the road, and you’re surprised that there might have been others that found him? Newsflash, dumbass, devil’s traps only work on demons inside them. Ones on the outside can still have enough juice to, say, tear up whatever the trap is drawn on and free their friends.”

Yeah. That’s about what John figured, and the fact that she’s not only come to the same conclusion, but is willing to tear him a new one for not thinking of it is… another point in her favour, really. A liar would be more likely to try and placate him, to soften the notion with a false ‘realisation’ of ‘what must have happened’.

“How do we kill it?”

Meira glares at him. “Dad shoots him in the fucking face about a year from now. Little less, I think,” she states, tone utterly flat and so devoid of any emotion it’s a very clear indicator of her growing impatience. Which shatters just a moment later, and she bursts out with, “Is that enough for you, you colossal twatwaffle? Will you let me out of here so I can save your son’s life, or do you want to play another round of paranoia-boner jerk-off?”

Revenge-boner jerk-off buddy echoes in John’s head again and he grits his teeth. “You just don’t stop, do you?” he asks, to buy himself a few goddamn seconds to process the rest of what she just said.

“Right back at you, motherfucker,” Meira snarls.

Yeah, well, John can’t afford to stop, because if he stops to think for even just a moment, he’s not going to be functional for the next twenty-four hours at least, and he needs to keep functioning.

“How?” John grits out. Functioning. Focusing on the next thing that needs to be done.

“How what?” Meira asks after a beat of evident confusion.

“How would you save Dean’s life?”

Meira gives him a look of such incredulous contempt, John’s control is severely tested in not smacking it off her face. “Uh, hello? Archangel here?”

And there’s that thing John’s been trying very hard not to think about. Angels. And his- And Meira potentially being one. But even if it’s true, even if angels do exist, John still can’t trust that that means anything in the grand scheme of things. “And what would it cost?” he demands, because that’s the question here. That’s the crux of the matter.

The doctors have all but given up, which means all John’s really doing is trying to find the solution that will be least likely to fuck his boys over in the process.

Meira’s breath catches. “Nothing,” she says, voice ragged, catching in her throat and coming out a whisper. She finds her voice a second later to add, “Fuck, I know you don’t think very well of me, but I’m not going to ask for payment for healing my goddamn family!”

John can’t let himself hope. Can’t let himself trust that easily. That’s how people end up dead. That’s how his boys end up dead. Except Dean’s already dying, isn’t he? “Nothing that good comes without a price,” John insists.

Meira kicks her chin up, and gives him more fucking lip. “Okay, fine, it’s going to cost half a dozen years of suffering, a barely averted apocalypse, the explosion of some ten-thousand year old issues, the concerted effort of heaven, hell, and half of fucking purgatory to kill me, and a bout of excruciating pain, but the only parts of it that are going to land on your shoulders are going to come for you anyway, so what the fuck have you got to lose? I’m not going to ask for your goddamned soul.”

A bare day ago, the fact that Meira has apparently figured out that he’s been considering… other options would have had his back up like nothing else, but now, it only serves to make him think- Maybe.

Then Meira’s expression twists into something purely spiteful, and she adds, “but hey, if you want me to extract a price, then how about; Stop traumatising your fucking kids!”

John glares at her to keep his expression steady over the maelstrom of emotions he’s feeling. There’s outrage there, but guilt too, and hope, no matter how hard he’s fighting it, and uncertainty, which he hates more than anything and, more to the point, cannot afford right now. He glares, and curls his hands into fists to keep them steady, but it doesn’t work, and the longer he takes to make his decision, the worse it gets.

In truth, he knows he’s already made his decision, and this dithering is just him not wanting to accept the risks.

He gives himself a mental kick up the ass, and goes to untie the supposed fucking archangel that’s offering to heal his son for nothing except… well, except his trust. A high price indeed, but not quite as high as his soul.

The ropes come loose, and the bruises around Meira’s wrists vanish right in front of his eyes. John wonders if it will be that easy for her to heal Dean, and then has to stop thinking about that or he’s going to change his mind – it can’t be this easy, nothing is this easy – and he’s already set himself on this course. Indecision will kill him just as surely as a bullet. He’s weighed his options, and he’s picked this one. Now, he’s going to stick to it.

“After you,” he tells her, gesturing to the door and pointedly not doing anything to break the trap under their feet.

“You know the signum dei vivi can hold some of the lower ranks of angels?” Meira asks in a deliberately conversational tone as she shakes her wings out and John tries very hard not to watch them instead of her face. “Including the Angel of Thursday. Originally, anyway,” she adds, and John makes a mental note to ask about that later, if-

“You claimed to be an archangel,” John reminds her, almost amused. If she’s trying to convince him to give her the benefit of the doubt if she can’t leave the circle, she’s not going to get anywhere with it anytime soon. But it does remind John that he has options, as distasteful as they are. “Prove it.”

Meira bounces and skips right over the outer edge of the trap, then spins on one heel, wings flaring wide to help her balance and make a spectacle of it. She spreads her arms as if displaying herself; a showy gesture like some game-show presenter, and half-bows to him like an actor at curtain call. “Satisfied, motherfucker?” she chirps with a grin that’s all teeth.

No, he isn’t, but… “If you can save Dean, I will be,” he tells her. If she can save Dean like she’s promised, then perhaps he can afford to trust her. The final test, and if she passes, he will have to accept that she’s been telling the truth.

She nods, accepting that, and gestures to the door. “After you,” she fires back at him. John takes the lead back to the rental, and drives them to the hospital in absolute silence.

They find Sam at Dean’s bedside again, head bowed over John’s own journal, flipping through the pages. He doesn’t look up as John slips into the room, but Meira isn’t quite so stealthy. She makes a noise like someone just kicked her in the gut when John clears her line of sight to the bed, and Sam’s head snaps up.

Something in his shoulders loosens when he spots the source of the noise. John wants to cuff him upside the head for trusting so easily when he taught him better than that, but given the givens it rather stinks of hypocrisy, so he lets the thought go. “Meira, hey,” Sam greets, attempting a smile that falls flat, before just nodding to them instead. “Dad.”

John crosses the room and claps him on the shoulder, grounding himself with the touch as much as it’s meant to comfort Sam. Sam glances up with another smile that just doesn’t quite work, and John has to swallow his own worry. He lets himself drop into the other visitor’s chair and scrubs a hand over his face to hide his expression from the room for a moment.

He can’t believe he’s doing this, that he’s trusting-

Don’t lose your nerve now, Winchester. “Go get something to eat, son,” he instructs. “I’ll- I’ll sit with Dean.” He can’t quite keep the catch out of his voice as he tries to talk about Dean, because either way, the situation is going change soon enough. Either Meira is telling the truth, and she heals Dean, or… or she’s not, and John has probably gotten his son into some even deeper shit than what he suspects is the actual goddamn apocalypse.

Sam opens his mouth to argue, but something seems to stop him, and he huffs a reluctant surrender. “You sure I should leave you two alone together?” he challenges, though it’s clearly not a refusal, just an attempt to lighten the atmosphere.

“If anything is going to get Dean to wake up, it’d be needing to mediate, right?” Meira says, playing along. Which is good, because John can’t think of anything to say that isn’t ‘no, you shouldn’t, you know better, I taught you better, goddamnit.’

Sam actually laughs, even if it is a bit ragged around the edges, as he levers himself up from his chair. “I don’t think things are quite that desperate yet,” he chokes out, and then swallows convulsively, like he can taste the lie like rot on his tongue.

“No promises,” Meira quips back, and Sam groans, but heads out of the room anyway with only one hesitant glance back towards the bed.

John expects Meira to do whatever it is she needs in order to heal Dean right away, but she waits, hovering just out of the doorway, looking to John like she’s waiting for a cue. John isn’t sure if he’s grateful that she’s allowing him that small illusion of control, or if he hates her just a bit more for making him even more complicit in this potential betrayal than he already is.

Still, he waits to be sure that Sam will be well out of the blast radius before he jerks his chin towards the bed and raises his eyebrows impatiently at the girl. She pulls a face right back at him, rolling her eyes before she squares her shoulders and steps up to the bed. She very delicately detaches the oxygen mask from Dean’s face. “For the record,” she announces, more to the room than to him, John thinks, “I am lodging a complaint with management that this is the only way I’ve found to get this to work at the moment.”

Hell, does Dean really let his daughter get away with so much goddamn whining? “Noted,” he drawls, making sure that one word communicates ‘get the fuck on with it’ as clearly as possible.

“Fuck you,” Meira mutters, but it’s tinged with humour rather than vitriol. John wonders at the change. Is it really just because he’s giving her a chance? Not all of her antagonism can be put down to a reaction to his distrust, but that edge that he’s always taken as an attempt to drive a wedge between him and his sons… Could that really just have been so much defensive snarling at his attempts to put some distance between his sons and this strange, unknown factor?

Meira draws in a fortifying breath, grabs hold of Dean’s head in both hands, and leans down to seal her mouth over his. John lurches in alarm, mind full of demons and deals and the consequences therein. No. No, if she’s tricked him into trading Dean’s soul for healing instead of his own, he’s going to kill her, and he’s going to make it hurt-!

Meira slumps like her strings have been cut, head bouncing off the edge of the bed as she collapses to floor in the same moment Dean’s eyes flicker open. A high pitched keening noise has both John and Dean scrambling to look around – or over – the side of the bed. “Shit, Meira!” Dean swears, swinging his legs out of bed without any sign of discomfort at all, and dropping to his knees beside her thrashing form.

It’s very clearly a seizure.

John doesn’t think about it, just strips off his jacket and folds it in two quick, economical motions as he glances at the clock and notes the position of the second hand. “Under her head,” he orders Dean, who looks up, startled, but takes the jacket without question and does as he’s told.

It’s an agonising twenty-seven seconds later that Meira stops convulsing with another, much quieter pained noise. “Meira?” Dean calls softly, and Meira’s eyes flicker open. “You back with us?” She nods, and Dean’s shoulders slump with relief. The nod turns into a roll of her head, as she tips it further back and meets John’s gaze. He’s not sure what she’s thinking, but John is feeling the full weight of realisation hit him like a sack of bricks.

That’s his granddaughter.

Fuck.

“The fuck was that?” Dean demands.

“A seizure,” Meira informs him, the little smartass. “Help me up,” she adds, and Dean obliges, hauling her to her feet. She shakes her limbs out like she’s still feeling phantom aches, and John makes several connections at lightning speed. There was no pagan god, was there? Or… that was a side-step, rather than a lie. She does have a pagan god she can call, because apparently the archangel Gabriel has been roleplaying a trickster for fun, but that isn’t how she healed that Meg Masters girl. She did this.

“Thirty seconds,” John informs her, because he doubts anyone else who’s been present has been in a state of mind fit for timing the damn seizure, and if that shit’s getting worse the more she does this, that’s important to know.

“Huh. You timed it?” Meira asks, and John nods, to which she flashes him a quick, grateful little smile.

It makes John feel deeply uncomfortably, so he ignores it in favour of getting Dean back into bed until a medical professional can verify for him that Meira did, in fact, heal him properly. Dean reluctantly goes where he’s bid, sort of. He sits down on the edge of the bed, but refuses to actually get back into it. “I feel fine,” he insists, glancing between John and Meira uncertainly. “The fuck happened?”

John decides to let Meira answer that. He’s interested to see how she handles it, especially now that he can see behind the curtain of her obfuscations.

“You remember we crashed?” she checks, and Dean nods. “Well, I shot the demon that ran us off the road, and John brought you and Sam to the hospital. Sam’s fine, just went to get something to eat,” she adds quickly when Dean’s eyes widen. “That was… what? Yesterday?”

“Two days ago,” John corrects.

“Shit, was I really… out for that long?”

John nods, with the tiniest hint of a smirk.

“Well, fuck.” Meira pauses. “What happened to the Colt?”

John points to his own back at waist level instead of answering aloud.

Meira breathes a sigh of relief, and as the air leaves her, so does all of the stress and tension that was holding her together, it seems. She sags and all but collapses onto the bed beside Dean and leans into him, pressing her face into his shoulder. “Don’t you ever fucking nearly die on me again, Dean,” she says thickly, sounding near to tears.

Dean clears his throat. “Do my best,” he promises, bringing an arm up around her shoulders and squeezing gently. They shudder in his hold as Meira loses the battle against tears, and they sit like that for a long moment, John feeling more and more like the interloper as time drags on.

Eventually, though, Dean lets his arm drop, and Meira takes the cue to sit up and pull herself together. She slides down off the bed so abruptly that John almost thinks she’s collapsed again, but instead, she settles at Dean’s feet, facing away, and says “Braid my hair,” in the most imperious tone John’s ever heard from her.

Dean snorts. “This going to be a thing?” he asks dryly as he pulls out the band holding her – rather wonky by now – ponytail in place.

“Don’t nearly die again and we won’t have to find out,” Meira snarks right back, and Dean chuckles, running his fingers through her hair.

“French braid again?” he asks, and Meira hums an affirmative. Her eyes slide closed again as Dean begins twisting her hair into place, and John watches the moment unfold with a desperate sort of ache in his chest.

This, he thinks suddenly, is what Dean’s future looks like. How often has Dean done this in Meira’s past? He can practically see the years falling off Meira and settling on Dean, until Dean looks as old as John is now, and Meira is a little slip of nothing that could fit on his lap.

He’s desperately glad that when they’re done and Dean’s tied off the braid, Meira immediately causes a ruckus by pressing the call button before Dean can stop her. The ensuing chaos of Dean’s arguments and the nurse’s arrival gives John the time he needs to pull himself back together. He needs to not fall apart in the middle of the goddamn hospital. They’ve still got demons crawling up their asses here, and it wouldn’t do to get caught off guard.

Sam gets back before the chaos is done, and only adds to it by hovering about awkwardly and getting in the way as he tries to assure himself that Dean’s okay. He’s apparently forgotten all about the tray of to-go cups of coffee in his hand, and doesn’t even seem to notice when Meira ducks into the scrum to snag two of them and retreat at speed with her prize. She settles in an arms-length from John and hands him one of the cups without looking at him. John takes it without a word.

Sam doesn’t notice, but Dean does. He tracks the gesture, and narrows his eyes at them suspiciously. Thankfully, the doctor then arrives to back up the nurse’s pleas for Dean to stay the night for observation, and he’s distracted with fending them off. They reluctantly produce discharge papers for him to sign, which he does, and then he practically bolts from the room.

“I fucking hate hospitals,” he announces, as the three of them catch up to him in the hallway and match his rapid pace.

“I’ve always kinda liked them,” Meira confesses, and John turns in unison with his sons to stare at her incredulously. “They’re one of the most defiant places in the world,” she says, full of warmth, “humanity blazing bright against the darkness, telling even death himself ‘not today.’”

There’s something profound in that, in the awe on Meira’s face as she says it. Except then Dean says “Game of Thrones,” in a tone of acknowledgement and grudging amusement, and Meira snaps her fingers and points finger-guns at him, and the moment breaks. John rolls his eyes.

“And you call me a nerd,” Sam grumbles good-naturedly as they reach the front doors and spill out into the muggy afternoon air. “So what now?” he asks, as the rapid escape from the building turns to a slow, uncertain meandering.

John knows he should have an answer, but he doesn’t. He clenches his jaw, and steels himself to come up with a plan of action and present it like it’s a done deal. He has to at least appear to have confidence and certainty for his boys. But before he can make any words leave his lips, Meira speaks up.

“Well, Bobby did say to head back to his once we got John back,” she reminds them all, and then flashes a winsome, utterly mocking smile at John. “He even promised not to shoot at you. Again.”

“Meira,” Dean groans, but even John can tell there’s not enough force behind it to stop her. There’s not enough force behind it to stop a toddler, never mind a wilful adult. This is why Meira’s so goddamn cheeky. Dean clearly needs to take a firmer hand with his kid in the future.

But that kid is currently the only reason Dean is walking out of the hospital, instead of still lying there dying, so… John curbs his first, angry rebuke. “I’m sure you wish he would,” he says instead, dry and pointed.

Meira’s smile grows teeth. “I would love to know what you did that actually made him try,” she taunts; dares. Her gaze holds his, and he can see the challenge in them, the test laid out. The unspoken, yet so terribly loud; tell the truth, if you can bear to admit it.

John is no coward, no matter what she thinks. He nods to her, ever so slightly, because it’s not as if she’s made a secret of the fact that she’s more of a mind with Bobby than John on this particular issue. “We might’ve had an argument or two about how I was raising my boys,” he says through gritted teeth.

Meira’s smile turns sweet, but no less sharp-edged. “I knew I liked him!”

John glares at her. Not only was that cheeky, it was childish and petty, and John has had it up to here with her attitude. “How your father ever put up with you, I have no idea,” he growls. Actually, now he thinks on it, she reminds him a little of Sam in his very worst teen years, when all John got from him was lip. When Sam had dug his heels in on every little issue just to prove he could.

“Dad!” Dean snaps.

There is the commanding tone John had been looking for, the bite in his voice that hits with enough of a punch to bring most anyone up short. John is not most anyone, but it’s good to know that Dean can pull it out when needed, even if he’s deeply unimpressed that it’s being pointed in his direction right now.

All of Meira’s sharp edges soften, though, and she leans into him, a silent gesture of gratitude and reassurance, even as her eyes never leave John. “I,” she begins, and even with the edges filed down there’s something portentous about her words that make them land heavily regardless, “was the light of my dad’s life, and he never gave me cause to doubt that.”

John flinches.

It’s not the words that hit, but the silences in between. The overt contrast, brought into sharp relief by the echoing silence. The absolute faith; the damning doubt.

“Meira!” Dean snaps.

Meira backs down, body language caving in, surrendering to her father’s scolding even though she doesn’t retract the words, the indictment. He’s seen her do this before, back in Chicago; when she’d pushed too far, gone cold with rage at something he’d said and Dean had stepped in, she’d backed down immediately.

At the time, John had taken it as another subtle ploy to drive a wedge between them. Deferring to Dean’s authority over John’s, subtly setting them into equal – and opposing – positions of authority. But no, it’s just instinct, a child listening to their father, even when she believes herself to be in the right, even when she refuses to drop John’s gaze or apologise, she still gives her father enough deference to stop fighting when he tells her to.

Small mercies, when she’s already won the bout.

“I’ll see you at Singer’s,” John says, crisply, because if he doesn’t keep his tone firmly regulated, it’s going to shake.

As he turns and walks away, he hears Dean ask, rather plaintively, “What the hell was that?” but then he’s too far away to hear Meira’s answer. As tempted as he is by a chance to gather more data on her, he finds it’s not enough to overcome the driving need to get away from her sharp gaze and her cutting words and her fucking judgement.

At least he’ll have the drive to Sioux Falls to try and get himself back under control.

Sioux Falls, South Dakota – Thursday 3rd August 2006

John does not feel any more under control by the time he reaches the Singer Salvage Yard. He even gave himself an extra half hour by doing a perimeter check around the place, just to be sure there aren’t any demons lying in wait. That’s as much grace as he’s willing to give himself, though, so after that he forces himself to knock on the door.

It’s opened a moment later by Singer, who levels a completely unreadable look at him for several painful moments before he says, “Winchester.”

“Singer.”

The silence that swells between them is broken by a quiet but ominous growl coming from inside the house, followed by a deliberately provocative “Good boy,” from John’s least favourite pain in the ass.

Singer huffs, somewhere between exasperated and amused, and steps back to let him in. John takes in the way Meira is sprawled out on the couch with a book propped on Rumsfeld’s flanks, and turns back to Singer. “Where are the boys?”

“Dean’s out back looking over the Impala,” Singer answers, closing the door, “and Sam’s gone out to get groceries.”

John grunts an acknowledgement and, with his last valid distraction so neatly removed, forces himself to walk into the study and claim the chair at Singer’s desk, sitting on it sideways so that he’s facing Meira. She looks so perfectly comfortable, so at home here, and it sends John’s thoughts into a whirlwind of questions. Instead of asking a single one of them, he forces himself to breathe steadily, to reel himself in, and focus on the mission. He needs relevant information.

He pulls out his journal and a pen, propping it open on the edge of Singer’s desk, and flipping to the next empty page. He writes today’s date, and Meira’s name. Just her first name, because now he knows the last name is a lie, and he can’t quite bring himself to commit the truth to paper just yet. “From the beginning,” he orders.

Meira meets his eyes, face utterly blank of expression, and then flicks a glance over his shoulder, to where Singer is propping up the doorway. Singer raises one unimpressed eyebrow, and Meira quirks a rueful little smile before turning back to John and cocking her head in an exaggerated gesture of confusion. “Which beginning?”

That’s a stupid question, and all the more for how it’s actually relevant when fucking time-travel is involved. “Blackwater ridge,” John states, because that’s the earliest incident he can find with even a hint of her presence.

Meira gives an acknowledging little bobble of her head. “I crash-landed because someone or something – I suspect the devil, frankly – fucked with my grace mid-flight,” she tells him, point-blank and to the point. John, honestly, appreciates it. He writes it down; ‘Arrived at Blackwater Ridge on 11/11/05 from ______ (>2030?) after an unknown force (suspected; devil?) attacked her and crippled her ability to fly (research: angelic grace, re; flight + time).’

“Missouri.”

“Her granddaughter babysat me a lot as a kid. It was hard not to think about it when I came face to face with her for the first time. Also, she could see what I am,” Meira reports, and John writes that down, too: ‘Knows Missouri’s granddaughter Patience from childhood, but never met Missouri. Missouri aware of her nature (review Missouri re: Meira + angels).’

“Plainview.”

It takes Meira a moment to answer that one, and when she does, it’s with a grimace. “Took me too freaking long to figure out how to make the healing work with my grace bound,” she explains.

“Bound?” John demands, head snapping up, half way through scribbling down ‘Abilities; healin-’

Meira gives him a deeply unimpressed look for that. “If it weren’t I would’ve fucked off back to my own time already,” she informs him, as though that should have been obvious. “I honestly don’t know how the fuck they managed it, but my grace is bound beneath my skin.” She gestures to herself. “I can’t affect anything but myself with it anymore.”

John narrows his eyes, because he knows for a fact that’s untrue. Then again, he remembers her whining from before she healed Dean, and asks, “Why kissing?”

Meira pulls a face. “Spiritual CPR,” she corrects plaintively. John snorts, almost more amused than he is annoyed at her childish antics. Sure, it wasn’t a pleasant notion to contemplate, but you bucked up and did whatever was needed to get the job done, pleasant or not. “Fuck you,” Meira huffed, without any of the familiar bite. Just like in the hospital, it was edged with a wry, self-directed humour than any sort of aggression.

Finally, she relents, and actually answers his damn question. “It’s the same reason demons do it to seal a deal,” she explains. “Healing with grace requires access to the soul, and-” A faint wistful smile crosses her face. “-and kissing is communion.”

That… is certainly a statement, especially coming from a- an angelic being of some kind. John jots it down with a note to consult Jim Murphy on the subject and how it might fit into common consensus on scripture. If nothing else, it’s sure to make for an entertaining conversation. Then he finishes his note about Meira’s abilities. ‘Abilities; healing (self, others through mouth-to-mouth access to soul), flight (through time, hampered, physical wings), shapeshifting (wings not always present),’ with plenty of space left for more.

“Chicago.”

Meira puffs up her cheeks like a chipmunk, and then blows out the breath in one big gusting sigh. “Which part?” she asks with a grimace.

John considers that, then flips back in his journal to the entries covering that whole clusterfuck. He scans it from the beginning, looking for the inconsistencies. “Novak?” he prompts, when he comes to his notes about his and Meira’s official introduction.

“Qaada’s vessel’s surname. I could hardly use Winchester, Pabbi doesn’t have one, and Renaldi is way too loaded for casual use. It was the first thing that came to mind that I could actually use.”

“Vessel?” John asks sharply.

“With consent,” Meira replies, just as sharp.

John notes that down, too, with an underlined reminder to research that, because it sounds suspicious as hell, and he really doesn’t like it. Now’s not the time to open up that question though, because John is looking to get as much information as he can out of her, not derail them with one of her rants about saving monsters.

He flips back to his notes on Chicago.

“The ways to kill demons?” he prompts. It’s been a burning question in his mind ever since she said it. He’d spent twenty years looking for a way to kill that yellow-eyed son of a bitch, and she came along and rattled off three just off the top of her head. It was galling.

Meira raises a hand in a loose fist and begins counting off on her fingers. “The Renaldi have been doing it that way for actual thousands of years before Samuel Colt came up with that ritual,” she explains, flicking up one finger that she then uses to point, with no small amount of melodrama, to her own face. “Angel,” the second finger goes up, and John doesn’t think it’s a coincidence that their backs are towards him. This girl is such a goddamn brat, and it’s so infuriating it’s coming back around to being funny. Not that he’s ever going to let her know that. “And not-bro Ben has the one that was used on Dad.”

The third finger pops up, but John isn’t paying her hand a lick of attention anymore. He’s staring at her dead on, willing himself not to lose his shit until she explains what she just said. She doesn’t speak, though, so he forces himself to grit out, “Explain.”

Meira’s expression is, at least, perfectly solemn. “And the First Seal shall break with the Righteous Man sheds blood in hell,” she quotes. And it is a quote, with all the portentous weight of a fucking prophecy.

Behind him, Singer sucks in a sharp breath. “No,” he breathes, devastated and in denial.

John wishes he could still hide behind denial. He wishes it didn’t fit all too well with the ugly suspicion that’s been growing in the back of his mind this last year or so. He never wrote that down, either, tried not to so much as look at it head on, but the pieces were there, and he’s too much a hunter to not notice them. “I knew it,” he snarls under his breath as it all comes together, like he was just waiting for someone else to say it.

And then the realisation catches up with him, the fucking weight of it.

The apocalypse. The end of the goddamn world, and his boys used to start it. Dean to open the gate, and Sam… Sam to lead the horde.

There’s a distant crunching sound. Pain lances through his hand. He looks down to see ink and blood both leaking out from between his fingers. Black and red. He looks at it, at his blood, and feels strangely disconnected from it. His mind is whirling, plans and contingencies coming together and falling apart rapidly as he tries to find some way out, but it’s all so very far away. Drowned under a frozen, desperate litany of not my boys, not my boys, not my boys-!

It- It doesn’t have to be Sam, does it? There are others. Dozens of others. And if it doesn’t have to be Sam, then maybe it doesn’t have to be Dean, either- And he knows, he knows, doesn’t he, the only way Dean could end up in hell, and-

He looks up, finds Meira watching him with slightly wide eyes. “Why did you stop me?” he rasps, voice ragged with the strain of keeping his emotions in check. “I could’ve-” he chokes on the words.

Meira’s shoulders hitch, like he’s surprised her, like he’s shocked her, and it nearly drives him into a fury. Does she really think so poorly of him? Does she really think he wouldn’t give anything to spare his boys-

“No, you couldn’t.”

It’s gentle. That’s the thing that gets him. Meira has never been less than fierce with him, except now. Now, despite the absolute immovable certainty of her words, her tone is soft. Kind. Anything else, he would have been able to rally against, to fight, but kindness? It slips past his defences and guts him.

He closes his eyes against it, as though that might protect him from the truth. When it doesn’t, he lowers his head into his hands, uncaring of the ink and blood he’s no doubt smearing across his face. He has to focus. He has to breathe, and focus. There has to be a way out of this. There has to be something he can kill to make this go away. He just- He just has to find it, and-

“Hey.”

Her voice is still so achingly soft. As are her hands when they catch his and urge them away from his face. As are her eyes when she goes to her knees before him to meet his gaze without forcing him to look up. It’s such a vulnerable place to put herself, and it makes her look young. Small, and young, and fragile, even though he knows she’s anything but. She holds his hands in hers, palms up and open and bloody, and holds his gaze with hers, soft and open and intent. A tiny smile pulls at one corner of her mouth.

“They win.”

They win.

They win?

They-

John’s sucks in a breath that shakes, rattled down to his bones, down to his soul. He stares at Meira, hardly daring to blink, unable to speak, but begging her with every atom in his body, because that can’t mean what it sounds like. She can’t be saying- But her smile widens, and the tenderness is touched with a hint of mischief, a wicked glint of daring and-

“Your boys beat the devil,” she tells him, and that spark in her eyes is pride. Pride in her family, in her father and her uncle, who beat the devil. Pride she’s offering up to share with him because that’s his boys she’s talking about. Sam and Dean. His sons. “They beat heaven, and hell, and every sorry motherfucker that came after.”

He’s spent so long fighting against hope. He had to be practical, he had to be realistic, he had to be sure. Good things don’t come without a price, every victory has to be snatched out of the jaws of defeat, every ally is a weakness waiting to be exploited.

But here it is, offered to him on a silver platter, and he can’t help but let it in.

Because it’s being offered to him by the only person he could believe it from. She’s the proof. She’s hope incarnate, drop-kicked into his son’s lives by some future menace, right into their fucking laps in the moment they- he needed it most.

He can’t fight the tremble in his lip, all his effort going into mustering the words, the question he needs to ask. He needs to hear it again. Needs to hear her say it again. “They win?” It comes out as hoarse as if he’s been screaming for hours. He feels like he has.

“Yeah,” Meira tells him, eyes bright and fierce. “Yeah, they do.”

The dam breaks.

The sob tears out of him like a living thing, ugly and raw and painful. His restraint shatters like glass, fractured and slicing him to ribbons on its sharp edges all the way down his throat and into his lungs as he gasps. It hurts, to hope, to see a light at the end of the tunnel at last. It hurts and hurts and hurts, deeper and stronger and sharper, a pain so clean it almost feels right.

Before he can even manage one full breath, another sob wrenches through him, burning his lungs, stinging his leaking eyes, setting his body to shaking. He feels like he’s trying to throw up his soul with every ragged, awful heave, and it just doesn’t stop. There is no end to it.

He’s not sure how long he sits there, hunched over in agony, sobbing out his pain and sheer, unrelenting relief. He’s not aware of anything but the hurt for long enough that even time has slipped his grasp. It could have been minutes, it could have been hours.

Reality reasserts itself slowly. First he becomes aware of the ache in his back, the pain in his hand, the rawness of his eyes. Then he realises he’s holding onto something. Then comes the realisation that that something is Meira. His hands are clenched so tight around her upper arms he would’ve left bruises on anyone more human. Her shoulder is wet with his tears, and probably less pleasant fluids. Her arms are curled around his ribs, holding him together as he goes to fucking pieces all over her.

Then he realises he’s gasping, breathing too fast and too shallow, still hitching with the last little lingering sobs. He finds the wherewithal to even it out, to steady himself so that his head stops spinning for lack of oxygen. He forces his fingers to uncurl one at a time, and then lifts his head off Meira’s shoulder to sit up straight.

Humiliation washes over him, and he hopes to god – if god is even listening – that she’ll have the – heh – grace to allow him to pretend this never happened. He’s not holding out much hope, but he has to try, and that starts with dragging up a mask of composure and leading by example.

This. Never happened.

He can believe that.

Any minute now.

When his throat isn’t clogged with lingering tears and snot; he clears it, the sound awkward and sharp in the silence. Meira’s eyes on him are steady and unyielding, and John feels horrifically seen. Like she’s looking right past his flesh and into his soul. And for all he knows, she could be. Fuck.

To his enormous relief, Singer walks into the room then – which means he didn’t stick around to watch John’s humiliation; decent of him – with a bottle of whiskey in one hand, and a trio of glasses hanging from the other. Not a word is spoken as he puts the glasses down on the corner of his desk, pours a generous measure into each, and re-caps the bottle. They each take a glass in silence, but once they all have one in hand, Singer lifts his and says, with a grim sort of humour, “To beating the apocalypse.”

Meira smiles and lifts hers. “To Team Free-Will.”

John knows he shouldn’t ask, he should let the moment be, but he can’t quite help it. “Team Free-Will?”

Meira’s smile turns sharp and vicious. “Because fuck the angels, fuck god’s plan, and fuck destiny.”

John’s pretty sure his own smile is equally vicious, or it would be, if he wasn’t feeling quite so wrung out. “I’ll drink to that,” he agrees, and lifts his own glass. He wonders, for a moment, what he wants to toast to. To hope? No. Meira’s being corny enough for all of them. But maybe… He meets her gaze and holds it when he says, “To the Winchesters.”

Going by the sudden sheen of tears in her eyes, she recognises what he’s trying to say. She blinks rapidly and sniffs, lip trembling. “Fuck you,” she grouses wetly, and then throws back her whiskey.

John… laughs. Really, what else had he expected?

He drinks his own whiskey as Meira is getting to her feet, but instead of returning to the couch, she hops up to sit on the clear patch of Singer’s desk. She points a finger at John around her empty glass, eyebrows raised at him in a pointed stare. “I’m still mad at you,” she states like a dire warning.

John would scoff, if he had the energy. As it is, it just comes out a soft huff that’s almost but not quite amusement. “I had noticed,” he retorts, reaching for the whiskey. He could use another glass if this conversation is going to go where he thinks it is.

“Missouri,” Meira states, in the exact same tone he’d used… however long ago it was that he’d been interrogating her. The tone that means ‘report, soldier’.

John’s instinct is to bristle, to reassert his authority, but… He’s tired, and he figures turn-about is fair play. And. Well. Granddaughter or not, there’s a tiny part of him that feels like Mary’s memory that can’t quite bring itself to defy the authority of an archangel.

So he closes his eyes, sets his shoulders, and reports. “The demon was after me, not them. If I got too close, if I was seen by one of his agents with the boys… I came to make sure they were safe, that it wasn’t going after them, but I couldn’t risk getting too close.”

“Rockford.”

John has to fight against a sneer. She knows the answer to that one. And, now he’s thinking about it, she probably suspected the answer to the first as well. Report, soldier. “I had to keep them away from California. There were omens all over the fucking state,” he bites out.

“Burkitsville.”

She knows the answer to this, so why-?!

Oh.

Realisation dawns, and John feels very, very stupid. This isn’t a report. This is a dressing down. Explain your mistakes to me, soldier, in detail, so that I know you understand exactly how stupid you’ve been. “The same,” he rasps out. He doesn’t have the strength to fight this right now, which is probably why she’s doing it now. He feels raw and vulnerable, which means that when she drives this knife home, he’s going to feel every fucking inch of it. Damn her.

“Plainview.”

Yeah.

John gasps around the pain of that reminder. He can’t harden his heart against it like he usually does. There’s just not the strength left in him after she tore all his defences down with those two terrible, beautiful words. They win. They win, they win, they win. “I couldn’t-” he starts, and then can’t continue. His voice will break. He’ll cry again. He doesn’t think he has any tears left, but his eyes are stinging anyway.

Report, soldier.

He breathes, steady as a metronome, until he can force his voice steady, even if that just means all the tremors end up in his hands, instead. “There was nothing I could do that Sam wasn’t already doing,” he says flatly, “and I couldn’t bear to watch-” His control fractures, threatens to break, and he drags it back out of sheer bloody spite. “-watch that.”

Meira gives him no quarter.

“Fitchburg.”

Report, soldier.

“I thought finally killing that thing might-” How to say it? How to explain? John fights for words, trying to put the whole ugly mess into as few as possible. “-help Dean put his mistake in the past.”

“His mistake?” Meira challenges with icy softness.

John breathes around another inch of the knife sliding in. Steady breaths. In and out. You were the commanding officer on the field, Winchester. Their mistakes are your mistakes. “My mistake,” he says. Correcting himself. Accepting the censure. Dean wasn’t the one who failed on that hunt. John was, for not anticipating the problem, for not teaching Dean better, for- Well, he thinks Meira would say for asking so much of Dean in the first place.

“The cabin.”

Report, soldier.

Only John’s not actually sure what Meira’s angling at, for this one. He wasn’t even in control for most of that disaster. He opens his eyes, frowning up at Meira. Her expression is hard and solemn, but surprisingly not angry. “Which part?” he asks, echoing her deliberately.

Meira’s eyes flash, and when she speaks, there’s a foreign cadence to her voice. Foreign, but familiar. “‘He wouldn’t be proud of me, he’d be pissed.’” she quotes at him, giving him absolutely no quarter.

John closes his eyes, more of a slow-motion wince than anything more deliberate. “He’s wrong,” he whispers, heart in his throat, because he’s not sure it’s true. Oh, he is proud of Dean, so proud he doesn’t even have words for it, but… he also knows why Dean would think that. He knows he’s always been hard on him, demanded perfection from him, because anything less would mean the death of the last thread tethering John to sanity.

“I know,” Meira says, and for some awful reason, that hurts too. Hurts like a knife to the chest. “That’s not what I’m asking.”

Oh. Yeah. Okay.

Explain your mistakes to me, soldier, in detail, so that I know you understand exactly how stupid you’ve been.

It hurts. It hurts so much he can barely breathe around the ache in his chest, but Meira waits him out with all the patience of an archangel, the kind of timeless patience that could watch mountains crumble to dust under the weight of time alone. It gives him time to wrench the words up from the wounds she’s cut into him, bloody and burning, with her own. “The hunt for the demon had to come first,” he explains, placing each word into the sentence as carefully as if he were defusing a bomb. Or arming one. “It was after Sam for something, and Dean was the only one left I could trust to help me protect him.”

There’s a long pause after he says it. Plenty of time for John to feel the ugliness of his own excuses. When Meira speaks, it’s no longer soft. Still quiet, still cold enough to burn, but now as hard as a granite wall. “You don’t get to do that.”

John’s eyes snap open before he realises he’s going to do it. He stares at her, taken-aback. That is not the dressing down he was expecting, which means the blow is still yet to come. She must read his wary confusion off his face, because she explains without prompting.

“You don’t get to raise them like soldiers since infancy and then get cold fucking feet at the eleventh hour,” she tells him, and despite the vulgarity, there’s an absolute quality to her voice that lends it weight. That, and the look in her eyes. John thinks they might actually be glowing faintly, they’re so bright with righteous fury. “You put a weight no child should ever have to bear on their shoulders, and that was wrong.”

There’s something gutting about having an archangel tell you you’ve done wrong.

There’s something worse about having your granddaughter tell you you’ve fucked up.

“You failed in your duty as a father, and starting to treat them like children now that they no longer are won’t fix it.”

John blinks, and feels a pair of tears streak down his cheeks, burning and then chilled. He hadn’t… seen it that way before, but she’s right. The demon had reappeared, and John, after twenty years of training his boys to fight that very evil, had panicked at the thought of them doing just that. It… had been cruel. “I did the best I could,” he says, but it’s not the defence it could’ve been. It’s still failure. He’d done what he’d thought was best for his boys, and it hadn’t been good enough. He hadn’t been good enough.

“And when your best wasn’t good enough?” Meira asks, cold as ice.

It’s almost amusing, how she’s echoing his thoughts like that. It does at least tell him that he’s come, at last, to the point she was trying to drive home. Here’s the knife. You weren’t good enough. You failed.

“I knuckled down and carried on.” Because what else was there? Lay down and stop trying at all? No. Every inch of him rebels at the mere thought. If he’s going to fail, he’s going to go down swinging. He won’t give the world the satisfaction of breaking him.

“What should you have done?” Meira asks.

John raises his eyebrows, surprised. Once again, she’s thrown him a curve-ball, and he has no idea what answer she wants from him. What should he have done? If he knew that, he would have done it! “I don’t know,” he admits. It’s… easier than he expected it would be, to say the words.

“You ask for help, you great idjit!”

John startles. He’d all but forgotten Singer was there. Meira clearly hadn’t, because she just gives John a hard, cold little smile, and gestures at Singer as if to say ‘there, it’s that easy’. John looks at Singer, who scowls back, and goes over all the arguments they’d had over the years about Sam and Dean. Now that he’s looking at them with fresh eyes, he can see that what it had all boiled down to was ‘let me help you!’ and he hadn’t been able to hear it because…

Because he couldn’t. He couldn’t let go of his boys, because if he did…

If he did, he’d have nothing but the hunt. And vengeance can’t sustain a man forever.

John huffs out a bitter laugh, recognising the selfishness in what he’d always thought he was doing for Sam and Dean’s sake, and drains the glass of whiskey he’s been nursing for this entire dressing down. He keeps his eyes on the glass, because he feels flayed, and he can’t meet anyone’s gaze when he says this.

It is, perhaps, the hardest thing he’s ever had to do.

“I need help,” he whispers into the silence.

Singer claps him on the shoulder and gives him a gentle little shake. “And you’ll get it,” he declares, like he’s daring John to argue with him. Some part of John still wants to, but mostly, he just feels… shaken. Unsteady.

It’s terrifying.

“First, go wash your face and maybe catch a nap before your boys see you wrecked like this,” Singer orders. “Sam should be back any minute.”

Orders are good. Orders mean John doesn’t have to work out what to do next. Except his eyes catch on his journal, and he remembers that there’s so much he still needs to do. So many questions that still need answers. Plans that need to be made out of that new information.

“I’m not going anywhere just yet,” Meira says, before he can open his mouth to argue. That alien coldness is gone from her voice now, and she sounds like nothing more than a tired young woman, wry and carelessly friendly. “It can wait.”

They win.

Yes, John supposes it can wait, at that. He lets out a breath that feels like it takes two decades of tension with it, and nods. Suddenly tired down to his bones, John hauls himself up and heads upstairs. He’s got his marching orders. Everything else can wait.