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last01standingTitle: Forecheck
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: SPN is not mine
Summary: John watches Dean and Sam grow up on the ice. [Part of the hockey AU]
Author's note: for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fish_echo who asked for hockey fic backstory. It was supposed to be comment fic. It ended up almost 2000 words. Oops.
FORECHECK
1984
After Mary dies, John starts going to hockey games at the local ice rink. It’s something to pass the time between hunts and the kids. He likes the ice rink more then the hockey. The game itself is violent and fast. He sees more then enough of that in his real life.
But the rink, the cold, calming ice in the face of a year (since Mary’s gone) of fire, this he needs.
He takes Dean to a game a few months after it starts and his boy, still mostly silent since his mother died, watches the game with fascination, his eyes never leaving the puck. Dean has his tiny hand clasped in John’s own at the end of the game, looking up at his father with wide innocent eyes.
“Can I try that?” his silent boy asks.
John can’t say no.
1986
They only head north nowadays, trying to settle in towns near an ice rink, or towns cold enough to freeze the ponds solid in the winter. John learns about the game almost unwillingly because his boy loves it and it’s the only thing Dean has that’s his own.
He’s not surprised when Sam watches one of Dean’s games, looks up at him and says, “Teach me.”
But he can’t teach Sam because he’s never played hockey in his life. He only knows skating about as well as Dean did when he was seven years old. Which, granted is better then most twenty year olds but John Winchester had been a baseball man in his youth. Hockey is a recent development and the nuances of things like offsides and icing still baffle him.
All he can do is buy Sam a pair of secondhand skates and take him and Dean out to the frozen pond and watch them play a game that brings them closer together but farther and farther away from him.
1989
Something’s got to go and the only non-essential John can see is hockey. It’s getting to that time of year again and Dean is still few years off high school team. No matter how many ways John divvies it up in his head, he’s not going to have enough to buy the ammo, feed his kids and pay rent if he’s got hockey looming down his shoulders.
He breaks it to Dean as gently as he can. His son goes quiet for a long moment but he doesn’t cry because no Winchester does. “It’s about money?” Dean says finally.
“I’m sorry kiddo,” John says, reaching out to ruffle his hair.
A week later there’s a hunt that keeps him away for a few weeks and when he gets back, Dean’s walking out the door, wearing his pads under and oversized sweatshirt, his skates dangling off of his stick, his hand clasped around Sam’s own.
“Where do you think you’re going, son?”
“Practice, today,” Dean tells him, not an ounce of shame in his gaunt face. He looks thinner and frailer then he should and John could guess what happened.
“I thought I we talked about this.”
“Yes, sir,” Dean replies. “You said it was about money. Me and Sam decided we’d make it work.”
“I like Ramen noodles,” Sam offers quietly.
John can’t bring himself to yell. His oldest son is willing to hunt, follow orders and do anything for his family, but there is one position where he will not budge.
1991
Home from a hunt he finds Dean with his arms around his little brother. There’s a splatter of blood on his eldest’s face and when he moves into the bedroom, he finds a dead zombie skewered to the wall by something that on further inspection appears to be half of a hockey stick. The other half is kicked up against the wall. John feels his stomach lurch. First, because no twelve year old kid should need to kill anything. Second, because that was Dean’s first stick. The one he’d bough at a second hand trade in store years ago. The possession Dean treated almost like a security blanket when he was scared.
He goes back to the hallway, pushing the pity out of his eyes. “Pack up,” he says. “We’re leaving.
1992
Dean’s first fight is not really his first fight. It’s just his first fight on the ice. The fight is swift and brutal. Dean doesn’t start it but the refs barely have the time to skate in before Dean snaps the other kid’s wrist and ends it.
The parents around him flinch. Only Sammy, watching his brother wide-eyed from the stands brightens. John knows this is the end of something. “Who is that boy?” a mother says from his left. “What kind of monster is that?”
Dean is thrown out of the game and two days later, John gets the call from the commissioner that says he is no longer welcome in the league. Dean’s tears well up but he doesn’t let them spill.
That night, John takes both of his boys to the diner and sets down the cardinal rule: Hockey is not hunting.
As far as his kids are concerned, there is no such thing as fighting in this sport.
1994
Hockey is not hunting.
Except the more hunters John meets, the more he starts to see a pattern.
There’s a family with four little boys he touches base with in Canada that has been hunting on and off for at least two generations and the roadhouse he sometimes frequents for information is run by the wife of Bill Harvelle of the Colorado Avalanche. There are at least six players from various minor league teams who he’s run across during the hunt and it’s a baffling coincidence.
Sometimes he finds himself, sitting down over a beer with a fellow hunter only to have them wipe monster guts off their jacket, take a sip and say, “So I hear your boys can really play.”
1998
Dean and Sam play one season together in high school. It’s Sam’s first year on varsity hockey and Dean’s fourth. Their coach sees the possibilities immediately and plays them as a pair on the blue line. They complement one another’s strengths better then John could have imagined. Dean is a solid calming presence in the back, controlling the puck with pinpoint accuracy and winning all the game’s little battles on effort.
Sam is different. He still hasn’t hit his growth spurt but he’s a wizard at intercepting through passes and has a knack for jumping into the offensive zone. But he’s young so he makes that mistakes. In that first season, he gets burned more often then he should and it’s Dean who bails the team out by making a tough play or taking the necessary penalty.
At the end of the year, Dean’s make first team all district and second team all state.
2000
He’s expecting it from Sam. Sees him filling out college applications even though the end game was supposed to be the family business. He’s waiting all through that year for Sam to come out, Sam to declare he’s leaving this family behind.
But in the end, it’s not Sam. It’s Dean. Dean who’d been disappearing during the summer for a few hours every day, coming back coated in sweat as he tosses his old hockey duffel onto the chair. Dean who’d decided to stay after high school despite the scholarship offer from Ohio State.
He’s smiling on the day it happens, the kind of stunned smile he’s not used to seeing on Dean’s face. “What’s wrong son.”
“I... I made it.”
Sam’s face lights up in the corner of his eyes but John’s heart clenches. “Made what.”
“I’ve been at a training camp for the Providence Bruins. It’s an AHL team... and I made it.”
John remembers Dean’s senior year of high school. The scouts, the scholarship offers. He’d turned them down.
Sam lets out whoops and claps his brother proudly on the back and starts chattering in that secret hockey language John has never understood. Dean doesn’t react. Just keeps staring at him, waiting.
“If you wanted to leave, why didn’t you do it right after high school?”
“And leave you and Sam here to rip each other apart?”
John takes a deep breath. “If you de—“
Dean cuts him off and it’s so out of character, so completely and utterly unexpected that it stops John cold. “Don’t give me an ultimatum. I’m going to do this dad, and in the off-season, I’m going come back to go hunting with you guys. This is not up for debate.”
They eye each other for a few minutes, neither willing to budge an inch. “Dad,” Sam says. “Aren’t you going to tell Dean congratulations?”
John straightens up because it is not going to congratulate Dean on something that will tear him away his family but at the same time there’s an odd creeping sensation in his stomach. Dean put his head down and worked harder then everyone else. It’s what every father wants to know. That his son can succeed at whatever he decides to do. “I’m not happy with you right now, Dean. But I am proud of you.”
2001
Sam leaves for Stanford with a partial scholarship for hockey and the rest made up with academic money. It’s an amiable split. Dean and John take him to school together and settle him into his dorm room. The pads and skates and miscellaneous hockey gear makes up more then half of the luggage.
He splits up with Dean when he breaks for training camp a few weeks later. Both his sons are off in the real world. A world filled with ice and pucks instead of monsters and graves. He wonders if maybe this is better for them both.
He stops calling to check in.
2005
He gets word that Dean is making his first NHL appearance when he is four states away. He makes the drive without thinking it. The hunt isn’t pressing and won’t be until the full moon. So he drives for almost fifteen hours straight, scalps a ticket outside the arena and is in the rink before the first puck drops.
Dean is on the ice for fourteen minutes.
He plays the same sort of game he always does, steady and dependable. However, John can see that the speed is a bit of a shock. He adjusts throughout the game. The angles getting smarter. The hits get bigger.
Dean is one of the people interviewed after the game and John listens with interest.
“It’s been a dream of mine for a long time,” Dean says with a sheepish grin. The black and gold Bruins jersey looks awful on him, but he’s standing straighter, smiling brighter then John has ever seen. “I know this sounds weird to say but I feel like hockey kind of kept me sane when I was a kid.”
It’s then that it hits John for real. He hadn’t understood before this. Hadn’t realized how much Dean needed this, how much Sam needed this. He had decades of normal under his belt before Mary. His sons didn’t have that. Had never had that. They were fighting for something they barely remembered.
The only taste of normal they had was hockey.
He had to finish this. So Dean could have his gold jersey and his big smile. So Sam could have his college degree and his time on the ice.
He has to end this fight so his kids won’t have to.
(end)
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: SPN is not mine
Summary: John watches Dean and Sam grow up on the ice. [Part of the hockey AU]
Author's note: for
fish_echo who asked for hockey fic backstory. It was supposed to be comment fic. It ended up almost 2000 words. Oops.After Mary dies, John starts going to hockey games at the local ice rink. It’s something to pass the time between hunts and the kids. He likes the ice rink more then the hockey. The game itself is violent and fast. He sees more then enough of that in his real life.
But the rink, the cold, calming ice in the face of a year (since Mary’s gone) of fire, this he needs.
He takes Dean to a game a few months after it starts and his boy, still mostly silent since his mother died, watches the game with fascination, his eyes never leaving the puck. Dean has his tiny hand clasped in John’s own at the end of the game, looking up at his father with wide innocent eyes.
“Can I try that?” his silent boy asks.
John can’t say no.
They only head north nowadays, trying to settle in towns near an ice rink, or towns cold enough to freeze the ponds solid in the winter. John learns about the game almost unwillingly because his boy loves it and it’s the only thing Dean has that’s his own.
He’s not surprised when Sam watches one of Dean’s games, looks up at him and says, “Teach me.”
But he can’t teach Sam because he’s never played hockey in his life. He only knows skating about as well as Dean did when he was seven years old. Which, granted is better then most twenty year olds but John Winchester had been a baseball man in his youth. Hockey is a recent development and the nuances of things like offsides and icing still baffle him.
All he can do is buy Sam a pair of secondhand skates and take him and Dean out to the frozen pond and watch them play a game that brings them closer together but farther and farther away from him.
Something’s got to go and the only non-essential John can see is hockey. It’s getting to that time of year again and Dean is still few years off high school team. No matter how many ways John divvies it up in his head, he’s not going to have enough to buy the ammo, feed his kids and pay rent if he’s got hockey looming down his shoulders.
He breaks it to Dean as gently as he can. His son goes quiet for a long moment but he doesn’t cry because no Winchester does. “It’s about money?” Dean says finally.
“I’m sorry kiddo,” John says, reaching out to ruffle his hair.
A week later there’s a hunt that keeps him away for a few weeks and when he gets back, Dean’s walking out the door, wearing his pads under and oversized sweatshirt, his skates dangling off of his stick, his hand clasped around Sam’s own.
“Where do you think you’re going, son?”
“Practice, today,” Dean tells him, not an ounce of shame in his gaunt face. He looks thinner and frailer then he should and John could guess what happened.
“I thought I we talked about this.”
“Yes, sir,” Dean replies. “You said it was about money. Me and Sam decided we’d make it work.”
“I like Ramen noodles,” Sam offers quietly.
John can’t bring himself to yell. His oldest son is willing to hunt, follow orders and do anything for his family, but there is one position where he will not budge.
Home from a hunt he finds Dean with his arms around his little brother. There’s a splatter of blood on his eldest’s face and when he moves into the bedroom, he finds a dead zombie skewered to the wall by something that on further inspection appears to be half of a hockey stick. The other half is kicked up against the wall. John feels his stomach lurch. First, because no twelve year old kid should need to kill anything. Second, because that was Dean’s first stick. The one he’d bough at a second hand trade in store years ago. The possession Dean treated almost like a security blanket when he was scared.
He goes back to the hallway, pushing the pity out of his eyes. “Pack up,” he says. “We’re leaving.
Dean’s first fight is not really his first fight. It’s just his first fight on the ice. The fight is swift and brutal. Dean doesn’t start it but the refs barely have the time to skate in before Dean snaps the other kid’s wrist and ends it.
The parents around him flinch. Only Sammy, watching his brother wide-eyed from the stands brightens. John knows this is the end of something. “Who is that boy?” a mother says from his left. “What kind of monster is that?”
Dean is thrown out of the game and two days later, John gets the call from the commissioner that says he is no longer welcome in the league. Dean’s tears well up but he doesn’t let them spill.
That night, John takes both of his boys to the diner and sets down the cardinal rule: Hockey is not hunting.
As far as his kids are concerned, there is no such thing as fighting in this sport.
Hockey is not hunting.
Except the more hunters John meets, the more he starts to see a pattern.
There’s a family with four little boys he touches base with in Canada that has been hunting on and off for at least two generations and the roadhouse he sometimes frequents for information is run by the wife of Bill Harvelle of the Colorado Avalanche. There are at least six players from various minor league teams who he’s run across during the hunt and it’s a baffling coincidence.
Sometimes he finds himself, sitting down over a beer with a fellow hunter only to have them wipe monster guts off their jacket, take a sip and say, “So I hear your boys can really play.”
Dean and Sam play one season together in high school. It’s Sam’s first year on varsity hockey and Dean’s fourth. Their coach sees the possibilities immediately and plays them as a pair on the blue line. They complement one another’s strengths better then John could have imagined. Dean is a solid calming presence in the back, controlling the puck with pinpoint accuracy and winning all the game’s little battles on effort.
Sam is different. He still hasn’t hit his growth spurt but he’s a wizard at intercepting through passes and has a knack for jumping into the offensive zone. But he’s young so he makes that mistakes. In that first season, he gets burned more often then he should and it’s Dean who bails the team out by making a tough play or taking the necessary penalty.
At the end of the year, Dean’s make first team all district and second team all state.
He’s expecting it from Sam. Sees him filling out college applications even though the end game was supposed to be the family business. He’s waiting all through that year for Sam to come out, Sam to declare he’s leaving this family behind.
But in the end, it’s not Sam. It’s Dean. Dean who’d been disappearing during the summer for a few hours every day, coming back coated in sweat as he tosses his old hockey duffel onto the chair. Dean who’d decided to stay after high school despite the scholarship offer from Ohio State.
He’s smiling on the day it happens, the kind of stunned smile he’s not used to seeing on Dean’s face. “What’s wrong son.”
“I... I made it.”
Sam’s face lights up in the corner of his eyes but John’s heart clenches. “Made what.”
“I’ve been at a training camp for the Providence Bruins. It’s an AHL team... and I made it.”
John remembers Dean’s senior year of high school. The scouts, the scholarship offers. He’d turned them down.
Sam lets out whoops and claps his brother proudly on the back and starts chattering in that secret hockey language John has never understood. Dean doesn’t react. Just keeps staring at him, waiting.
“If you wanted to leave, why didn’t you do it right after high school?”
“And leave you and Sam here to rip each other apart?”
John takes a deep breath. “If you de—“
Dean cuts him off and it’s so out of character, so completely and utterly unexpected that it stops John cold. “Don’t give me an ultimatum. I’m going to do this dad, and in the off-season, I’m going come back to go hunting with you guys. This is not up for debate.”
They eye each other for a few minutes, neither willing to budge an inch. “Dad,” Sam says. “Aren’t you going to tell Dean congratulations?”
John straightens up because it is not going to congratulate Dean on something that will tear him away his family but at the same time there’s an odd creeping sensation in his stomach. Dean put his head down and worked harder then everyone else. It’s what every father wants to know. That his son can succeed at whatever he decides to do. “I’m not happy with you right now, Dean. But I am proud of you.”
Sam leaves for Stanford with a partial scholarship for hockey and the rest made up with academic money. It’s an amiable split. Dean and John take him to school together and settle him into his dorm room. The pads and skates and miscellaneous hockey gear makes up more then half of the luggage.
He splits up with Dean when he breaks for training camp a few weeks later. Both his sons are off in the real world. A world filled with ice and pucks instead of monsters and graves. He wonders if maybe this is better for them both.
He stops calling to check in.
He gets word that Dean is making his first NHL appearance when he is four states away. He makes the drive without thinking it. The hunt isn’t pressing and won’t be until the full moon. So he drives for almost fifteen hours straight, scalps a ticket outside the arena and is in the rink before the first puck drops.
Dean is on the ice for fourteen minutes.
He plays the same sort of game he always does, steady and dependable. However, John can see that the speed is a bit of a shock. He adjusts throughout the game. The angles getting smarter. The hits get bigger.
Dean is one of the people interviewed after the game and John listens with interest.
“It’s been a dream of mine for a long time,” Dean says with a sheepish grin. The black and gold Bruins jersey looks awful on him, but he’s standing straighter, smiling brighter then John has ever seen. “I know this sounds weird to say but I feel like hockey kind of kept me sane when I was a kid.”
It’s then that it hits John for real. He hadn’t understood before this. Hadn’t realized how much Dean needed this, how much Sam needed this. He had decades of normal under his belt before Mary. His sons didn’t have that. Had never had that. They were fighting for something they barely remembered.
The only taste of normal they had was hockey.
He had to finish this. So Dean could have his gold jersey and his big smile. So Sam could have his college degree and his time on the ice.
He has to end this fight so his kids won’t have to.
(end)
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(no subject)
24/1/10 04:51 (UTC)Summary: John watches Dean and Sam grow up on the ice.
I started falling in love with this story here. :)
“Can I try that?” his silent boy asks. // John can’t say no.
Ooooooh, I can just see John melting here.
John can’t bring himself to yell. His oldest son is willing to hunt, follow orders and do anything for his family, but there is one position where he will not budge.
Yes, this, exactly! I love what you've done with this story and showing such deep love
1991
I liked this one.
As far as his kids are concerned, there is no such thing as fighting in this sport.
Oh, I like this and how it ties into the current fic!
1994 ... Except the more hunters John meets, the more he starts to see a pattern. ... Sometimes he finds himself, sitting down over a beer with a fellow hunter only to have them wipe monster guts off their jacket, take a sip and say, “So I hear your boys can really play.”
Ha! Yes! Also, I love this bit too.
They complement one another’s strengths better then John could have imagined. Dean is a solid calming presence in the back, controlling the puck with pinpoint accuracy and winning all the game’s little battles on effort.
This might be my favourite bit all story so far! *hearts this*
2000
OH NO I CHANGE MY MIND! THIS SECTION IS EVEN MORE AWESOME!
He stops calling to check in.
Oh, John-love, you're tearing up my heart here :(
“I know this sounds weird to say but I feel like hockey kind of kept me sane when I was a kid.”
See, I knew this! Oh, I love this story so much. And I love the realisation that John has from here to the rest of the end.
(no subject)
25/1/10 04:53 (UTC)I'm glad it lives up to your expectations. =)
I should give you a huge THANKS for the kick in the ass with this too because the chapter that had been giving me hell in the real hockey fic has been sorted and posted and I'm back to the OMG GLEE of this verse (not that it ever really left)
I'm happy to hear some John love, because I really did kind of adore John back in the day. His life kind of sucked but he managed to raise two kids who turned out more or less all right. It's probably the reason I had the SamnDean of my verse be waaaay better adjusted then the normal SPN versions.
See, clearly hockey fixes everything. =)
(no subject)
24/1/10 09:54 (UTC)(no subject)
25/1/10 04:54 (UTC)I really want more Winchesters play sports AUs. IT WOULD BE MARVELLOUS.
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