The call came when he was hunting. It was just as well, because it would have killed Dean to see him cry like that again, to see his old man shatter like cheap plastic until he could find it within himself to remember this one didn’t matter the way Mary had, and it hadn’t for more than twenty years.

John supposed he should consider it an effort at reconciliation that the old man called him at all, let him know rather than just considering it something that was no longer his business as if they’d never been family once; but he didn’t. He considered it a punishment, considered it one more way the old bastard could inflict pain on someone he’d only taken in to get the kid he actually wanted.

He also supposed he should consider it a generosity that he asked (or more accurately, told) John to fly to Seattle and claim the body. An effort to give them some time alone together, knowing John would never come to the funeral, knowing he’d never step foot in that house again after what passed between them the last time he was there. But he didn’t. He considered it punishment for leaving in the first place, retribution for turning his back on his brother and walking away without a backward glance.

He considered it penance for not wanting normal the way his brother always had, not wanting it enough to give up who he was, disbelieve what he’d seen, forget who his real father was, and how much it would never be that sanctimonious rich bastard no matter how hard he or Denny tried to make it so.

And even John had to admit the guy had really tried.

But love wasn’t something that took with everyone. It wasn’t something that could be changed out like a bad tire, wasn’t something that could be mistaken for the same thing when a new version was put in place after the old one blew and left you stranded all alone on the side of the road.

It hadn’t taken with John. He resented the weight of it, resented the way it tried to replace something that couldn’t have been replaced, even if this man was up to the task, which he wasn’t. Their father’s hands had been the color of grease and hard work. This guy made his money on the backs of others, and he spent it on things like perfectly manicured nails, stylish tuxedoes, vacations in the Bahamas and snorkeling lessons for a kid he wanted, as well as the one he didn’t.

But he and Danny were a package deal, so Duquette did his best to buy the package. And in his own defense, John had tried, too, it just wasn’t something he was ever able to do.

It was easier for Danny. He hadn’t been there, hadn’t seen the terror in Dad’s eyes when he grabbed John by the shoulders and told him "Go get your brother and take him outside, John. Don’t look back. Go, son. Go." He hadn’t seen the way the fire was boiling out of Billy’s room when Dad went back inside, hadn’t heard the way Dad was screaming Mom’s name as John turned and ran down the hall, grabbing Danny and dragging him out of bed, getting him half way down the hall to the front door before Danny was even fully awake.

He hadn’t stood in the front yard watching the place burn to the ground, knowing somewhere deep inside that he should have stayed, that he should have gone in after his Dad instead of obeying his last order to run, to leave a man behind, to be a coward in the name of living to fight another day. John obeyed because it had never occurred to him to disobey one of his father’s orders; but even so, he knew it should have occurred to him this time. He knew he should have been a man this time instead of a little boy; that he should have been a Marine instead of a spineless lackey who did whatever some punk-ass ROTC jerkoff told him to do.

Even though it wasn’t a punk-ass ROTC jerkoff giving the order.

But even so, John should have known to disobey it. He should have realized if he’d gone in with his dad instead of going after Danny, his dad would come back out to save him, to save them. But he didn’t. John did what his dad told him to do, and because of that, his dad never came out again.

John waited for him on the lawn until a fireman picked him up and carried him to the ambulance, kicking and screaming the whole way; but his dad never came.

The difference between he and Danny became set in stone during that long ride to the hospital. Danny sobbed like a little boy taken away from the safety of his mama’s arms. John screamed like an animal torn off the tit, denied the very essence of what it took to keep on living.

The difference became more pronounced in the hospital itself. Danny talked to everyone about what happened, seeking comfort, seeking some sense of normalcy to replace everything that had burned away in the darkness. John talked to no one. He didn’t talk at all, just curled into himself and stared at the wall, hating the world, wanting to hurt it in retaliation for everything that had burned away to nothing but darkness.

They’d been in the orphanage for almost a year when Duquette showed up looking for an heir to his empire. During that year, John protected his brother the way he always had, taking anyone to task who even looked at Danny cross-eyed. At first, his ferocity earned him pity from the people who ran the place. After the third kid he put in a cast for trying to take something from Danny that Danny needed, he earned animus from them. Resentment. Perhaps even a little fear.

When Duquette showed up, he was given the grand tour of the place, introduced to all the promising children who might make suitable heirs for a man with the kind of money Duquette had. That didn’t include the Winchester boys. Not because Danny wasn’t the most promising kid in the place, but rather because Danny’s brother was part of the package deal. Even in those days, they did their best not to split twins up, and John wasn’t someone the orphanage people were willing to even show Duquette, let alone suggest he might consider taking home to a wife so fragile from the loss of the only child she would ever bear that she needed some kind of replacement for the blown tire that left her stranded all alone on the side of the road.

A Danny to plug into her Denny hole and make it right again.

But as hard as the orphanage people tried to distract Duquette from Danny, that rich bastard saw what he wanted the moment he walked into the room, and he never considered anyone else from that moment on. He and Danny talked for hours that day, bonding over God knows what because John didn’t stick around to find out. He knew he was the anchor around Danny’s neck when it came to finding a family again, and as much as it gutted him to do so, he left Danny behind this time not because someone ordered him to, but because he knew it was the right thing to do.

Right for Danny, if not for him.

And when push came to shove, Danny was really the only thing that mattered to John after the fire. He’d sacrificed their father for Danny; and once he’d paid that kind of price, the idea that Danny could be anything less than worth what he cost was so repellent John he couldn’t even consider it. Wouldn’t even consider it. So he had a choice: Love Danny enough to let him go or hate him enough to push him away. Either way, leaving Danny with this rich bastard who’d already hung a sold sign around his neck was the right thing to do for the only thing on the planet John still loved, so he did it.

Duquette visited twenty times over the next three months. They went on three in-home visits, John always part of the deal but never part of the package.

As much as Duquette loved Danny, his wife loved Danny twice that much. She heard his name once, and her eyes filled with tears. She never saw him clearly after that, never saw Danny as anything other than the Denny she’d lost. Denny junior. Denny Duquette.

Her Denny.

And they were everything Danny wanted, too. Normal. Family. A life. John tried to stay out of the way of that. He tried to sit to one side and keep his mouth shut, tried not to resent it every time that bitch called Danny "Denny," every time that rich bastard Duquette called John "Son," or presumed to put his God damned hands on him like he had a right to touch John in any way, for any reason.

John had known they would be separated in the end from the very first time he saw Duquette look at Danny and smile, so it surprised him when the adoption papers listed them both. Danny and John Winchester was how it read. Denny Duquette and his dead-weight brother was how it read to John. He got up and walked away, left the Duquettes sitting in a room with the kid they wanted so he could go outside and find a quiet place to hide, to remember what family really was, to remember a father who wanted him for who he was, not because that was the only way to get the one that really mattered.

Dad’s little Marine. That’s the way his father always referred to him. Gunny Sergeant John. He called Danny "Danny" when he called him anything at all, but mostly he just left Danny to Mom, talking cars with John instead, or strategy, or telling him war stories, or ghost stories, or just stories about men who were man enough to sacrifice everything for what they believed in, what they loved.

Sometimes, when Danny would say something at the dinner table that was dorky even for Danny, Dad would glance at John and smile. That was Dad saying, "Are you sure you’re related to him, son?" before he looked at Danny and smiled in a totally different way to say, "Really? That’s very interesting, son. I never knew that." Which was Dad’s way of calling Danny a dork … something Danny never got, but John always did.

They might look alike, but they were never alike, not even then.

And it got worse once he and Danny went to live with the Duquettes. John wouldn’t let them take his name away, so Duquette negotiated a truce with him, dubbed him a "foster child" rather than some fatherless kid he could buy and change into whatever his wife was missing and wanted to replace. Danny, on the other hand, sucked the Duquette name up like Winchester meant nothing and never had. He even asked them to change his name from "Danny" to "Denny" at the same time they changed his name from "Winchester" to "Duquette;" and his mother cried her Denny tears at that, as if she’d ever had any idea at all his name was Danny in the first place.

Or Winchester, for that matter.

It was the beginning of the end for he and Denny-not-Danny. They grew apart over the years, Denny taking to school the way he’d always taken to their mother’s tutoring—their real mother’s tutoring—before the fire. He was smart, and the Duquettes loved that about him. John was smart, too; but he never showed it because if he had, they might have tried to love that about him, too.

And he didn’t want their love. He didn’t want anything from them except exactly what he got: a family for Danny.

For Denny.

When they turned sixteen, Duquette bought them each a car. It was the only time in his life John actually felt close to the old man, not because he popped for a car, but rather because he bought Denny some streamlined piece of imported crap, but he bought John a ’67 Impala. It was three years old and had 7,000 miles on it, but it was in cherry condition, and John had never wanted anything in his life more than he wanted a ’67 Impala when he was just thirteen.

Well, not anything he could actually have at least.

He’d told Duquette as much in an argument once. They were right in the middle of one of their many knock-down drag-outs about the war and whether or not the punks running to Canada or riding daddy’s dollar to the dorm were cowards or simply avoiding a draft that would send them to fight in a war shedding American blood for all the wrong reasons (money being chief among those reasons) when John asked Duquette for the only thing he’d ever asked that rich old bastard for.

Or demanded was probably a more accurate way of characterizing the exchange.

John was telling Duquette he was a great one to object to someone shedding blood to earn some rich bastard a little more money (it was his favorite punch in this game they played, one he knew hurt Duquette so he threw it every time he got a chance, as hard as he could throw it) and Duquette was telling him he was just some punk thirteen-year-old know-it-all who’d bought into Daddy’s hero stories about the war (that was Duquette’s favorite punch in this game they played, one he knew hurt John so he threw it every time he got a chance, as hard as he could throw it) when John said the only thing he really wanted from Duquette was a ’67 Impala so he could put his shit in the trunk and ride.

You could fit a body in the trunk of one of those babies, he’d told Duquette; and he’d meant it as a threat, which was exactly how Duquette took it.

It was the last time they argued about the war. It was also the only time John ever actually told Duquette something he really wanted.

So when he strolled outside with Denny on their sixteenth birthday—bored and angry and resentful of whatever obscenely expensive piece of German precision-engineered shit Duquette would have bought them both because he always paid double for anything Denny wanted just so Denny wouldn’t feel guilty for getting something his brother didn’t—and saw the high shine of a black ’67 Impala sitting right alongside the high shine of a rich-man car that probably cost twenty times as much, John was more than surprised. He was stunned. Stunned to silence, stopped dead in his tracks in a way he’d never been by a rich bastard who’d never once bought John anything he wanted rather than spending five times more on something Denny wanted just so the two of them could look like a matched set of kids even if they weren’t.

For a moment, John didn’t know what to say. He just stood in the driveway staring at it, his hands shaking a little with how much he wanted to go touch it, how much he wanted to run his fingers along the lines of muscle and power that meant freedom the way his dad had always talked about freedom: an open road and the deafening scream of wind passing through like the sweet song of metal-against-metal in a working man’s hands. He didn’t notice the Duquettes all watching him with little smiles of satisfaction, waiting for him to be happy just once, waiting for him to say just one thing, just one time, that wasn’t hard or angry or mean for the sake of being mean. He didn’t see anything but that car until Duquette finally spoke, prompting, "So?"

John glanced up, met Duquette’s eyes and said, "So … is this your way of telling me it’s time to get the fuck out?"

There were a number of things John regretted in his life, but he regretted none of them more than he regretted the look those words, in response to this gift, put in Duquette’s eyes. Nothing he regretted more than kicking that old man in the gut as a thank you for this last ditch effort to connect, for this one time he tried it John’s way rather than doing it Denny’s, or his own.

For just a moment, nobody said a word. If John had apologized in that moment, he could have changed things, could have fixed them; but he didn’t because he couldn’t. Couldn’t take it back once it was said, couldn’t admit he didn’t mean it so much as he simply said it because he could.

The moment passed, and Duquette smiled. He tossed John the keys to the Impala and said, "Happy Birthday, John."

It was one of the few times Duquette didn’t use the address "son" instead of John’s name. All these years, he’d called John "son" rather than his name like he couldn’t bear the idea of actually granting John any identity that wasn’t Denny’s brother or Duquette’s less-than-wanted son. And in all those years of being called "son" at the cost of his own name, this was the only time John had ever actually wanted to hear that word come out of Duquette’s mouth.

When Duquette turned and walked away, Denny went after him, trying to make it better. Denny’s mother just looked at John, her eyes as condemning of him as they’d been the first time she saw him, looking him over from head to toe and judging him inadequate to the task of living up to whatever benchmark she had in her head as the low water mark for deserving her dead kid’s inheritance.

"Leave, John," she said quietly. "I don’t care where you go, or how long you stay gone, but for right now, just leave."

John smiled at her even though the heart he didn’t realize he still had until that moment was half-cracked and breaking open. "Wow. Two presents I actually want on the same day. Maybe this is my birthday after all. Thanks, Mom. Tell your husband I’ll be back in time for cake and ice cream."

He drove away in his shiny, new Impala and spent the rest of the day on the road, listening to it sing, listening to it scream. He spent more than a week gone before he came back, pulled into the driveway and drove through those enormous iron gates, a little surprised and a little relieved they hadn’t change the security code to keep him from getting back in once they got him out in the first place.

Denny met him at the door, engulfed him in a hug he wasn’t really expecting. "I thought you were gone," he said, holding onto John until John gave in, held on a little in return.

"I was," John told him. "So I’m back now. Buck up, Denny. Be a man, not a Duquette."

Denny let him go, stepped back and decked him with a right cross John never saw coming. As he stood over John, both hands clenched to fists, his whole body shaking with emotion, he said, "Don’t ever do anything like that to Dad again, or stay gone."

And he meant it.

John lasted another year and a half before he couldn’t take it any longer. He signed on the dotted line and presented a forged birth certificate he bought with Duquette’s money to prove he was old enough to die for his country, and proud as hell to be given the chance to do so. He told Denny he was leaving before he told the Duquettes. It almost killed him when Denny looked him in the eyes and said, "Figured you’d do something like this eventually. Try not to get yourself killed."

John smiled, played it cool by lifting an eyebrow and saying, "Well don’t get all weepy-eyed on me there, Denny."

"List me as next of kin on your tags," Denny added. "That way, when you die, Dad won’t have to deal with burying your dumb ass. I’ll claim the body and put you in the ground. It’s the least I can do for him after all he's done for us."

Those were the last words that ever passed between them.

John packed half a dozen t-shirts and a couple pair of jeans. He left everything else they’d ever given him behind when he strode into a living room bigger than their old house to tell Duquette where he was going, and why, and what he could do with his objections if he had any. Duquette pitched a fit, tried to threaten John into staying by telling him he’d call the Marines and out his fake ID, give them his real age if that’s what it took to keep John from throwing his life away in some God-forsaken country in the name of a war he didn’t understand and only wanted to fight because he wasn’t smart enough to realize his dad was some knuckle-dragging monkey who was a Marine because he’d never been smart enough to be anything else.

If Denny hadn’t pulled him off the old man and thrown him out the door, locking the damn thing behind him, John might have spent his eighteenth birthday in prison for murder rather than in Nam, getting shot at and realizing that, as much as Duquette was dead wrong about his dad, he hadn’t been entirely wrong about the war, or about why John wanted to go there just to get away from a world he couldn’t live in any longer.

Denny’s world.

So when the call came, it hit John like a sucker punch from the blue.

"John," the voice on the other end of the line said when he answered. "This is Denny Duquette. Your brother’s dead. He had a heart transplant, and it didn’t take. His body’s at Seattle Grace Hospital in Washington. I want you to go pick it up, sign for it, and send it home for burial. You don’t need to come with it. In fact, I’d prefer it if you didn’t."

And then Duquette hung up, the silence between them sounding like more than twenty years of lost opportunities that weren’t so much lost as simply given away to darkness.

*

The doctor glanced up as he entered his office, stopped dead in his tracks and went the black-man version of whiter than a sheet as he whispered, "Mother of God."

John glanced away, resisted the urge to show his resentment. It was the third time someone here had responded to him this way. He had to assume that meant the resemblance hadn’t grown less pronounced over the years despite their lack of contact.

"Yeah," John said. "I realize I look like him. Can we dispense with the formalities and just sign the papers and be done with it?"

Doctor Webber blinked. He caught his balance, restructured his composure enough to close the door behind him, walk across the office and sit down.

They were finished with the paperwork in ten minutes. It took Webber another fifteen to outline Denny’s progression from walking dead man to body bag. John listened without comment, stood when the other man was finished. He held a hand out for the shaking as he said, "I appreciate the rundown on how things happened. And the care you took of my brother when he was alive."

He left before the man could tell him any more about how much they all loved Denny at Seattle Grace, how sorry they were about the way things worked out. How much Denny meant to them, how much he wasn’t just another patient, but rather someone who left his mark forever on this place and these people.

It wasn’t a story John found unfamiliar. Denny was like that. He always had been.

"Denny?"

The way she said it prepared John for the look on her face when he glanced up, met her eyes. He’d assumed there was someone here behind the "Holy fuck!" and the "What the hell?" and the "Mother of God" he’d already gotten. Doctors didn’t bond with patients that way. Not unless they were part of the family. And since Denny had gone down the educational road of snorkeling trips in the Bahamas rather than med school the way Duquette had always planned, John had to assume Denny was involved with someone here, that he’d become part of their family the same way he became part of Duquette’s, by simply being who he was and accepting the love they wanted to give in reciprocation for everything Denny brought to life that no one else really could.

John knew the moment he saw her that his brother and he hadn’t grown as far apart as twenty years might suggest. She looked a lot like Mary, but it wasn’t her look that struck him so much as it was her way of being. He could see Mary in every line of her expression, in the strength in her spine even as she looked like she was about to fall to the floor, in the way her blue eyes told him she’d loved Denny the same way Mary loved him for the six years they had before it all went up in fire and blood.

"John," he corrected more harshly than he intended. "And yes, I know I look just like him. I’m only here to pick up the body. I’m leaving now, so if you just close your eyes and count to twenty, you can open them again, and I’ll be gone. You can pretend I was never here."

She grabbed his arm as he passed, her grip like a vise, the strength of it something he didn’t expect from someone as slender as she was, as pretty, as blonde, as soft, as feminine. "Who the hell are you?" she demanded, her voice a whisper between them, her eyes studying him as if she was seeing a ghost.

Or something worse.

"I’m his brother," John said. "Now let me go."

He tried to pull his arm away, but she didn’t let go. He could have forced the issue, but she looked like she might collapse if he did, so he didn’t.

"He never mentioned you," she said finally.

"We haven’t spoken for more than twenty years."

She let him go then. Her hand sprang open like he was hot, and she stepped away from him like he was tainted. "Why?"

Her tone was an accusation. He responded accordingly.

"Because only one of us had a heart," John said.

He couldn’t have hurt her more if he’d backhanded her. She took another step back, stumbled a third, and then a forth.

"Iz?" The holy fuck! guy was coming down the hall at a clip that implied Denny wasn’t the only one in love with this woman. He accelerated to reach her as she grabbed at a counter for stability, saying, "It isn’t him. It’s his brother or something. I was trying to find you, trying to warn you …."

She’d regained her composure, was glaring at John now instead of staring at him with the kind of horror that could make a man remember the look in a rich bastard’s eyes when his not-really kid responded to a gesture of kindness by sticking a knife in his emotional gut and eviscerating him just for the hell of it. She didn’t say anything, and for a long moment, neither did he.

"Makes a little more sense now, doesn’t it?" he allowed finally. "I’m not the good twin, darlin. Trust me when I tell you it might have failed him in the end, but at least Denny had a heart. And a good one, which I’m sure you already know. So whatever you were to him, I’m sorry he’s gone. I’m sorry for your loss, for the loss of the whole fucking lot of you. But whatever he was to me is none of your damned business, so you should leave it alone or brace yourself to find out how different we really are."

He walked by her then, left her behind the same way he’d left Denny behind twenty years ago, without a backward glance and knowing in his soul he’d given away something that might have saved him if only he’d been smart enough to hold on instead of pushing away and trying to go the road alone.

*

John had Denny’s remains cremated before he sent them home, just to be sure. He knew Duquette would view that choice as punitive, knew Duquette would see it as just another shot like the one he took on their sixteenth birthday, but it wasn’t. It was necessary.

He’d thought at first it was just a sense of guilt that made the air at Seattle Grace feel so familiar, smell so much like family. He’d thought it was his imagination and his need to close a book he’d torn in half the last time they spoke that made him feel like Denny was watching from a corner, arms folded across his chest and eyes guarded as he tried to decide why John was there, and what that meant in the context of his life as Denny Duquette rather than the life of Danny Winchester he’d thrown to the dogs when he was six and some daddy wannabe came knocking with an offer to trade one vowel for another to buy a whole second shot at living and being loved.

But as much as John thought the rest might have been his own imagination, he knew, standing in the hallway outside Webber’s office, staring into the blonde’s horrified eyes as he told her Denny was the one with a heart, but saying it in a way he knew would gut her even as he said it … he knew then that the cold on his neck wasn’t his imagination. He knew the way an icy wind invaded his body and tried to clamp down around his heart, tried to kill him silent in defense of a woman John spoke to the same way he’d spoken to the only other person Danny Winchester loved (for very much the same reasons he’d spoken to Duquette that way), that Denny was still with her. Denny hadn’t left her behind any more than John would have left Mary behind until someone forced him to, until someone burned his bones to set his spirit free.

To force his spirit free, if necessary.

Which it was. Necessary. So John cremated his brother’s mortal remains and sent the ashes back to Duquette in a brass urn he paid for with a credit card in his own name.

He didn’t actually plan on doing it, but somewhere in the flat nothingness of Kansas, he took a left turn when he should have taken a right and ended up at a cathedral in Memphis even though Duquette had specifically asked him not to come. They had Denny’s ashes boxed in a casket near the altar as if he hadn’t been cremated at all, as if that choice hadn’t been taken out of the Duquettes’s hands in a way that no doubt seemed designed to make a clear statement about how much Denny had never been their family as much as he was John’s.

The Duquettes ignored John like he wasn’t there. The rest of the mourners stared at him as if they thought he was a ghost, or someone’s idea of a really, really bad joke. John didn’t respond to either treatment. He merely sat in a pew at the back of the church and listened to a preacher tell the gathered masses what a joy it had been to know Denny Duquette. What a good man Denny had been; how kind, how gentle, how much he’d been a part of the family of God’s children who would be welcomed home to His rich bastard’s mansion in the sky.

John listened, holding his silence tight; holding his grief tighter; holding his anger and his rage and his bitterness at He who would presume to prepare a place for his brother without also preparing one for him tightest of all.

John held his head up, defiant, unbowed while others around him put to display their obedience, their fidelity, their faith in things they’d never seen betrayed, never known as lies or exaggerations or simply wishful thinking. He closed his mind to a still silence as those around him prayed for the soul of someone who didn’t need their prayers any more than he needed John’s to go where both Denny and Danny had always belonged: someplace better than here, someplace warmer and gentler and more befitting of a kid who’d been able to look into the dark and see the light since the day he was born.

Amen. John rose and left the cathedral behind him. He waited for Duquette across the street from the massive iron gates that kept cars like his on the outside where they belonged. Unwilling to try his old code--knowing it would be changed and not wanting to feel what that would feel like to be denied entrance to the house of a father he’d never wanted and dogmatically refused to accept--John sat in silence while the limo pulled into the driveway and the gates opened, letting the Duquettes inside and then closing behind them to keep the rest of the world out.

He was sure Duquette saw the Impala sitting curbside in a neighborhood that wouldn’t admit a muscle car’s worth if their souls depended on it. He was less sure Duquette would acknowledge his existence in any way that didn’t involve a neighborhood security patrol, or cops responding to a Duquette service call the way civil servants always responded with the master of the house rings.

It was a little more than seven minutes later when Duquette stepped out a front door that cost more than most men make in a year to walk down the long drive, leaving his wife safe inside as he strolled through gates that opened to let him pass so he could approach a car most men in his income bracket wouldn’t look down their noses to see. John got out, met him half way so they were both standing in the middle of a street that saw about as much traffic as John’s bed had seen since the night Mary was murdered.

John spoke first, opening with something he didn’t actually intend to say: "I’m sorry about the Impala crack."

For a moment, Duquette was too stunned to respond. It was so far off any greeting he expected that even the master of playing people to the end of making obscene amounts of money couldn’t come up with a single thing to say in the face of an act of near-contrition from a son who’d never accepted him, and never would.

"I always wanted to say that," John admitted a little awkwardly. "So now I’ve said it. You didn’t deserve that crack. It wasn’t fair. I know why you bought this car, and I knew it even then. And for one brief moment, I might have even loved you for it. Which is probably why I said what I said. But whatever reason I might have had—if I even had a reason other than wanting to hurt you—I regret saying it. So I’m sorry, if that matters now. Or even if it doesn’t."

Duquette nodded, asked, "Do you want to come inside?"

"No. I don’t belong there now any more than I did then."

"You’ve always been welcome here, John," Duquette said calmly. "It’s you who chose to stay away."

John smiled a little. Bitterly. "I don’t want to fight, old man. I just came to tell you I was sorry. And to tell you I didn’t burn Denny’s body out of spite. I did it because it had to be done. You’ll never understand why, and I’m not going to waste my time trying to explain it to you; but I at least wanted to say it, at least wanted you hear it from me, even if I know you’ll never believe it."

"You should come inside," Duquette said like it was the only answer he had that he was willing to speak.

"Do you know about the blonde?" John asked.

Duquette looked down the street, his features going dark, dissatisfied. "Yeah. I know about her. He proposed to her right before he died. She was his doctor, and she used that against him to crawl inside his wallet as he lay in a hospital bed, too damn proud to call us and tell us where he was so we could be there with him, so he wouldn’t have to die alone."

"It wasn’t like that," John said.

Duquette snorted. "How would you know?"

"I just know. I looked into her eyes. She loved him. She loved him the way I loved Mary."

Duquette’s expression shifted. He wanted to ask, but he didn’t, so John told him. "My wife was murdered in our house when my sons were children. I loved her the way I loved my dad, and I lost her the way I lost my dad. It did the same thing to me, and I only survived it because I didn’t have any choice; because my sons needed me too much for me to leave them alone, or I would have, both in the house as it burned and later, when the pain became too much and the need to escape it became too great."

"I’m sorry," Duquette said quietly.

This time, it was John who looked away, John who studied the far end of the quiet street for several seconds before he could look back, meet Duquette’s eyes again. "Thank you. But it was a long time ago. My sons are almost grown now. They’re strong. The oldest is just like me. The youngest is someone you’d adopt and make your own, which is why I’ll never introduce him to you; because I couldn’t take that, couldn’t take losing him to you again, couldn’t take being replaced in his eyes the way I was in Denny’s."

"That isn’t fair, John."

"I know it isn’t," John admitted. "But I’ve never been fair with you before, so why break with tradition now?"

"I’m not your father," Duquette said. "But I always tried to be."

"It wasn’t your shortfall, Duquette," John assured him. "It was mine. I knew that then; I know that now. I just can’t change it, and I know myself well enough not to try."

"Come inside with me," Duquette offered again.

And John denied him for the third time: "No. I don’t belong there. You aren’t my father, and you never will be."

Duquette stepped back, hurt but trying not to show it. "Fine," he said. "Have it your way, John. But when you change your mind, the fact that you’ve turned away from me so many times won’t matter. I still want to be your father. I’ll forgive you whatever you ask to be forgiven if you just come to me and ask it."

"I’m not humble enough to ever ask for your forgiveness," John said. "The best I could ever do is apologize for being unfair to you, and for taking the generosities you’ve offered over the years the way I wanted to take them rather than the way I know they were intended."

"Then just come to me," Duquette said. "I’ll take that as enough in your case."

John laughed a little, shook his head at how far this man was willing to go to save someone who simply could not be saved. "I’ll keep that in mind," he said finally.

"Do," Duquette returned. "I want to meet your sons some day. Both of them, not just the one who reminds you of your brother."

"You and Dean would get along just about as well as you and I did. But he thinks you have great taste in cars. I never told him it was my taste, you were nothing but the guy with the money to foot the bill."

Duquette didn’t answer that. His generosity in not doing so shamed John enough to admit something he didn’t want to admit. "Can you see why you never had a chance with me, old man?" he asked. "I came here to apologize about the Impala crack, and I leave by making another, just as bad, if not worse."

"It isn’t worse," Duquette said. "And I've come to expect it from you. I try not to let it hurt me any more. It does, but I try not to let it."

The silence stretched between them until it threatened to break and send them twenty years away in opposite directions.

"I told him once that his grandfather gave me the Impala," John said suddenly. "He knows my dad died when I was five, but he’s never questioned that because Dean doesn’t question me any more than I questioned my dad. But I told him that for you. Not because I ever expect the two of you to meet, but because …" he stopped, thought about it for a long moment, then finished "… because I wanted to. I wanted to say it that way, so I did."

Duquette nodded. He understood in a way that perhaps no one else would. "Small steps, John," he said. "Small steps."

"Anyway." John stepped away from him, stepped back to the Impala behind him. "I’m going now. Thank you for the car. I never said that either, and I should have."

"Thank you for coming to the funeral."

"I wasn’t sure I’d be welcome." He laughed quietly and corrected himself. "Scratch that. I knew I wouldn’t be welcome, but I came anyway. For Denny. But for you, too."

"The prodigal son is always welcomed home, John."

"I’ll tell him that if I ever see him," John returned.

"My son?" Duquette asked quietly.

"The one I’m not," John clarified without the rancor his denials usually wielded.

Duquette nodded, accepting it this time, even though he still offered, "Don’t forget what I said."

"About my father being a knuckle-dragging monkey who was never smart enough to be anything but a Marine?"

He shouldn’t have said it, but he did. And in saying it, John realized he should have said it. He had to say it.

"About forgiveness, son," Duquette returned calmly. "About the door always being here if you want to walk through it. We’ve never changed the code on the gate, and we never will."

"I’ll remember that the next time I run low on funds," John said.

"Bring your sons with you. I’ll give them each a car. It seems like the only thing I ever did right in the many things I tried to do with you."

He shouldn’t have said it, but he did. And in hearing it, John realized Duquette should have said it. John had to hear it so he could respond fairly this time. So he could say what he should have said more than twenty years ago when a man he spent most of his life denying tried yet again to turn the other cheek and offer love to a child who would not be loved.

"You did a lot right with me," John said. "And you gave Denny what I couldn’t. I’ll always love you for that. And for the Impala."

"I’m glad you came, John."

John nodded. "I am, too." He hesitated, then asked something of a man he’d never asked for anything in his entire life other than a car he’d never thought he had an ice cube’s chance in hell of actually getting. "Do me a favor, will you?"

Duquette blinked, surprised; but he recovered quickly. "Sure."

"You don’t even want to know what it is before you agree?"

"No. Just ask me, and I’ll do it if I can."

John nodded. "Give her a chance," he said. "Reach out and make it better for her. She loved him. I’m pretty sure he must have loved her, too. Loved her enough that I had to burn his body to set him free."

Duquette frown, cocked his head to one side.

"Don’t ask," John said. "Just take it on faith, old man: this time, I’m right. If you loved Denny as much as I know you did, you have to try and connect with her."

"That’s your favor?" Duquette asked.

"Yes."

Duquette sighed. "I was hoping you’d ask for money. Or a new car. Or maybe the moon. Those I could probably manage."

"So you won’t do it then?"

Duquette studied John’s eyes for a long moment, then gave in. "I’ll do it," he said. "Or I’ll try at least. I’ll meet with her, see if I can find what you saw in her. I won’t promise I’ll see it, or that I’ll be able to connect, even if I do. But I’ll try."

"That’s all any of us can ever do," John said. Then, because it occurred to him almost like another man thinking within the confines of his own skull, he said, "You knew he proposed to her. How?"

"He called. Left a message on our answering machine the night he died."

"Did you keep it?" John asked.

Duquette looked down, his eyes dark with pain as he said in a voice so quiet John could barely hear it, "Yes."

"Play it for her," John said. "Let her hear whatever he had to say about her in his own voice." Duquette looked up again, looked at John like, just for a moment, he saw someone else there. Someone more familiar. Someone he’d always called Denny, but he’d always thought of as Son. "It’s what Denny would want," John told him. "Trust me on this, Dad. It’s what he would want."

Duquette made a sound that cut straight through to John’s soul.

"What?" John asked.

"You called me Dad," Duquette said.

John’s eyes clouded. He turned away, open the Impala’s door and dropped inside. "Sorry," he said. "Must have just come out."

Duquette stepped in close, put his hand on John’s arm and tightened his fingers into it, holding on. He didn’t say anything for so long John finally did, looking up and asking again, "What?"

Duquette let him go, stepped back again. "Nothing. Goodbye, son. Be safe, and come home again when you’re ready."

"You can change the code on the gate any time you want," John returned. "I appreciate the offer, but it wouldn’t be fair to let you think I’m ever coming back. I’m not. This isn’t where I belong. It never was, and it never will be."

"The code will stay the same, whether you ever use it or not."

John started the car, gunned it a little just to hear the sound of it rebel against the quiet still of this exclusive neighborhood. "His name is Sammy," John said, looking out the windshield rather than looking at the man to whom he was speaking. "I’ll put your name and address in my journal. When I die, he’ll look for you, and he’ll find you because that’s who Sammy is." John did look at Duquette then, met his eyes and asked him for another favor, one for himself this time, rather than one for Denny. "Don’t take him away from Dean. Be his grandfather all you want, but don’t leave Dean all alone by the side of the road. He needs Sammy. Don’t take that away from him, even if Dean never accepts you as anything other than some rich old bastard who tried to save his father from himself but never could." John swallowed hard, then finished, "Do that for me. Please. If you ever gave a shit about me at all, do that one thing when Sammy comes to you. Just don’t take him from Dean. Even if you can, don’t."

"I never took Denny from you, John," Duquette said quietly.

"I know that. I gave Denny away. But Dean’s smarter than I am. He won’t do that with Sammy, and I need you to promise you won’t do it to him, even if you can."

"I promise," Duquette said.

John nodded. He looked at the manicured road ahead of him, studied it with the critical eye of someone seeing something he didn’t understand and never would. It was claustrophobic in its civility. How he’d managed to live here until he was seventeen was beyond him. John put the Impala in gear and drove away. He didn’t look in the rearview mirror to see the man standing in the street behind him, watching him go with eyes that wanted him to stay.

It took fifteen minutes to get on the highway, and another forty-eight to clear the city and find the open road stretched to the horizon before him. He pushed the Impala up to eighty, then to ninety. With the window down and his elbow stuck out into the sunshine of a day that began cloudy, the wind tore through the car in the deafening thunder of freedom. John listened to it sing, hearing metal in the way it serenaded him with music that never appealed to Denny, but that was the only song he and his father had ever known.

Somewhere in the quiet of his mind, John heard his brother’s voice from a lifetime ago, whispering in his ear as they laid curled up around one another, still smelling of smoke under the antiseptic wash of the hospital’s attempt to scrub the residue of tragedy off their skins. "I’m here, John," Denny whispered, stilling the rage that had been screaming through John’s bones since the fireman picked him up and carried him away from any chance he had of ever seeing his dad again. "I’m right here. I promise, John. I’m still right here."

John listened to the music play, driving fast on the open road in the direction of home and the boys he’d never leave behind.