Love how you got inside John's head at this crucial time.

Excellent job! The tone is appropriate, the descriptions vivid, and best of all, it's just generally absorbing! Great work!

This is a fantastic look inside the mind of John Winchester. I really think you have acute insight into the man. IMToD is one of my favorite episodes, the main reason being that we see how much John loves both his sons.

Loved how you gave us his thoughts, his reasoning for his sacrifice: " His sons didn’t need him anymore, not really. Not like they needed each other" - a play on the demon's lie to Dean. You also tell us why John had that last conversation with Dean before giving up the Colt - because he had to let Dean know that the demon lied, that without Dean, the family would have never survived. Guh.

Hearing John's thoughts as he sat in Dean's room, I couldn't help but think about what spiritDean was saying to John - asking him why he wasn't doing anything to help him, that he had done everything John asked of him, and what kind of a father was he? Oh, Dean, when you found out, it hurt even more.

Wonderful one shot. Thanks for sharing it with us. Now, on to "Fire". Until next time...

I was wondering how you would write John. Your take on Sam and John's relationship was been so fraught with tension and inability and frustration, while Dean's has been so much more poignant and desperate even.

In My Time Of Dying is a fav episode, and I'm delighted to read a John POV, investigating the mystery of his thought processes and decisions in that episode. Really, very good.

I am, even now, downloading Fire in the Hole - with great anticipation : ) Heck, who i am kidding - with frigging huge Antici...pation!

_

"He knew what that looked like, just him and Dean: bloody and efficient, an oiled machine. Hard and relentless. He didn’t exactly know what just him and Sam might look like, but he wasn’t planning on finding out. He suspected that he and Sam alone together would be too much, like flame and dynamite. Too much, and not enough, because the glue that held everything together wouldn’t be there. The center wouldn’t hold."

And that, that is why I love your writing. Thank you for putting it all down into words so eloquent. Beautifully done!

Well I'll make it an even twenty reviews, as here I am breaking my record on reviewing your stories so late. Even finished reading this two days ago but kinda forgot to review, I had it on my pda *falls to the floor in shame*. Er, can I say I'm really sorry and will review the next one lickety-split? Anyways, I wasn't much of a John fan, although the guy did eventually grow on me. But I always knew that even if he didn't really show it, he did love his boys, or how would they have turned out so well?

This was written so lyrically, and it was like hearing John's voice, even his cursing in his head was in character. Loved the references back to "Red", nice to have his point of view, it filled in this little missing piece that I didn't know was missing. And him smiling and charming the nurse...so that is where Dean got it from ;) And him knowing what the doctor was going to say and not caring...well he did care, but he already had a plan. That was cool. He was right, Dean and Sam together would work better than him and Sam. And he might not have been the best parent in the world, but willing to sacrifice himself for his son was definitely a mark of a loving one. Although I wish he'd have found a different way, where they all could live, you helped to make his choice just a bit more understandable. Thanks so much for sharing this. And you're working on the next one? Yay! You did a great job, and I'm now looking forward to the John moments in your next fic. Hope you have a wonderful week :)

So, I definitely did not think I’d like this story because I have a deep, abiding hatred for John, but seriously? This was awesome. Not that I still don’t hate him, of course, but you really did an amazing job of summing up his motives. And the description definitely psyched me out into thinking it’d be something funny!

It was really an awesome capturing of John’s voice and, like always, I’m so impressed by the way you use small phrases to just make everything make sense. Like this sentence summing up Sam’s motives for everything: “Self-centeredness and Dean, of course.” Is just incredibly spot on. I guess in a way Dean both loves him and hates him for it.

So anyway, yes, color me impressed (and maybe a little converted to sympathy for John)! I’ve been crazy busy with exams, and this was definitely a nice break!

As usual, I sit in awe. I take it the reference to Red was in John's 25 missing days. Ye gods, poor Dean! I want to say poor John but what he does is destroy his son to some extent. Fantastic story though. Now you've got me all excited for the next big fat fic, I can't wait, so be quick with it! Great story.

Ok, so I have 3 things to say about that. 1 - squee! New story! yay!

2 - thanks for those glimpses into john's pov through Red. LOVE that story.

3 - thanks for this little (too short) story. I really liked it.

Did I mention - squee, new story?

Oh crap! John put his own name on the forms! This was great seeing things through John's eyes

Hey babe! Looking up from the tangled depths of my project to tell you this was a great one! Looking forward with interest to your John-centric tale. Glad you finally saw the rock and the hard place the poor b llox is caught between :0) Stay crazy you fruit loop!

Not only did you write a lot of the scenes I would have liked to have seen in IMTOD, but you also wrote a couple of the scenes I would have liked to have seen in Red! I think John's always kind of been a huge shadowy background fic in your fics, so it's interesting to see you foreground him like this at a point in the show where we didn't really get to see anything of what was going through his head. You made a great job of pinpointing all the things about both boys he loved, and really brought home the sacrifice he made - the sacrifice he KNEW he was going to have to make. No way he went down into that basement thinking he'd only have to give up the Colt...

If this is only the warm up exercise, I can't wait for the next fic!

Beautifully written and the last line was the icing on the cake. Simply perfect.

Cheers,

Sera

Late night comments, marginally coherent, I hope. Bear with you? As if. I'm beginning to think you could write a story in which the Winchester men are sitting around reading pages of the phone book to one another and still invest it with texture and emotional complexity. I'm pleased to hear this is prologue to another long fic. John Winchester is a challenge, not the least because there is not much canon material to work with. John's sons are the major conduit leading into John's psyche. I cannot wait to see what you do with him.

Two things that tugged at my mind on a first reading of this piece will keep me awake if I don't get them down, so I beg your indulgence. First of all, I was taken by John's thoughts about (and curious appreciation for) Sam's inclination to be self-centered. I agree that he is, although his sensitivity and compassion temper it to some extent. I also think that he is becoming more aware of it himself as time goes on. Sam's word's you quoted from Devil's Trap-"No, sir, not before everything"-are an example of this growing awareness, as is his "We were just starting to be brothers again," from IMTOD. In addition, it strikes me that Sam is self-centered in direct proportion to the extent to which John and Dean made him the center of the Winchester universe after Mary's death. (I could get really tangled up in astrophysical metaphors here, since the dance among the three of them is every bit as complex as the mathematics describing the effect of multiple planetary bodies upon one another!)

The other thing that struck me is what I take to be a significant blind spot in John's understanding of Dean. Namely, his apparent conviction that Dean knows how John feels about him and should be able to see past the YED's lies in that regard. Was this intentional? God knows, it is a looming pitfall in parent/child relationships even under relatively normal circumstances, so it would not seem inconsistent at all that John would fail to take into account the impact on Dean of the repeated abandonments he has suffered. My suspicion is that it was entirely intentional (if poorly stated on my part), since you are not the sort of writer who settles for superficiality and your subjects are real, flawed human beings.

My thoughts are starting to stray off in a million different directions, so I had better give it up before I stop making sense altogether! My god, you're a brave woman. Tackle it, bring it to its knees and rip off it's helmet. I can't wait to see what's under there.

That was beautiful. Lovely insight into John's thoughts and understanding of his sons. Glad to see you're planning more stories for John.