Fic: Three foggy mornings and one rainy day (will rot the best birch fence a man can build)
Title: Three foggy mornings and one rainy day (will rot the best birch fence a man can build)
Author: britomart_is
Rating: PG
Genre: Gen
Words: 7000
Notes: Thank you to setissma and to Robert Frost.
Summary: Mary Winchester has one son.
This is the way it is.
Mary drifts in phenobarbital sleep, buoyant and aimless. Dreams skim past her like jellyfish trailing their stingers, plucking at her hair and whispering in her ears, but they can't grab hold of her. She doesn't have enough substance for them to wrap around her and pull her into the deep dark depths, so she slips and slides away.
The bed - the entire earth - thuds into place beneath her when she opens her eyes. She blinks and hears the crying - that howl of inarticulate suffering that only a dying man or an infant can produce. Mary blinks again, and frees herself from the clutching sheets. Her feet drag sleep-heavy over the carpet. "Coming," she says to the wall.
Halfway down the hall, arms wrap firmly around her waist. John envelops her from behind, rocks her. She's reminded of the seas of sleep, rocking in the waves. She could stay like this forever. "Mary, stop. Jesus, just stop."
"John, what?" He should let her go. She has things to do. The screaming is still filling up the hallway with need.
There's kindness in John's voice, and an open wound. Something raw and bleeding. "Wake up."
She does. "Oh," she says, a small word in a quiet hallway. She looks from John's clenched jaw to the nursery door. "I heard it, John. I did." The door pulses at her, taunts her with opacity. Anything could be behind a closed door, and she'll never know until she looks. She can't be sure until she checks.
The door handle is tarnished, carpet in front of it worn ragged and low.
"Go back to bed, Mary. You need to sleep." John's hands stroke over her hair. His breath huffs warm on her scalp when he rests his face on the crown of her head. "I need you to be here with me," he says. "I can't do this on my own."
It might be the worst thing he could ask of her, to be here. But she can't deny him that.
She can feel the door's sinister gaze at her back as John guides her back to bed. She can hear the silence laughing at her.
Maybe there's something inside of Mary that was always a single frayed thread away from losing its moorings, born of a childhood spent bracing against the night her parents would drive into the darkness to be heroes and wouldn't come back. She learned to fear the gray rays of morning when she was still clutching a stuffed rabbit, waiting for the sound of the key in the door and wondering if it would never come.
Mary doesn't stop hearing cries in the night. But she learns to hear them and do nothing, to stay in bed, close her eyes and count her sins like sheep, because it makes John happy. No, not happy, never that. But not as sad as it made him to catch her halfway down the hall. Mary leaves a pill on her tongue and lets it sit there till it's bitter and powdery. She swallows it down, lets it pull her where the screams can't reach her.
This is the way it is. This is the way it has been for some time.
Time fails to stop. Time rolls on with increasing momentum, like a car with its brakes cut hurtling down a slope. The Winchesters persist. Mary begins to sleep at night, and sometimes during the day. John goes to work, provides for his family, keeps a cabinet full of empty bottles in the garage next to his tools, and kisses her with mouthwash on his breath. Mary feigns ignorance with a delicate understanding that John Winchester's pride is a wild animal best left unprovoked.
And Dean … Dean is fine. He was so young. He doesn't understand. Dean's all right.
Dean is nine years old when the troubles start.
Muffled feet thmph-thmph-thmph in the hallway long after Dean should have been in bed. Up and down the hallway. Up and down the stairs.
The faucet squeaks on in the middle of the night and runs for too long, then ceases just when Mary thinks she'll go check to see if Dean's sick.
Clattering and scraping from downstairs tear Mary from the oceans of sleep, making her think she's late to breakfast till she realizes it's still dark out. She descends the stairs into the square of yellow cast by the blazing kitchen lights. There's a glass of chocolate milk on the table, still cold and sweating down its sides. She puts the milk back in the fridge and eyes the dark ring of condensation on the wood.
Road Runner meep-meeps, and Mary makes it down to the living room in time to see Wile E. Coyote suspended in mid-air, legs cycling frantically before he drops from cliff-height. The television makes a soft declining sound as she clicks it off, and when she goes upstairs to check on Dean, the boy is feigning sleep.
They take him to a gentle-voiced woman with linen suits and wire-framed glasses. She asks Dean why he isn't sleeping. She asks him what he's trying to tell his parents. Dean narrows his eyes.
They take him back the next week and he refuses to get out of the car. When John bodily picks him up to carry him inside, Dean bites.
Dean's class takes a field trip to the zoo, and he crumples the permission slip in the bottom of his backpack, tells the teacher his parents are ethically opposed to the captivity of animals. That itself is unnerving, unlike Dean - Dean who's all action, who doesn't have the patience to make up a sly story. Mary doesn't find out until Dean stays home that morning, cheerfully declaring the day off. A year ago, Mary would have scolded. A year ago, Mary would secretly have been more amused than concerned. "I can still drive you," she says, hoping. "It's a beautiful day."
Dean regards her evenly and says, "I can't. I'm busy." He shuts the door to his room and whispers filter out from beneath the door. Mary brings him ants-on-a-log and a glass of chocolate milk (since he suddenly seems to like it so much,) and Dean, sitting cross-legged on the floor, turns to stare at her like she's interrupting. Dean bites into a celery stick and carefully sets the chocolate milk down a foot to his right.
Mary comes back from the grocery store with her arms full of brown paper and crinkly white plastic. The west wall of the house shudders rhythmically under the impact of Dean's soccer ball. "Your dad told you to stop that. You'll wreck the siding."
"Sorry," Dean says, and he stops, foot resting on the ball.
Mary's barely set the bags down in the kitchen when the rhythmic thumps start up again. She shakes her head, smiling, and she's still smiling when she goes upstairs and sees Blue Bear sitting upright in the middle of the hall. An infant can sit upright at six months.
Blue Bear's little arms reach for Mary. Small enough to fit in her hand, soft and colored like a pale sky, Blue Bear once sat on a shelf at the hospital gift shop. John spent twenty minutes picking him out, addled by nerves and caffeine and joy.
Further down the hall a blankie, too briefly used to be properly threadbare, sprawls across the carpet like a dead man at a crime scene. The nursery door hangs ever so slightly ajar. The open space between door and doorframe teases at Mary like a deep ravine. She wants to peer over the edge, but if she falls in she'll never find her way back out.
The door moans on its hinges. The room isn't cluttered, doesn't smell like baby powder and old diapers, neglected by harried new parents. It's perfect. It's curated.
There's a small clean circle in the thick dust of a shelf where the porcelain angel once rested. Its wingtip is to Mary's left, a fold of its robe to her right. Its face is shattered beyond repair.
When Mary grips Dean's shoulder, she leaves a bloody handprint. Staring at it in bewilderment, she realizes that a sharp-edged piece of broken wing is cutting into her clenched hand. Dean is crying. He must have started when she wrenched him from his game, dragged him up the stairs.
Dean's trying to push her over the edge, she thinks. He does these things to hurt her.
"I don't ever go in the stupid nursery!" Dean shouts, pink-faced, and he shakes her off. "You never believe me. You never believe me!" He runs out of the nursery and slams his own door. Springs squeak, and angry pillow-muffled sobs filter down the hallway.
The center of the room is empty. The crib wasn't salvageable, of course. Mary runs a finger through the dust on the shelf. A cold draft passes through, shivering Mary's skin and gently twirling the dangling mobile. Baseballs and gloves. Mary wonders if Dean ever wishes for someone to play catch in the backyard with. If she placed a delicate blanketed bundle in Dean's arms right now, Mary wonders if he'd remember how to cradle it.
A tug at the hem of her shirt makes her sway on her feet. Mary shuts her eyes. "Not right now, Dean."
Tug.
"I'll be out in a minute, Dean," she snaps.
"Are you mad?"
Mary stops, listens for a long moment to Dean's muffled crying down the hall, and looks down.
The boy who isn't Dean is pale and indistinct, like a double exposure on a photograph, but the weight of his chubby hand clinging to Mary's shirt-hem is insistent. "Are you mad?" he asks again.
"No," she says, because it's difficult to be angry at a little boy who looks so shamefaced, even if he isn't really a little boy. "I'm not mad."
"I didn't mean to break it," the boy wails, and Mary is cold down to her bones when he leans into her body. "It just fell."
"I believe you," she soothes. "I believe you." Mary the hunter and Mary the mother clash and meld. "Are you lost?"
The boy pulls away, little face tight with misery. "I didn't mean to," he says again, and then with a flicker he's gone, like a lightbulb burning out.
Dean doesn't raise his head at the dip of the mattress when Mary sits down. He's cried himself out and now breathes snottily into the pillow. Mary pulls him in close to her side, lets him blow his nose on her sleeve. She examines her son closely, bowled over by an unexpected rush of relief. There's nothing wrong with Dean. And this, this she can handle. "I need you to tell me everything."
Dean's little body goes rigid, suspicious.
"That boy seems sad," she says, and Dean peers up at her. "Don't you think?"
Dean nods slowly, expression opening up into earnest concern. "Yeah." He bites his lip. "I can make him laugh sometimes."
"We'll help him," Mary says, smoothing a cowlick out of Dean's hair, and she feels him relax further.
When Dean smiles up at her, finally curling into her body, Mary feels like a monster. "Yeah. We're gonna help," Dean echoes.
Mary lays down a line of salt under the rug at Dean's doorway after he goes to sleep.
Sitting down at a wide library table with a stack of yellowed records is like getting the blood pumping in a tingling leg after a long time on the road. Pins and needles. She checks the property records first, rules out the patently absurd possibilities: the house was not, she can now confirm, built over the foundations of an orphanage of sad-eyed waifs. Then she looks into previous tenants, expects to find a serial child molester walking free on a technicality, is already anticipating how she'll tell John she's putting in a pantry and then tear up the cellar till she finds small bones buried three feet deep and wrapped in a tarp. The tenants reveal nothing: a happy family of six, all alive and well, who relocated to New Mexico, and before them the same old woman for sixty years. Mary scrutinizes the granny's obituary but just can't convince herself she sees signs of witchcraft.
The Missing Persons records take the longest, poring over photos, newspaper clippings with the pleading of desperate families clinging to hope. She goes back as far as the 1920s, looks at the families' sepia grief and thinks I'm sorry about your dead boy because the story's told by the decades of empty headlines, no joyful reunions to report. So many dead boys, but not the right dead boy.
She wonders if their angel-breaking chocolate-milk loving visitor has any living family. She feels like she'd have to track them down, but doesn't know what she'd say. Doesn't know whether they'd hear our boy is at peace or our boy died suffering. Perhaps it's kinder to crush false hope, but it's hardly fair that Mary get that job. He's gone, he's really gone, I assure you, I burned the bones myself.
It's not about fair, her parents always taught her. The world isn't fair.
Mary wakes up in the early hours, birds gossiping in the half-light outside her window. She disentangles herself from a snoring John, fondly stroking his arm before venturing out of bed to follow the faint sounds.
Hitched sobs lead her to Dean's doorway. The ghost sits hunched against the wall, staring reproachfully at the salt line. He looks up at her approach and his face crumples, a new wave of tears taking him over. Not real tears, she reminds herself. Not anymore. Mary sits next to him. She waits.
"Dean won't play with me," the ghost finally says. He sniffles, a long messy drag of breath through a stuffed-up nose. Breath that isn't breath, that isn't keeping him alive.
Mary buys gardenia-scented soap and chaperones field trips to the science museum and bakes layer cakes for PTA fundraisers. Mary's husband loves her for her soft heart, looks at her with warm eyes when she plies a sick Dean with buttered toast and cool washcloths. Mary sets out dishes of food on the back porch for the neighborhood cats even though they're already overfed and imperious. Mary doused old bones with kerosene and salt when she was twelve years old and her mother dropped the match. Mary has scars on her hands that John thinks are from a childhood of climbing trees. Mary's love for her family is the thing that redeems her. Mary's love for her family is the thing that destroys her. Mary thought she sold her soul once, but she was mistaken. Mary once sold something she would never have willingly given. Mary let down her guard, thought the demons of her past could never run fast enough to catch up with how much she'd changed, and she was wrong. And she watched-heard-smelled-the consequences. She hears it every night.
The steel core inside of Mary burns white-hot as she looks at the ghost. Those are not tears. That is not a heartbroken child. Not anymore. "Stay away from my son," she says. "You aren't welcome here."
A five year-old boy throwing a tantrum is a powerful force. The ghost of a five year-old boy throwing a tantrum is something else entirely. Mary grits her teeth, bones vibrating with the resonance of the ghost's wailing. Dean is kept up all night, pillow clamped over his ears to drown out the screams, emerging only to glare at Mary and demand to know what she's done. Even John, usually blissfully immune to the strange occurrences in the house, churns the sheets in his nervous insomnia, his subconscious recoiling even when his ears register only silence.
While Dean is in school the next day, Mary swings by the hardware store, the corner grocery, and the glorified Hot Topic that sells nag champa and yoga mats and Tibetan prayer flags to the local yuppies. She pounds iron nails into the doorframes, burns sage in every corner of the house, breaks out the books from her heavy black steamer trunk in the attic and etches protective sigils beneath the rugs. By the time Dean gets home from tee ball, Mary has the house locked down so tight she suspects that even some of John's more uncouth Marine buddies might have trouble getting in.
A week passes without a sign of the ghost, and Mary's almost ready to breathe a sigh of relief. But she's not the only one who's noticed its absence, as she learns when Dean goes ballistic. Mary and John come home from date night to find every window and door in the house thrown wide open, the lines of salt she'd carefully laid down under strips of tape swept away, rugs tossed aside and sigils hastily scratched out, messy chunks taken out of the door frames where Dean's pried the nails out with a claw hammer. Dean's sitting at the kitchen table with cookie crumbs on his face, a second plate sitting untouched, waiting for someone who will never be able to eat them. Dean raises his chin defiantly to meet Mary's eyes. "He didn't do anything wrong."
"Dean. What the hell did you do to the house?" John never even noticed the alterations Mary made, but he sure notices Dean's attack on them.
"Mom started it! He just wants to come inside!"
"Jesus, Dean, you're too old for imaginary friends," John says. Mary recognizes that what this boy needs is some military discipline look on John's face from his ill-fated attempts to shame Dean out of a brief bed-wetting phase, and she decides to put the brakes on this train right now.
"He's not. Imaginary," Dean says, and Mary knows the ready-to-boil-over look on Dean's face far too well.
She squeezes John's hand, I'm going to handle this and you're going to let me. "He's not a pet, Dean. You can't keep him."
"You're trying to get rid of him," Dean says, voice completely flat, and for a moment Mary is almost afraid of her son.
She tries a different tack. "He isn't happy, is he?" Dean is silent. "He's stuck. He's lost."
"Maybe if we were just nicer to him-" Dean tries, lamely.
Mary snaps. "He's dead, Dean, and I think you know it."
"I know." Dean says. "I know, I know, okay? But it's not fair!" The force behind Dean's words propels him from his seat, hums through his body till he's shaking. "He's just a little kid! So, what, he doesn't even get to grow up?"
John's hand is grasping her shoulder even before she sways on her feet. She drops a hand on his, squeezes back, it's okay.
Mary busies herself with Dean's plate of crumbs and she's looking at water running down the sink when she says, "If I could make him stop being dead, I'd do it, Dean. But I can't."
Dean's sneakers shuffle over the linoleum. When Dean clutches at her sleeve, she can't help remembering a chubby hand that wasn't really a hand tugging at her shirt-hem. "I promised. I said I wouldn't let anybody hurt him." Dean is so young, so serious, not grown into his own responsibility yet. His conscientiousness is like the clumsy oversized paws on a puppy. "I promised I'd take care of him, Mom."
God, Mary thought she knew all the ways in which she'd been catastrophically wrong, but there's one more for the list - she thought that Dean was too young to grieve his brother. Thought he was too young to understand. He would have been the best big brother. She wishes more than anything that she could have seen it. Instead she gets this poisoned, perilous thing, watching Dean's fierce instincts attach to the saddest, smallest creature within reach.
When Dean's put to bed, John sits across from her at the kitchen table and looks at her like he's waiting for a wise motherly explanation. "I'm trying to understand what you're doing here, but I'm not-" He halts, looks down at his hands. "I just want us all to be okay."
Mary looks at her husband - the beloved, handsome boy she held dead in her arms, the good man who deserves better than to be looking over his shoulder for the things that go bump in the night - and her heart sinks. "John, we need to talk."
Mary doesn't relent, keeps the salt lines in front of Dean's door. Every day Dean's on a little more of a hair trigger, face drawn and eyes flitting over the world like it isn't real, twitchy and irritable. She assumes it's sulking and stress right up until she realizes that Dean has simply stopped sleeping. She follows the nighttime whispers down the hallway and finds them hiding in the nursery, windows crackling with ghost-frost. One boy with fogged breath and one boy with no breath at all. The boys are cross-legged with knees touching, heads bent to the center in quiet consultation.
Dean wasn't meant to be alone, and it's like somewhere in his core he knows that. Mary fears what that will mean for him, what he'll be driven to do. Needing people is a dangerous proposition. Mary should know.
Dead ends slam up in front of Mary at every turn of her search. She digs up the cellar just to be sure and the only bones she finds are mice. She brings in a priest to purify the house, and halfway through the rites she sees the ghost lurking quietly in a corner, eyes wide with curious fascination as he watches the priest flicking holy water from his fingertips. The archived newspapers reveal nothing, and neither does an interview with ninety-five year-old Mrs. Mullin, usually an impeccable source of unsolicited historical gossip. Dean's ghost boy is doubly ethereal - his earthly existence seems wiped from the records. Surely, Mary thinks, there must be something. There must have been someone who searched, someone who mourned.
The unfruitfulness of Mary's efforts eases her into complacency. Uneasily, they coexist, and it's fine for a while, until the day Dean comes bursting through the back door and slings his backpack onto the couch. Mary's already set out afternoon snack - two plates, two glasses, no longer patient enough to tell Dean that the ghost won't feel left out and can't feel hungry.
"Mom! There's a carnival!" His words tumble out on heaved breaths, and his socks are pocked with burrs, betraying his shortcut home through vacant lots. "They're putting up the Tilt-a-Whirl, Mom, you've gotta let us go."
"Dean, last time you went on a carnival ride you threw up in my lap on the drive home. I don't think that's a good idea."
Dean beams, pink and freckle-spotted. "But Sammy wants to go!"
Mary drops the carton of milk. It falls, tips, and milk glug-glugs onto the linoleum in slow pulses. "What did you just say?"
Dean pales. "Um," he says, and shifts his weight to one foot.
"Why did you call it that?"
"Cause that's his name," Dean whispers, looking at the milk on the floor. "He told me."
"Jesus," Mary says. She sends Dean to his room, and she's still sitting alone at the kitchen table when John gets home and steps in the puddle of milk.
John, who took the news that his home was haunted by a ghost whom everyone but him could see with remarkable equanimity, doesn't take this latest development as calmly. Mary's seen John cry three times: when each of his sons came into the world, and when one of them went out of it. This is the fourth time. "Why can't I see him?" John asks, voice strained with bewilderment and rejection, and his gaze searches the shadows. "Why won't he let me see him?"
"It's not him," Mary insists. "Just think about it. Just calm down and think. That ghost wasn't a baby when he died, he's five if he's a day. It's not him." Mary hasn't decided if the name is cruel coincidence or something more sinister.
"Maybe-" John says, and doesn't seem to have thought through to the end of his sentence. "Maybe it is." Dawning hope and tentative happiness encroach on the weariness of John's face, and Mary hates the ghost for putting that look in John's eyes when it's only going to be ripped away.
Because there isn't any hope. Mary had known there was no hope long before the coroner snapped off his gloves and said there was nothing left for him to examine. Before the embers even finished steaming, before the fire hoses were coiled away, Mary'd known that it was her fault. Ten years was one voice in her head and don't get out of bed was another, and it was her fault.
She'd wanted to do what she knew best, shutter the windows, oil her guns grown dusty beneath the spare linens, tear the world open and rip retribution from its core. She could have done it, too, she truly believes that, could have put a name to the demon who kissed her and could have hunted it, trapped it, pinned it to the floor and watched it wriggle like a bug beneath an entomologist's microscope while she unstrung its innards.
But even then, even when pounds fell off her frame like molting feathers because food was bitter with smoke, when the smell of roasting meat made her vomit till her spine rattled with barking dry heaves, when the radio was always on, set to static, because in a silent room Mary would always, always hear weeping screams in the ringing of her ears - even then, she protected what she had left. A grieving husband. A son who was an age for sippy cups, a son who'd had the words scared right out of him. Both of them ripe for the losing.
She'd passed hours with hands clasped and knees aching in the closet-sized roadside chapels meant to save the souls of long-haul truckers, the tiny, private holy places where no other prayers would drown out her own.
And the angels answered Mary back, clear as day: This is a cycle. Nothing good comes of it. And trailing, promised - it'll be the death of you, Mary.
So she'd swallowed pills that made her sleep, stumbled from bed to soothe nonexistent weeping, and resigned herself. And the soul she thought she'd sold crowded her insides, unwelcome, claustrophobic.
Mary could have the best help in the world the moment the name Campbell passed her lips - hunters don't forget their martyrs - but the last thing she needs is bearded NRA enthusiasts on her doorstep saying just this once and it's local and two, maybe three stitches. So Mary Campbell stays in hiding, and Mary Winchester flips open the White Pages.
Mary squeezes her eyes tight shut and thrusts a pin in the phonebook. She's skeptical of the results; she needs a psychic, not a state.
Most people answer the phone with hello. The psychic answers with, "I was wondering when you'd get the courage up, honey. How are those boys of yours?"
"I only have one son," Mary answers.
"Oh," the warm voice says, sounding honestly stunned. "Oh, Mary. I'm so sorry."
John leaves work early the day Missouri comes, shaves freshly and puts on a shirt that isn't wrinkled. The floor creaks as he shifts his weight from foot to foot, fingers twitching at his collar, lurching forward to answer the door the moment he sees her turn off the sidewalk. Mary doesn't get through offering the woman something cold to drink before Missouri's crouching down, gaze laser-focused on a patch of air.
"Hi, baby," Missouri says. "Will you talk to me?"
Mary's hair stands on end. She follows the line of Missouri's intent stare, the air shifts like a camera finding its focus, and the ghost is there as if he was all along. The small figure is standing just beyond John's leg, hands bashfully clenching and unclenching. John notices the direction of their attention and stares unnerved behind himself, eyes searching the air. "What? What?"
Then the ghost boy shuffles forward and wraps his arms around John's leg, face hidden behind John's thigh. The boy peeks out to peer solemnly at Missouri, shy under the scrutiny of this strange interloper.
John's eyes widen when he sees where they're looking, but his searching gaze finds nowhere to land. "Mary?"
"Can't you see him?" The psychic's hand reaches out, curved, like she wants to pet a child's hair. "He wants you to see him."
John shudders a step to the side, breaking the ghost's hold. Not to be deterred, the boy reaches out and wraps a small hand around John's thumb, clutching, seeking reassurance. Mary sees it the moment John feels the touch.
It never stops making John beam like the big softie he is - the way those baby fists flail in the air, then latch onto John's work-rough hands, tiny pink-soft chubby baby hands that barely reach around John's index finger. John tickles Sam's belly until the air colors with the gurgles, shrieks and chortles of a happy Sammy.
Mary walks Missouri out to the front stoop while John retreats to the garage, to his cabinet of empty and soon-to-be-empty bottles. It won't be a pleasant night. Missouri's face is troubled. "Something's wrong," she says.
"No fucking kidding," Mary blurts out, feeling hysterical laughter nipping at her vocal cords.
Missouri frowns. "No call for that kind of language," she says absently.
It's not Sammy. Mary knows that. It can't be him. The thing is, Mary noticed something, as the ghost peered out from behind the shelter of John.
The ghost is older.
Missouri nods, though Mary never spoke. "When you first met him-"
"He was shorter," Mary says. "Chubbier. His hair grew out, it's in his eyes now." They grow so fast at that age. Children do, that is. Living children. "But that's impossible," she tests. "Ghosts don't grow."
"No, they don't," Missouri says slowly. "Ghosts don't grow." Whatever she's thinking, she doesn't care to translate it from psychic-world for a normal human brain.
Mary pays Missouri, less for her services than to make her go away so that Mary can sit in the quiet kitchen and think while John clatters tools in the garage in a charade of productivity.
Mary doesn't get up from the table until Dean gets home from school.
This is the way it is.
They all adjust to the temperature fluctuations, sweaters scattered around the house to be pulled on absentmindedly when it drops to glacial and goosebumped levels. Dean draws in the frost on the windows on warm Midwestern afternoons.
The lights flicker like an excited heartbeat, like a child's eyelashes. Eventually it doesn't even bother Mary. She pauses with her finger pinned to the cookbook, and continues her recipe when the lights come back on.
Dean sleeps now that he isn't forced to consort with the ghost in secret after-hours - that is, he sleeps unless the ghost turns up to play. He goes out with friends unless he can stay home with a dead boy instead. He goes to school because Mary threatens to lay down salt lines again. He clenches his jaw and refuses to go on the class camping trip because it would take him away from home for a week, and he grows pale from long hours indoors.
John's hands shake. He looks in corners but never sees anything. Instead of retreating to the garage to work on project cars, he stays, grim-faced, in his recliner, trying to catch the shadows moving. His glasses of this or that leave rings on the tabletops.
Mary sleeps soundly, then wakes and hears delighted laughter in the radio static, in the hum of a fan, in the roar of passing trucks. She stares at the ghost - at the ghost who grows - and says not him.
But when he disappears for days at a time, as ghosts do, she's as jittery as John and as bereft as Dean. There are no neighbors she can call and no posters she can tack up on street poles, because ghosts don't go missing, they just go.
Slowly, steadily, the living Winchesters immure themselves with their grief, in a house that flickers cold, flickers dark, flickers empty.
This is the way it is. This is the way it has been for some time. Since it can't be changed, this is the way it must be.
"Ghosts don't grow," Missouri says. A child's voice, indistinct, crackles in the noise of the phone line.
"What do you want?" Mary asks. She hates picking up the phone these days. She hates making excuses for why Dean can't come to the birthday party, why she can't meet the girls for coffee, why John can't make it to work today.
"So he's not a ghost."
"Stop it," Mary says, voice edging tight and high. "Leave us alone."
"I told you something felt wrong," Missouri says, infuriatingly calm and measured, "but I lied. Ghosts feel wrong, Mary. They feel out of place, out of time, out of step with life. That child feels like he's home."
"He's dead," Mary whispers. The voice in the static is so loud that maybe Missouri can't hear her, so she speaks up. "He's dead."
"But he could have lived," Missouri says. "There's something about your boy, Mary - the world where he lived is so powerful a possibility, it didn't die when he did."
"If he's not a ghost, then what is he?"
"Stuck," Missouri says. "He's stuck. Between the world where he's alive and the one where he's dead. He may not even know it. He just wants to be with his family. Wants to be human. And he'll keep on trying to be human, but he never will be."
"He needs to move on," Mary says dully, because life always finds a way to be crueler.
Missouri hmmms. "Mary, why didn't you leave the house after the fire?"
Mary's half-distracted, already thinking ahead, trying to remember if her parents ever met a ghost whose remains were already incinerated. Trying to forget the cases where some ghost, some monster, was protected by surviving family members that wouldn't let them go.
"Tragedy like this, most parents would," Missouri continues. Mary snaps to attention, searching for a judgment in Missouri's tone. She doesn't find it. "Something's keeping you here. Just as surely as there's something keeping Sam."
There's a world where Sammy never died. Where Mary got out of bed. Where Sammy grows taller, and drinks chocolate milk, and needs a haircut. That world is so strong it's forcing its way into this one, even now.
This is the way it is. This is the way it has been. This is not the way it was meant to be.
When Dean's school friends show up on the doorstep, looking like living boys should look, muddy knees and double-knotted laces and peanut-butter breath, Dean lets himself be dragged outside to play soccer in the yard.
Mary finds Sam solemn and still with his fingers clenched on the windowsill. The band of sunlight cuts through him, makes him insubstantial. He turns to Mary, and it's not the fact that she can see right through him to the sofa behind that makes Sam look inhuman to her. It's the age in his eyes.
"I can't follow him outside," he says.
Mary nods, voice stolen.
"Something's wrong with me," he says, testing.
"Nothing is wrong with you," Mary interjects, fiercely as if someone bullied her beloved son on the playground. "Sam," she says hesitantly. "Do you know who I am?"
Sam's eyes follow each pass of the soccer ball outside the window, spectral hand disappearing where it meets the glass. "I know you're my mom, and I know Dad's my dad, and I know Dean's … he's Dean," Sam says reverently. "I know my room is at the end of the hall. I know I'm good at climbing trees. I know I like white bread toast with the crusts cut off, but." Sam's gaze goes somewhere very far away, somewhere Mary can't follow him. "I don't think I've ever had toast," he says. He looks to her. "Have I?"
"No."
"Mom, what's wrong with me?"
And this is something Mary's learned over and over since becoming a parent, that children will understand more than you think they can. "You died. You're not alive."
Sam nods like she's just confirming what he already suspected. Then his chin lifts and he looks her in the eye. "I don't want to be dead."
And Mary's grief is doubled now, because the resolve in his face, the firm line of his jaw and the steel in his gaze, are a hint of the man he would have grown into. She mourns them both now, the baby boy who should have been hers to coddle and comfort, and the strong, stubborn man who should have been hers to be proud of.
When Sammy's ash-and-shadow arms wrap around her, it's like leaping into the pond when it's just begun to thaw - the cold seizes all her muscles, stills her lungs, and she sinks.
Mary leaves John watching Dean. John's pulling the bread from the breadbox, cheese ready to be sliced. He moves without looking at what he's doing. Dean, Dean with the big eyes and big smile and outsize personality, seems small. Diminished. They have four wooden chairs at their solid, squat-legged dinner table. For symmetry, of course. It would look wrong to have only three. So the fourth chair sits empty, or piled with discarded sweaters and newspapers.
She takes a long look at her husband and son before she shuts the door behind her and steps into the night. Crickets and the clang of a distant train. It would be so easy for Mary to just turn around and go back inside. No one would know. No one would blame her. She doesn't.
Mary Winchester has one son. But that's not the way it's meant to be.
She pulls the car out and drives until pavement turns into gravel and gravel turns into dirt, dust that rises in a haze in her rear view mirror, and the headlight beams plunge into the black.
Mary drops the keys twice at the front door. John comes to her rescue, opening it from inside with a greasy spatula still in hand. He has smile lines around his eyes, like he's just finished laughing at a joke she hasn't heard. He kisses her and smells like nothing but motor oil and soap. His arm wraps strong around her waist, playful, possessive.
The acrid scent of smoke cuts through to the doorstep.
"Dad, it's burning! It's burning!"
"Whoops." Mary watches the relaxed line of John's shoulders as he pads back to the kitchen. She stops on the threshold. John is scooping blackened grilled cheese sandwiches out of a pan and onto plates.
"Hey, Mom," Dean says, mouth already full of crumbs.
"Hi, Mom," Sam says, beaming past his chocolate milk mustache. He takes a bite of his own sandwich and strings of melty cheese drip down his chin.
"Oh Christ," Mary says, and bursts into tears.
In the middle of the night, she goes to the nursery that is not a nursery. There's a bed piled high with blankets, little-boy-lump burrowed deep underneath them. Books stacked untidily next to the shelves they've been taken from. The day's clothes dumped unceremoniously on the ground. Crooked picture frames of days Mary doesn't remember because she never lived them, and a little boy she doesn't even know.
Sammy's warm and squirming in his sleep, little heart thumping beneath her hand.
It takes her two weeks before she can bring herself to touch him when he's awake. But he's still there. Not a phantom. Not a cruel joke. Just a boy with sticky hands and rumpled clothes.
For the first time in years, Mary's claustrophobia lifts.
Kids grow up fast. Six turns to sixteen in the blink of an eye.
Ten good years later, the boys slump on the couch watching Twilight Zone reruns, bellies full of meatloaf and brussels sprouts, because Mary can do that for them at least, she can make them eat their vegetables. She can give them that now and hope they remember it.
Sam's ankles stick out of his pajama pants, legs longer than Dean's now. He's handsome. And boy, is he stubborn. And god, is she proud.
Mary shuts the front door behind her quietly.
- she is survived by her husband, John Winchester, and her sons, Dean and Sam Winchester, all of Lawrence, Kansas -
There comes a day, after the funeral, when Sam finds her diary. He's been surreptitiously going through her things for days, searching for answers. He's tired of flinching every time a dog barks. He's tired of being told that sometimes tragedies just happen. The journal is blank but for one line:
I went to Missouri and I learned the truth.
"Missouri," he murmurs.
Dean's in the doorway, shoulders fury-tight. "Stay out of Mom's stuff."
"Dean," Sam says. "We need to go to Missouri."
"What, like the state?"
Sam thrusts the journal into Dean's hands. "Whatever she knew, that's where we find it."
The car doors creak when they slam, both in time together, and the engine growls like a living thing. Dean cranks the volume, and Sam rolls down his window.
Because that's the way it always had to be.
Author: britomart_is
Rating: PG
Genre: Gen
Words: 7000
Notes: Thank you to setissma and to Robert Frost.
Summary: Mary Winchester has one son.
This is the way it is.
Mary drifts in phenobarbital sleep, buoyant and aimless. Dreams skim past her like jellyfish trailing their stingers, plucking at her hair and whispering in her ears, but they can't grab hold of her. She doesn't have enough substance for them to wrap around her and pull her into the deep dark depths, so she slips and slides away.
The bed - the entire earth - thuds into place beneath her when she opens her eyes. She blinks and hears the crying - that howl of inarticulate suffering that only a dying man or an infant can produce. Mary blinks again, and frees herself from the clutching sheets. Her feet drag sleep-heavy over the carpet. "Coming," she says to the wall.
Halfway down the hall, arms wrap firmly around her waist. John envelops her from behind, rocks her. She's reminded of the seas of sleep, rocking in the waves. She could stay like this forever. "Mary, stop. Jesus, just stop."
"John, what?" He should let her go. She has things to do. The screaming is still filling up the hallway with need.
There's kindness in John's voice, and an open wound. Something raw and bleeding. "Wake up."
She does. "Oh," she says, a small word in a quiet hallway. She looks from John's clenched jaw to the nursery door. "I heard it, John. I did." The door pulses at her, taunts her with opacity. Anything could be behind a closed door, and she'll never know until she looks. She can't be sure until she checks.
The door handle is tarnished, carpet in front of it worn ragged and low.
"Go back to bed, Mary. You need to sleep." John's hands stroke over her hair. His breath huffs warm on her scalp when he rests his face on the crown of her head. "I need you to be here with me," he says. "I can't do this on my own."
It might be the worst thing he could ask of her, to be here. But she can't deny him that.
She can feel the door's sinister gaze at her back as John guides her back to bed. She can hear the silence laughing at her.
Maybe there's something inside of Mary that was always a single frayed thread away from losing its moorings, born of a childhood spent bracing against the night her parents would drive into the darkness to be heroes and wouldn't come back. She learned to fear the gray rays of morning when she was still clutching a stuffed rabbit, waiting for the sound of the key in the door and wondering if it would never come.
Mary doesn't stop hearing cries in the night. But she learns to hear them and do nothing, to stay in bed, close her eyes and count her sins like sheep, because it makes John happy. No, not happy, never that. But not as sad as it made him to catch her halfway down the hall. Mary leaves a pill on her tongue and lets it sit there till it's bitter and powdery. She swallows it down, lets it pull her where the screams can't reach her.
This is the way it is. This is the way it has been for some time.
Time fails to stop. Time rolls on with increasing momentum, like a car with its brakes cut hurtling down a slope. The Winchesters persist. Mary begins to sleep at night, and sometimes during the day. John goes to work, provides for his family, keeps a cabinet full of empty bottles in the garage next to his tools, and kisses her with mouthwash on his breath. Mary feigns ignorance with a delicate understanding that John Winchester's pride is a wild animal best left unprovoked.
And Dean … Dean is fine. He was so young. He doesn't understand. Dean's all right.
Dean is nine years old when the troubles start.
Muffled feet thmph-thmph-thmph in the hallway long after Dean should have been in bed. Up and down the hallway. Up and down the stairs.
The faucet squeaks on in the middle of the night and runs for too long, then ceases just when Mary thinks she'll go check to see if Dean's sick.
Clattering and scraping from downstairs tear Mary from the oceans of sleep, making her think she's late to breakfast till she realizes it's still dark out. She descends the stairs into the square of yellow cast by the blazing kitchen lights. There's a glass of chocolate milk on the table, still cold and sweating down its sides. She puts the milk back in the fridge and eyes the dark ring of condensation on the wood.
Road Runner meep-meeps, and Mary makes it down to the living room in time to see Wile E. Coyote suspended in mid-air, legs cycling frantically before he drops from cliff-height. The television makes a soft declining sound as she clicks it off, and when she goes upstairs to check on Dean, the boy is feigning sleep.
They take him to a gentle-voiced woman with linen suits and wire-framed glasses. She asks Dean why he isn't sleeping. She asks him what he's trying to tell his parents. Dean narrows his eyes.
They take him back the next week and he refuses to get out of the car. When John bodily picks him up to carry him inside, Dean bites.
Dean's class takes a field trip to the zoo, and he crumples the permission slip in the bottom of his backpack, tells the teacher his parents are ethically opposed to the captivity of animals. That itself is unnerving, unlike Dean - Dean who's all action, who doesn't have the patience to make up a sly story. Mary doesn't find out until Dean stays home that morning, cheerfully declaring the day off. A year ago, Mary would have scolded. A year ago, Mary would secretly have been more amused than concerned. "I can still drive you," she says, hoping. "It's a beautiful day."
Dean regards her evenly and says, "I can't. I'm busy." He shuts the door to his room and whispers filter out from beneath the door. Mary brings him ants-on-a-log and a glass of chocolate milk (since he suddenly seems to like it so much,) and Dean, sitting cross-legged on the floor, turns to stare at her like she's interrupting. Dean bites into a celery stick and carefully sets the chocolate milk down a foot to his right.
Mary comes back from the grocery store with her arms full of brown paper and crinkly white plastic. The west wall of the house shudders rhythmically under the impact of Dean's soccer ball. "Your dad told you to stop that. You'll wreck the siding."
"Sorry," Dean says, and he stops, foot resting on the ball.
Mary's barely set the bags down in the kitchen when the rhythmic thumps start up again. She shakes her head, smiling, and she's still smiling when she goes upstairs and sees Blue Bear sitting upright in the middle of the hall. An infant can sit upright at six months.
Blue Bear's little arms reach for Mary. Small enough to fit in her hand, soft and colored like a pale sky, Blue Bear once sat on a shelf at the hospital gift shop. John spent twenty minutes picking him out, addled by nerves and caffeine and joy.
Further down the hall a blankie, too briefly used to be properly threadbare, sprawls across the carpet like a dead man at a crime scene. The nursery door hangs ever so slightly ajar. The open space between door and doorframe teases at Mary like a deep ravine. She wants to peer over the edge, but if she falls in she'll never find her way back out.
The door moans on its hinges. The room isn't cluttered, doesn't smell like baby powder and old diapers, neglected by harried new parents. It's perfect. It's curated.
There's a small clean circle in the thick dust of a shelf where the porcelain angel once rested. Its wingtip is to Mary's left, a fold of its robe to her right. Its face is shattered beyond repair.
When Mary grips Dean's shoulder, she leaves a bloody handprint. Staring at it in bewilderment, she realizes that a sharp-edged piece of broken wing is cutting into her clenched hand. Dean is crying. He must have started when she wrenched him from his game, dragged him up the stairs.
Dean's trying to push her over the edge, she thinks. He does these things to hurt her.
"I don't ever go in the stupid nursery!" Dean shouts, pink-faced, and he shakes her off. "You never believe me. You never believe me!" He runs out of the nursery and slams his own door. Springs squeak, and angry pillow-muffled sobs filter down the hallway.
The center of the room is empty. The crib wasn't salvageable, of course. Mary runs a finger through the dust on the shelf. A cold draft passes through, shivering Mary's skin and gently twirling the dangling mobile. Baseballs and gloves. Mary wonders if Dean ever wishes for someone to play catch in the backyard with. If she placed a delicate blanketed bundle in Dean's arms right now, Mary wonders if he'd remember how to cradle it.
A tug at the hem of her shirt makes her sway on her feet. Mary shuts her eyes. "Not right now, Dean."
Tug.
"I'll be out in a minute, Dean," she snaps.
"Are you mad?"
Mary stops, listens for a long moment to Dean's muffled crying down the hall, and looks down.
The boy who isn't Dean is pale and indistinct, like a double exposure on a photograph, but the weight of his chubby hand clinging to Mary's shirt-hem is insistent. "Are you mad?" he asks again.
"No," she says, because it's difficult to be angry at a little boy who looks so shamefaced, even if he isn't really a little boy. "I'm not mad."
"I didn't mean to break it," the boy wails, and Mary is cold down to her bones when he leans into her body. "It just fell."
"I believe you," she soothes. "I believe you." Mary the hunter and Mary the mother clash and meld. "Are you lost?"
The boy pulls away, little face tight with misery. "I didn't mean to," he says again, and then with a flicker he's gone, like a lightbulb burning out.
Dean doesn't raise his head at the dip of the mattress when Mary sits down. He's cried himself out and now breathes snottily into the pillow. Mary pulls him in close to her side, lets him blow his nose on her sleeve. She examines her son closely, bowled over by an unexpected rush of relief. There's nothing wrong with Dean. And this, this she can handle. "I need you to tell me everything."
Dean's little body goes rigid, suspicious.
"That boy seems sad," she says, and Dean peers up at her. "Don't you think?"
Dean nods slowly, expression opening up into earnest concern. "Yeah." He bites his lip. "I can make him laugh sometimes."
"We'll help him," Mary says, smoothing a cowlick out of Dean's hair, and she feels him relax further.
When Dean smiles up at her, finally curling into her body, Mary feels like a monster. "Yeah. We're gonna help," Dean echoes.
Mary lays down a line of salt under the rug at Dean's doorway after he goes to sleep.
Sitting down at a wide library table with a stack of yellowed records is like getting the blood pumping in a tingling leg after a long time on the road. Pins and needles. She checks the property records first, rules out the patently absurd possibilities: the house was not, she can now confirm, built over the foundations of an orphanage of sad-eyed waifs. Then she looks into previous tenants, expects to find a serial child molester walking free on a technicality, is already anticipating how she'll tell John she's putting in a pantry and then tear up the cellar till she finds small bones buried three feet deep and wrapped in a tarp. The tenants reveal nothing: a happy family of six, all alive and well, who relocated to New Mexico, and before them the same old woman for sixty years. Mary scrutinizes the granny's obituary but just can't convince herself she sees signs of witchcraft.
The Missing Persons records take the longest, poring over photos, newspaper clippings with the pleading of desperate families clinging to hope. She goes back as far as the 1920s, looks at the families' sepia grief and thinks I'm sorry about your dead boy because the story's told by the decades of empty headlines, no joyful reunions to report. So many dead boys, but not the right dead boy.
She wonders if their angel-breaking chocolate-milk loving visitor has any living family. She feels like she'd have to track them down, but doesn't know what she'd say. Doesn't know whether they'd hear our boy is at peace or our boy died suffering. Perhaps it's kinder to crush false hope, but it's hardly fair that Mary get that job. He's gone, he's really gone, I assure you, I burned the bones myself.
It's not about fair, her parents always taught her. The world isn't fair.
Mary wakes up in the early hours, birds gossiping in the half-light outside her window. She disentangles herself from a snoring John, fondly stroking his arm before venturing out of bed to follow the faint sounds.
Hitched sobs lead her to Dean's doorway. The ghost sits hunched against the wall, staring reproachfully at the salt line. He looks up at her approach and his face crumples, a new wave of tears taking him over. Not real tears, she reminds herself. Not anymore. Mary sits next to him. She waits.
"Dean won't play with me," the ghost finally says. He sniffles, a long messy drag of breath through a stuffed-up nose. Breath that isn't breath, that isn't keeping him alive.
Mary buys gardenia-scented soap and chaperones field trips to the science museum and bakes layer cakes for PTA fundraisers. Mary's husband loves her for her soft heart, looks at her with warm eyes when she plies a sick Dean with buttered toast and cool washcloths. Mary sets out dishes of food on the back porch for the neighborhood cats even though they're already overfed and imperious. Mary doused old bones with kerosene and salt when she was twelve years old and her mother dropped the match. Mary has scars on her hands that John thinks are from a childhood of climbing trees. Mary's love for her family is the thing that redeems her. Mary's love for her family is the thing that destroys her. Mary thought she sold her soul once, but she was mistaken. Mary once sold something she would never have willingly given. Mary let down her guard, thought the demons of her past could never run fast enough to catch up with how much she'd changed, and she was wrong. And she watched-heard-smelled-the consequences. She hears it every night.
The steel core inside of Mary burns white-hot as she looks at the ghost. Those are not tears. That is not a heartbroken child. Not anymore. "Stay away from my son," she says. "You aren't welcome here."
A five year-old boy throwing a tantrum is a powerful force. The ghost of a five year-old boy throwing a tantrum is something else entirely. Mary grits her teeth, bones vibrating with the resonance of the ghost's wailing. Dean is kept up all night, pillow clamped over his ears to drown out the screams, emerging only to glare at Mary and demand to know what she's done. Even John, usually blissfully immune to the strange occurrences in the house, churns the sheets in his nervous insomnia, his subconscious recoiling even when his ears register only silence.
While Dean is in school the next day, Mary swings by the hardware store, the corner grocery, and the glorified Hot Topic that sells nag champa and yoga mats and Tibetan prayer flags to the local yuppies. She pounds iron nails into the doorframes, burns sage in every corner of the house, breaks out the books from her heavy black steamer trunk in the attic and etches protective sigils beneath the rugs. By the time Dean gets home from tee ball, Mary has the house locked down so tight she suspects that even some of John's more uncouth Marine buddies might have trouble getting in.
A week passes without a sign of the ghost, and Mary's almost ready to breathe a sigh of relief. But she's not the only one who's noticed its absence, as she learns when Dean goes ballistic. Mary and John come home from date night to find every window and door in the house thrown wide open, the lines of salt she'd carefully laid down under strips of tape swept away, rugs tossed aside and sigils hastily scratched out, messy chunks taken out of the door frames where Dean's pried the nails out with a claw hammer. Dean's sitting at the kitchen table with cookie crumbs on his face, a second plate sitting untouched, waiting for someone who will never be able to eat them. Dean raises his chin defiantly to meet Mary's eyes. "He didn't do anything wrong."
"Dean. What the hell did you do to the house?" John never even noticed the alterations Mary made, but he sure notices Dean's attack on them.
"Mom started it! He just wants to come inside!"
"Jesus, Dean, you're too old for imaginary friends," John says. Mary recognizes that what this boy needs is some military discipline look on John's face from his ill-fated attempts to shame Dean out of a brief bed-wetting phase, and she decides to put the brakes on this train right now.
"He's not. Imaginary," Dean says, and Mary knows the ready-to-boil-over look on Dean's face far too well.
She squeezes John's hand, I'm going to handle this and you're going to let me. "He's not a pet, Dean. You can't keep him."
"You're trying to get rid of him," Dean says, voice completely flat, and for a moment Mary is almost afraid of her son.
She tries a different tack. "He isn't happy, is he?" Dean is silent. "He's stuck. He's lost."
"Maybe if we were just nicer to him-" Dean tries, lamely.
Mary snaps. "He's dead, Dean, and I think you know it."
"I know." Dean says. "I know, I know, okay? But it's not fair!" The force behind Dean's words propels him from his seat, hums through his body till he's shaking. "He's just a little kid! So, what, he doesn't even get to grow up?"
John's hand is grasping her shoulder even before she sways on her feet. She drops a hand on his, squeezes back, it's okay.
Mary busies herself with Dean's plate of crumbs and she's looking at water running down the sink when she says, "If I could make him stop being dead, I'd do it, Dean. But I can't."
Dean's sneakers shuffle over the linoleum. When Dean clutches at her sleeve, she can't help remembering a chubby hand that wasn't really a hand tugging at her shirt-hem. "I promised. I said I wouldn't let anybody hurt him." Dean is so young, so serious, not grown into his own responsibility yet. His conscientiousness is like the clumsy oversized paws on a puppy. "I promised I'd take care of him, Mom."
God, Mary thought she knew all the ways in which she'd been catastrophically wrong, but there's one more for the list - she thought that Dean was too young to grieve his brother. Thought he was too young to understand. He would have been the best big brother. She wishes more than anything that she could have seen it. Instead she gets this poisoned, perilous thing, watching Dean's fierce instincts attach to the saddest, smallest creature within reach.
When Dean's put to bed, John sits across from her at the kitchen table and looks at her like he's waiting for a wise motherly explanation. "I'm trying to understand what you're doing here, but I'm not-" He halts, looks down at his hands. "I just want us all to be okay."
Mary looks at her husband - the beloved, handsome boy she held dead in her arms, the good man who deserves better than to be looking over his shoulder for the things that go bump in the night - and her heart sinks. "John, we need to talk."
Mary doesn't relent, keeps the salt lines in front of Dean's door. Every day Dean's on a little more of a hair trigger, face drawn and eyes flitting over the world like it isn't real, twitchy and irritable. She assumes it's sulking and stress right up until she realizes that Dean has simply stopped sleeping. She follows the nighttime whispers down the hallway and finds them hiding in the nursery, windows crackling with ghost-frost. One boy with fogged breath and one boy with no breath at all. The boys are cross-legged with knees touching, heads bent to the center in quiet consultation.
Dean wasn't meant to be alone, and it's like somewhere in his core he knows that. Mary fears what that will mean for him, what he'll be driven to do. Needing people is a dangerous proposition. Mary should know.
Dead ends slam up in front of Mary at every turn of her search. She digs up the cellar just to be sure and the only bones she finds are mice. She brings in a priest to purify the house, and halfway through the rites she sees the ghost lurking quietly in a corner, eyes wide with curious fascination as he watches the priest flicking holy water from his fingertips. The archived newspapers reveal nothing, and neither does an interview with ninety-five year-old Mrs. Mullin, usually an impeccable source of unsolicited historical gossip. Dean's ghost boy is doubly ethereal - his earthly existence seems wiped from the records. Surely, Mary thinks, there must be something. There must have been someone who searched, someone who mourned.
The unfruitfulness of Mary's efforts eases her into complacency. Uneasily, they coexist, and it's fine for a while, until the day Dean comes bursting through the back door and slings his backpack onto the couch. Mary's already set out afternoon snack - two plates, two glasses, no longer patient enough to tell Dean that the ghost won't feel left out and can't feel hungry.
"Mom! There's a carnival!" His words tumble out on heaved breaths, and his socks are pocked with burrs, betraying his shortcut home through vacant lots. "They're putting up the Tilt-a-Whirl, Mom, you've gotta let us go."
"Dean, last time you went on a carnival ride you threw up in my lap on the drive home. I don't think that's a good idea."
Dean beams, pink and freckle-spotted. "But Sammy wants to go!"
Mary drops the carton of milk. It falls, tips, and milk glug-glugs onto the linoleum in slow pulses. "What did you just say?"
Dean pales. "Um," he says, and shifts his weight to one foot.
"Why did you call it that?"
"Cause that's his name," Dean whispers, looking at the milk on the floor. "He told me."
"Jesus," Mary says. She sends Dean to his room, and she's still sitting alone at the kitchen table when John gets home and steps in the puddle of milk.
John, who took the news that his home was haunted by a ghost whom everyone but him could see with remarkable equanimity, doesn't take this latest development as calmly. Mary's seen John cry three times: when each of his sons came into the world, and when one of them went out of it. This is the fourth time. "Why can't I see him?" John asks, voice strained with bewilderment and rejection, and his gaze searches the shadows. "Why won't he let me see him?"
"It's not him," Mary insists. "Just think about it. Just calm down and think. That ghost wasn't a baby when he died, he's five if he's a day. It's not him." Mary hasn't decided if the name is cruel coincidence or something more sinister.
"Maybe-" John says, and doesn't seem to have thought through to the end of his sentence. "Maybe it is." Dawning hope and tentative happiness encroach on the weariness of John's face, and Mary hates the ghost for putting that look in John's eyes when it's only going to be ripped away.
Because there isn't any hope. Mary had known there was no hope long before the coroner snapped off his gloves and said there was nothing left for him to examine. Before the embers even finished steaming, before the fire hoses were coiled away, Mary'd known that it was her fault. Ten years was one voice in her head and don't get out of bed was another, and it was her fault.
She'd wanted to do what she knew best, shutter the windows, oil her guns grown dusty beneath the spare linens, tear the world open and rip retribution from its core. She could have done it, too, she truly believes that, could have put a name to the demon who kissed her and could have hunted it, trapped it, pinned it to the floor and watched it wriggle like a bug beneath an entomologist's microscope while she unstrung its innards.
But even then, even when pounds fell off her frame like molting feathers because food was bitter with smoke, when the smell of roasting meat made her vomit till her spine rattled with barking dry heaves, when the radio was always on, set to static, because in a silent room Mary would always, always hear weeping screams in the ringing of her ears - even then, she protected what she had left. A grieving husband. A son who was an age for sippy cups, a son who'd had the words scared right out of him. Both of them ripe for the losing.
She'd passed hours with hands clasped and knees aching in the closet-sized roadside chapels meant to save the souls of long-haul truckers, the tiny, private holy places where no other prayers would drown out her own.
And the angels answered Mary back, clear as day: This is a cycle. Nothing good comes of it. And trailing, promised - it'll be the death of you, Mary.
So she'd swallowed pills that made her sleep, stumbled from bed to soothe nonexistent weeping, and resigned herself. And the soul she thought she'd sold crowded her insides, unwelcome, claustrophobic.
Mary could have the best help in the world the moment the name Campbell passed her lips - hunters don't forget their martyrs - but the last thing she needs is bearded NRA enthusiasts on her doorstep saying just this once and it's local and two, maybe three stitches. So Mary Campbell stays in hiding, and Mary Winchester flips open the White Pages.
Mary squeezes her eyes tight shut and thrusts a pin in the phonebook. She's skeptical of the results; she needs a psychic, not a state.
Most people answer the phone with hello. The psychic answers with, "I was wondering when you'd get the courage up, honey. How are those boys of yours?"
"I only have one son," Mary answers.
"Oh," the warm voice says, sounding honestly stunned. "Oh, Mary. I'm so sorry."
John leaves work early the day Missouri comes, shaves freshly and puts on a shirt that isn't wrinkled. The floor creaks as he shifts his weight from foot to foot, fingers twitching at his collar, lurching forward to answer the door the moment he sees her turn off the sidewalk. Mary doesn't get through offering the woman something cold to drink before Missouri's crouching down, gaze laser-focused on a patch of air.
"Hi, baby," Missouri says. "Will you talk to me?"
Mary's hair stands on end. She follows the line of Missouri's intent stare, the air shifts like a camera finding its focus, and the ghost is there as if he was all along. The small figure is standing just beyond John's leg, hands bashfully clenching and unclenching. John notices the direction of their attention and stares unnerved behind himself, eyes searching the air. "What? What?"
Then the ghost boy shuffles forward and wraps his arms around John's leg, face hidden behind John's thigh. The boy peeks out to peer solemnly at Missouri, shy under the scrutiny of this strange interloper.
John's eyes widen when he sees where they're looking, but his searching gaze finds nowhere to land. "Mary?"
"Can't you see him?" The psychic's hand reaches out, curved, like she wants to pet a child's hair. "He wants you to see him."
John shudders a step to the side, breaking the ghost's hold. Not to be deterred, the boy reaches out and wraps a small hand around John's thumb, clutching, seeking reassurance. Mary sees it the moment John feels the touch.
It never stops making John beam like the big softie he is - the way those baby fists flail in the air, then latch onto John's work-rough hands, tiny pink-soft chubby baby hands that barely reach around John's index finger. John tickles Sam's belly until the air colors with the gurgles, shrieks and chortles of a happy Sammy.
Mary walks Missouri out to the front stoop while John retreats to the garage, to his cabinet of empty and soon-to-be-empty bottles. It won't be a pleasant night. Missouri's face is troubled. "Something's wrong," she says.
"No fucking kidding," Mary blurts out, feeling hysterical laughter nipping at her vocal cords.
Missouri frowns. "No call for that kind of language," she says absently.
It's not Sammy. Mary knows that. It can't be him. The thing is, Mary noticed something, as the ghost peered out from behind the shelter of John.
The ghost is older.
Missouri nods, though Mary never spoke. "When you first met him-"
"He was shorter," Mary says. "Chubbier. His hair grew out, it's in his eyes now." They grow so fast at that age. Children do, that is. Living children. "But that's impossible," she tests. "Ghosts don't grow."
"No, they don't," Missouri says slowly. "Ghosts don't grow." Whatever she's thinking, she doesn't care to translate it from psychic-world for a normal human brain.
Mary pays Missouri, less for her services than to make her go away so that Mary can sit in the quiet kitchen and think while John clatters tools in the garage in a charade of productivity.
Mary doesn't get up from the table until Dean gets home from school.
This is the way it is.
They all adjust to the temperature fluctuations, sweaters scattered around the house to be pulled on absentmindedly when it drops to glacial and goosebumped levels. Dean draws in the frost on the windows on warm Midwestern afternoons.
The lights flicker like an excited heartbeat, like a child's eyelashes. Eventually it doesn't even bother Mary. She pauses with her finger pinned to the cookbook, and continues her recipe when the lights come back on.
Dean sleeps now that he isn't forced to consort with the ghost in secret after-hours - that is, he sleeps unless the ghost turns up to play. He goes out with friends unless he can stay home with a dead boy instead. He goes to school because Mary threatens to lay down salt lines again. He clenches his jaw and refuses to go on the class camping trip because it would take him away from home for a week, and he grows pale from long hours indoors.
John's hands shake. He looks in corners but never sees anything. Instead of retreating to the garage to work on project cars, he stays, grim-faced, in his recliner, trying to catch the shadows moving. His glasses of this or that leave rings on the tabletops.
Mary sleeps soundly, then wakes and hears delighted laughter in the radio static, in the hum of a fan, in the roar of passing trucks. She stares at the ghost - at the ghost who grows - and says not him.
But when he disappears for days at a time, as ghosts do, she's as jittery as John and as bereft as Dean. There are no neighbors she can call and no posters she can tack up on street poles, because ghosts don't go missing, they just go.
Slowly, steadily, the living Winchesters immure themselves with their grief, in a house that flickers cold, flickers dark, flickers empty.
This is the way it is. This is the way it has been for some time. Since it can't be changed, this is the way it must be.
"Ghosts don't grow," Missouri says. A child's voice, indistinct, crackles in the noise of the phone line.
"What do you want?" Mary asks. She hates picking up the phone these days. She hates making excuses for why Dean can't come to the birthday party, why she can't meet the girls for coffee, why John can't make it to work today.
"So he's not a ghost."
"Stop it," Mary says, voice edging tight and high. "Leave us alone."
"I told you something felt wrong," Missouri says, infuriatingly calm and measured, "but I lied. Ghosts feel wrong, Mary. They feel out of place, out of time, out of step with life. That child feels like he's home."
"He's dead," Mary whispers. The voice in the static is so loud that maybe Missouri can't hear her, so she speaks up. "He's dead."
"But he could have lived," Missouri says. "There's something about your boy, Mary - the world where he lived is so powerful a possibility, it didn't die when he did."
"If he's not a ghost, then what is he?"
"Stuck," Missouri says. "He's stuck. Between the world where he's alive and the one where he's dead. He may not even know it. He just wants to be with his family. Wants to be human. And he'll keep on trying to be human, but he never will be."
"He needs to move on," Mary says dully, because life always finds a way to be crueler.
Missouri hmmms. "Mary, why didn't you leave the house after the fire?"
Mary's half-distracted, already thinking ahead, trying to remember if her parents ever met a ghost whose remains were already incinerated. Trying to forget the cases where some ghost, some monster, was protected by surviving family members that wouldn't let them go.
"Tragedy like this, most parents would," Missouri continues. Mary snaps to attention, searching for a judgment in Missouri's tone. She doesn't find it. "Something's keeping you here. Just as surely as there's something keeping Sam."
There's a world where Sammy never died. Where Mary got out of bed. Where Sammy grows taller, and drinks chocolate milk, and needs a haircut. That world is so strong it's forcing its way into this one, even now.
This is the way it is. This is the way it has been. This is not the way it was meant to be.
When Dean's school friends show up on the doorstep, looking like living boys should look, muddy knees and double-knotted laces and peanut-butter breath, Dean lets himself be dragged outside to play soccer in the yard.
Mary finds Sam solemn and still with his fingers clenched on the windowsill. The band of sunlight cuts through him, makes him insubstantial. He turns to Mary, and it's not the fact that she can see right through him to the sofa behind that makes Sam look inhuman to her. It's the age in his eyes.
"I can't follow him outside," he says.
Mary nods, voice stolen.
"Something's wrong with me," he says, testing.
"Nothing is wrong with you," Mary interjects, fiercely as if someone bullied her beloved son on the playground. "Sam," she says hesitantly. "Do you know who I am?"
Sam's eyes follow each pass of the soccer ball outside the window, spectral hand disappearing where it meets the glass. "I know you're my mom, and I know Dad's my dad, and I know Dean's … he's Dean," Sam says reverently. "I know my room is at the end of the hall. I know I'm good at climbing trees. I know I like white bread toast with the crusts cut off, but." Sam's gaze goes somewhere very far away, somewhere Mary can't follow him. "I don't think I've ever had toast," he says. He looks to her. "Have I?"
"No."
"Mom, what's wrong with me?"
And this is something Mary's learned over and over since becoming a parent, that children will understand more than you think they can. "You died. You're not alive."
Sam nods like she's just confirming what he already suspected. Then his chin lifts and he looks her in the eye. "I don't want to be dead."
And Mary's grief is doubled now, because the resolve in his face, the firm line of his jaw and the steel in his gaze, are a hint of the man he would have grown into. She mourns them both now, the baby boy who should have been hers to coddle and comfort, and the strong, stubborn man who should have been hers to be proud of.
When Sammy's ash-and-shadow arms wrap around her, it's like leaping into the pond when it's just begun to thaw - the cold seizes all her muscles, stills her lungs, and she sinks.
Mary leaves John watching Dean. John's pulling the bread from the breadbox, cheese ready to be sliced. He moves without looking at what he's doing. Dean, Dean with the big eyes and big smile and outsize personality, seems small. Diminished. They have four wooden chairs at their solid, squat-legged dinner table. For symmetry, of course. It would look wrong to have only three. So the fourth chair sits empty, or piled with discarded sweaters and newspapers.
She takes a long look at her husband and son before she shuts the door behind her and steps into the night. Crickets and the clang of a distant train. It would be so easy for Mary to just turn around and go back inside. No one would know. No one would blame her. She doesn't.
Mary Winchester has one son. But that's not the way it's meant to be.
She pulls the car out and drives until pavement turns into gravel and gravel turns into dirt, dust that rises in a haze in her rear view mirror, and the headlight beams plunge into the black.
Mary drops the keys twice at the front door. John comes to her rescue, opening it from inside with a greasy spatula still in hand. He has smile lines around his eyes, like he's just finished laughing at a joke she hasn't heard. He kisses her and smells like nothing but motor oil and soap. His arm wraps strong around her waist, playful, possessive.
The acrid scent of smoke cuts through to the doorstep.
"Dad, it's burning! It's burning!"
"Whoops." Mary watches the relaxed line of John's shoulders as he pads back to the kitchen. She stops on the threshold. John is scooping blackened grilled cheese sandwiches out of a pan and onto plates.
"Hey, Mom," Dean says, mouth already full of crumbs.
"Hi, Mom," Sam says, beaming past his chocolate milk mustache. He takes a bite of his own sandwich and strings of melty cheese drip down his chin.
"Oh Christ," Mary says, and bursts into tears.
In the middle of the night, she goes to the nursery that is not a nursery. There's a bed piled high with blankets, little-boy-lump burrowed deep underneath them. Books stacked untidily next to the shelves they've been taken from. The day's clothes dumped unceremoniously on the ground. Crooked picture frames of days Mary doesn't remember because she never lived them, and a little boy she doesn't even know.
Sammy's warm and squirming in his sleep, little heart thumping beneath her hand.
It takes her two weeks before she can bring herself to touch him when he's awake. But he's still there. Not a phantom. Not a cruel joke. Just a boy with sticky hands and rumpled clothes.
For the first time in years, Mary's claustrophobia lifts.
Kids grow up fast. Six turns to sixteen in the blink of an eye.
Ten good years later, the boys slump on the couch watching Twilight Zone reruns, bellies full of meatloaf and brussels sprouts, because Mary can do that for them at least, she can make them eat their vegetables. She can give them that now and hope they remember it.
Sam's ankles stick out of his pajama pants, legs longer than Dean's now. He's handsome. And boy, is he stubborn. And god, is she proud.
Mary shuts the front door behind her quietly.
- she is survived by her husband, John Winchester, and her sons, Dean and Sam Winchester, all of Lawrence, Kansas -
There comes a day, after the funeral, when Sam finds her diary. He's been surreptitiously going through her things for days, searching for answers. He's tired of flinching every time a dog barks. He's tired of being told that sometimes tragedies just happen. The journal is blank but for one line:
I went to Missouri and I learned the truth.
"Missouri," he murmurs.
Dean's in the doorway, shoulders fury-tight. "Stay out of Mom's stuff."
"Dean," Sam says. "We need to go to Missouri."
"What, like the state?"
Sam thrusts the journal into Dean's hands. "Whatever she knew, that's where we find it."
The car doors creak when they slam, both in time together, and the engine growls like a living thing. Dean cranks the volume, and Sam rolls down his window.
Because that's the way it always had to be.