Supernatural Fic: More Things in Heaven and Earth
Title: More Things in Heaven and Earth
Author: xaara
Rating: PG, gen
Timeline: AU/pre-series
Characters: Dean, Sam, John, Mary, Pastor Jim
Summary: A few roads not taken, a couple that might have been.
More Things in Heaven and Earth
Six days thou shalt work, but on the seventh day thou shalt rest: in earing time and in harvest thou shalt rest.
-Exodus 34:21
It’s been two weeks. Two Sundays. Two attempts to scrape the mud from behind the ears of one floppy-haired miscreant and wiggle him into a pair of slacks, an ironed shirt. Two hours of speaking to an audience attentive save the four-year-old bundle of cotton and dress shoes three sizes too big curled in the last pew, asleep.
Jim’s almost completely sure that he was not destined for fatherhood. At least not in the literal sense of the word.
On the third Sunday, Sammy wakes screaming from a nightmare. Dean wraps around him, hushing him, but it’s too late. The churchgoers turn as one to observe the tableau. Desperate, Jim keeps talking.
They’re not listening. Everyone’s watching the little boy hiccup and twist the heels of his hands against his eyes as his brother whispers things to him, things that are private and secret and his. “When’s Dad coming home?” Sam asks, and Dean mutters an answer Jim can’t hear. The tone, though, that tone sinks straight through the crowd. There’s the edge of hope there, the desperate hope of a man asea on a life raft.
Fishers of men, Jim thinks. He wonders whether this is a test.
Twelve Sundays, and Sam stops asking. He stops falling asleep at the back of the service. He sits rigid against the right angles of the pew, hands folded in his lap, and stares straight ahead.
By the time he’s ten, Sam can quote whole sections of the Bible from memory. Latin has become his second language. He’s memorized nine different exorcisms and knows how to bless the commonly occurring waters of the earth. He sits in class and absorbs, silently, and when his teacher gives him an assignment on British mythology he writes a five-page paper on the signs, habits, and practices of the typical boggart.
When Sam’s thirteen, he throws a pile of books against the wall in a fit of frustration. Without touching them.
By the time he reaches fourteen, he’s put it all together.
“My mother was murdered,” he tells Jim. Lays it out. “She was murdered by a telekinetic demon who wanted me for my own telekinesis, and it’s kept on murdering other people. It’s going to come back soon, and this time I’m going to be ready. I’m going to stop it.” He’s nearly as tall as Jim and twice as serious, all dark eyes and hair combed neatly back. Dark green shirt tucked into a pair of black pants, hands still against his sides.
Jim thinks about arguing, but Sam is fourteen and four hundred and his body has not yet begun to write its autobiography in wrinkles, in scars. They’re all in his head, angry and raw where his father used to be.
Jim has never hated John Winchester. John wanted something that he couldn’t have, wanted a family and a home and a wife to love and children to dote on. He wanted report cards and football games and late-autumn picnics. Instead, he got a wife who looked down at him from above as her blood heated to boiling on his hands and two young men who have faith in nothing but each other and God, in that order.
The front door of the church is propped open to catch the last of the warm breezes. It will turn winter soon, but Dean is outside propped against the hood of his car like it will be summer forever. He wears a pair of tight black jeans, a black t-shirt stretched across his chest. He’s grown something like six feet in the last week. The bottom of the shirt barely brushes his belt buckle.
It’s a goodbye. Dean scuffs his boot against the gravel and stares straight ahead, so Jim returns his attention to Sam. He wants to say something profound, wants to leave this boy, this child, with words that will guide him or save him or bring him back home. He’s sure he feels the floor shift beneath his feet. He no longer wonders who’s afloat on a changeable sea.
Sam has a quest. Sam has his mind and his Latin and what he lacks in muscle he makes up for in brother.
Jim has a book and a robe and the sinking feeling he’s failed in everything he’s ever tried to accomplish.
“And he stayed yet other seven days; and again he sent forth the dove out of the ark,” Sam says. He walks as a man from the church.
Two years later, an envelope arrives in Jim’s mailbox. No return address. When he opens it, three olive leaves fall out, spin like promises to the ground. He bends to pick them up. They crumble beneath his fingers, slip between the floorboards, and disappear.
--
Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.
-The Little Prince
“I’m telling you, Dean, she’s not a regular mom like the other ones.”
“She seems fine to me. Not like the last one.”
“Whatever. At least the last one was human. This one, I swear, man, she’s something else.”
“You mean the implants are something else. Because dude, I’ve seen some--”
“Gross, Dean.”
“Just sayin’. You know, I think we could’ve scored gold this time. She doesn’t look like she’s going to keep as good an eye on us as the last few.”
“That’s because she’s busy finding cats to murder for their eyeballs.”
“And what now?”
“Cats. I found them in the trash out back. Without their eyeballs.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. I’m telling you, this one, she’s not--”
“We need to get back to Dad.”
“That’s what I’ve been telling you. But it never lasts, you know that, some teacher sees a black eye and it’s not like we can tell her you got it trying to hold a possessed guy down while I did the exorcism.”
“Cat eyes, Sammy--”
“Sam.”
“--boy. We can worry about the adults who think they’re protecting us when we’ve just saved their asses later.”
“Yeah.”
“Oh for Christ’s sake, what now?”
“I just.... Don’t you ever wish, you know? That it could just. Last?”
“I--nah, man. ‘Sides, what you need’s always going to be here. Me.”
“You are so full of shit sometimes.”
“Hey. Don’t get all mushy on me, now.”
“Get the fuck off me. We have work to do.”
--
No one knew them. No one knew where they had come from.
-The Boxcar Children
John’s still a little drunk when he wakes up, the last echoes of the buzz fading at the back of his mind while the first throbs of the hangover crowd into the front. His tongue sticks fuzzily to the roof of his mouth and he rolls over, pulling the tangle of sheets and blankets with him, dragging a pillow over his head. The room lies still in the early hours of morning, silent. He goes back to sleep.
When John wakes a second time, the angle of the sun through the drawn drapes suggests midmorning. John opens his eyes, checks the next bed.
Which is empty.
Sam and Dean, who he left curled into respective lumps identifiable as children only because of the noses peeking from beneath the blankets, have disappeared.
He’s out of bed, splashing ice-cold water on his face to wake himself up, in a matter of seconds. Shit, he thinks. Kidnapped? But there’s no evidence they went unwillingly; their bed is made. When he checks back on a sudden hunch, he notices their duffels are gone as well. The trunk of the Impala is missing Sammy’s blades, Dean’s shotgun, an assortment of amulets. Two weeks’ worth of ammo.
John knows how to fight evil. He knows its haunts, can feel the way it displaces the air around itself; his blades and bullets find it in the dark without conscious guidance.
He has no idea what to do when his sons leave, apparently of their own accord, to make their way in the world. His heart pulses against the inside of his throat; he can feel his body throbbing with it. His mind, though, his mind stays completely blank, uncomprehending. I can’t do this, he thinks, and calls Jim.
“Go look for them,” Jim says as if it’s the most logical thing in the world. “They won’t have gone far. They’re not stupid.”
John wants to believe it. Wants to believe they’ll make it to wherever they’re headed, that they won’t be waylaid by a spirit or werewolf or even just the guy who talks to himself at the back of the bus.
He drives into town. It’s a tiny place, little more than a handful of cabins huddled together beneath the chill of the too-vast sky. Always, out here, always too much sky, crowding the horizons down, reflecting the earth and trapping it. He goes in slow, doesn’t want to rouse too much interest. He’s raised his boys well--first hint that someone’s onto them, they’ll be across state lines, preying on diner waitresses for free pie.
It’s harder than he expected. It takes him almost five days, the burn of panic in his stomach as he wonders whether he might’ve been wrong about it, whether they were kidnapped by something smart enough to make it look like--no. He can feel the relief like a gentle summer storm when he overhears rumors in the bar about a couple of kids running around in the woods, maybe living in the abandoned McPherson cabin three miles away. No evidence of any kids when the sheriff went out there to check it out, though. No evidence of anyone period, no smoke, no tracks, nothing.
“Weird,” John says. The man he’s talking to nods, raises his glass.
“’s not just that, either. Supposedly, something was haunting that old barn at the edge of town, getting pretty damn testy if anything walked through the door, but it’s been quiet going on three days now.”
“Who do you think the kids are?” John asks. He has no interest in the barn. It was something he’d been meaning to look into, but it looks like Dean probably beat him to it, and now all he wants is to check the grounds for evidence that his sons have been there.
“You know,” the barkeep says, leaning in, “I don’t put much stock in the paranormal, but man, if those are real kids, they’re doing a pretty damn impossible job of keeping their signs covered.”
It’s not impossible, John knows. They’ve trained for hours--go out a mile, cover all your tracks, don’t let me find you--and in a strange, terrifying way, he’s proud of them.
By the time John discovers their camp, the green of the trees has turned red and gold and begun to drop to the earth. Sam is resting, wrapped in a sleeping bag, Dean keeping watch over him. They both snap to alert as they perceive John’s presence, but Dean lowers his shotgun almost immediately.
“Hello, boys,” John says. They look back at him with wide, tremulous eyes. Dean freezes, jaw set, and stares, but Sammy shakes himself free of the sleeping bag and runs into his father’s arms. It surprises John. He expected to work for this.
“I want to go home,” Sam sniffles as John tangles fingers through his too-long hair.
“I want you to come home,” says John. He stares over Sam’s head at Dean, who stands motionless, the gun at his side.
“We have conditions,” Dean says.
Dean is small and wiry and defiant. He includes Sammy in the we because it has never occurred to him to do otherwise.
“Name your terms,” says John.
--
Though silence is not necessarily an admission, it is not a denial, either.
-Marcus Tullius Cicero
They never talk about that night. Sometimes John traces his fingers over Mary’s scars, smooths them with lips and tongue. He falls asleep curled tight around her.
She wakes with a jolt from dreams of fire and screaming pain across her belly. Dreams of John’s face as he registered her blood on the back of his hand, the terrible acceptance in his eyes when he met hers.
“Shh,” John whispers, breath warm and humid at the nape of her neck. “Shh, Mary, it’s okay, you’re okay.” His words dangle, drunk with sleep.
“It wanted to kill me,” she says. She’s not sure she said it out loud until John’s body tightens against her. She presses on. “What if it comes back? What if it comes for someone else?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know.”
She turns in his arms until they lie forehead-to-forehead, noses almost touching. “We have to do something.” She can’t let it do this to another family, to another mother and her sons. Her husband.
The next morning, it’s all over the papers. She suspects it’s been all over the papers for years, but when she looks up from the microfiche in the library, her eyes tearing from squinting at the print and reading the same stories over and over, she knows that this time it’s up to them. There are patterns: mysterious cattle deaths, electrical outages. Men called crazy, claiming their wives burned to death pinned to the ceiling. Infants just barely saved.
And then...nothing. Infants grow up into young men, fathers go back to their jobs and try to forget it ever happened.
She prints the articles she needs and takes them home, drops them on the dinner table in front of John’s plate. “We have to do something,” she says.
The next day, the call comes. “Hello?” says the voice on the other end. “I’m calling for Mary Winchester.”
“This is she,” Mary says. Pauses. “Who’s this?”
“The name’s Jim,” says the voice on the other end. “I’m a pastor at St. Catherine’s. I think we might have some things to talk about.”
--
Every mother is a working mother.
The day Dean graduates from high school, Mary is walking through a cave trying to track a spirit that’s been driving campers in the area insane for two weeks. Dean's robe is awkward and sticks to his wrists in plastic sweaty folds below the too-short cuffs of his dress shirt. His shoes pinch, the tag on his shirt tickles, and the stupid fucking square hat thing keeps whacking him in the face with its tassel. He walks across the stage to dedicated cheering from Sam, but it’s a pinpoint of sound, and goddamnit, he wants his mother to be there.
It’s not like he got into Harvard or anything, but it’s a decent school, and he got everything but his rent paid for because he’s fucking poor. He buys a ticket out there, leaves Sammy sleeping on the next motel bed. His mother’s not back yet.
He thinks he should maybe be surprised that she’s waiting for him at the bus stop. She’s dressed as she has been since, well, since: jeans, boots, a canvas jacket slung over a flannel shirt. Her presence hurts, escalating pressure inside his ribcage. “Hey,” he says.
“I’m sorry I missed it,” she says. She looks tired, slumped, her fingernails cracked and dirty. Sometimes when Dean looks at her, he can still see the reflection of the fire in her eyes.
He shrugs. “It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not.” They stand a careful distance from one another. Dean tries not to breathe too deeply.
“Your father would’ve been proud of you,” she says. “I’m proud of you.”
He’s not going to cry. Winchesters don’t cry. But he feels something hard and painful lodge behind his collarbone, and his eyes grit like he’s spent too much time staring at the sun. “I’ll be back,” he says. His voice grates hoarse against the back of his throat. “I swear, Mom, I’ll--”
She sweeps him into a hug, her wiry arms wrapped around him, her face buried in his shirt. She makes him feel enormous, like he might break her if he squeezes too hard, so he embraces her gently, rests his chin atop her head. They remain like that, locked together, until Dean’s bus pulls into the station and long after it pulls out.
“I’m sorry,” Mary says, disentangling herself, straightening her shirt. “I’ll get you another ticket.”
As they wait together for the next bus, Mary speaks in short bursts. “Remember to salt all the entrances,” she says. “And carve those protection symbols I taught you. You can ink them if you absolutely have to, but carving’s safer. Hang the pentagram just as soon as you get there. Make sure you always have a weapon within arm’s reach. Keep your chin down and your elbows in and for god’s sake keep your right side protected.” She runs on, and Dean stops listening to the words, just memorizes the cadence of her voice, feels it wash over him like a baptism.
Sam turns up three years later with the news that Mom’s disappeared on a hunting trip. Dean thinks about the way picking up girls at frat parties is even easier than trying to do it at bars without his mother noticing. He thinks about the way the sun warms his skin when he wakes for an early-morning run, the way the ground feels beneath his feet as he stretches his strides. Not running from something, just running. Knowing that eventually, the road will turn home. He thinks about the final exams he has next week.
And then he gets in the car with his brother. “Where did you last see her?” he asks.
Sam lets out a little breath like a waterfall and accelerates.
Author: xaara
Rating: PG, gen
Timeline: AU/pre-series
Characters: Dean, Sam, John, Mary, Pastor Jim
Summary: A few roads not taken, a couple that might have been.
More Things in Heaven and Earth
Six days thou shalt work, but on the seventh day thou shalt rest: in earing time and in harvest thou shalt rest.
-Exodus 34:21
It’s been two weeks. Two Sundays. Two attempts to scrape the mud from behind the ears of one floppy-haired miscreant and wiggle him into a pair of slacks, an ironed shirt. Two hours of speaking to an audience attentive save the four-year-old bundle of cotton and dress shoes three sizes too big curled in the last pew, asleep.
Jim’s almost completely sure that he was not destined for fatherhood. At least not in the literal sense of the word.
On the third Sunday, Sammy wakes screaming from a nightmare. Dean wraps around him, hushing him, but it’s too late. The churchgoers turn as one to observe the tableau. Desperate, Jim keeps talking.
They’re not listening. Everyone’s watching the little boy hiccup and twist the heels of his hands against his eyes as his brother whispers things to him, things that are private and secret and his. “When’s Dad coming home?” Sam asks, and Dean mutters an answer Jim can’t hear. The tone, though, that tone sinks straight through the crowd. There’s the edge of hope there, the desperate hope of a man asea on a life raft.
Fishers of men, Jim thinks. He wonders whether this is a test.
Twelve Sundays, and Sam stops asking. He stops falling asleep at the back of the service. He sits rigid against the right angles of the pew, hands folded in his lap, and stares straight ahead.
By the time he’s ten, Sam can quote whole sections of the Bible from memory. Latin has become his second language. He’s memorized nine different exorcisms and knows how to bless the commonly occurring waters of the earth. He sits in class and absorbs, silently, and when his teacher gives him an assignment on British mythology he writes a five-page paper on the signs, habits, and practices of the typical boggart.
When Sam’s thirteen, he throws a pile of books against the wall in a fit of frustration. Without touching them.
By the time he reaches fourteen, he’s put it all together.
“My mother was murdered,” he tells Jim. Lays it out. “She was murdered by a telekinetic demon who wanted me for my own telekinesis, and it’s kept on murdering other people. It’s going to come back soon, and this time I’m going to be ready. I’m going to stop it.” He’s nearly as tall as Jim and twice as serious, all dark eyes and hair combed neatly back. Dark green shirt tucked into a pair of black pants, hands still against his sides.
Jim thinks about arguing, but Sam is fourteen and four hundred and his body has not yet begun to write its autobiography in wrinkles, in scars. They’re all in his head, angry and raw where his father used to be.
Jim has never hated John Winchester. John wanted something that he couldn’t have, wanted a family and a home and a wife to love and children to dote on. He wanted report cards and football games and late-autumn picnics. Instead, he got a wife who looked down at him from above as her blood heated to boiling on his hands and two young men who have faith in nothing but each other and God, in that order.
The front door of the church is propped open to catch the last of the warm breezes. It will turn winter soon, but Dean is outside propped against the hood of his car like it will be summer forever. He wears a pair of tight black jeans, a black t-shirt stretched across his chest. He’s grown something like six feet in the last week. The bottom of the shirt barely brushes his belt buckle.
It’s a goodbye. Dean scuffs his boot against the gravel and stares straight ahead, so Jim returns his attention to Sam. He wants to say something profound, wants to leave this boy, this child, with words that will guide him or save him or bring him back home. He’s sure he feels the floor shift beneath his feet. He no longer wonders who’s afloat on a changeable sea.
Sam has a quest. Sam has his mind and his Latin and what he lacks in muscle he makes up for in brother.
Jim has a book and a robe and the sinking feeling he’s failed in everything he’s ever tried to accomplish.
“And he stayed yet other seven days; and again he sent forth the dove out of the ark,” Sam says. He walks as a man from the church.
Two years later, an envelope arrives in Jim’s mailbox. No return address. When he opens it, three olive leaves fall out, spin like promises to the ground. He bends to pick them up. They crumble beneath his fingers, slip between the floorboards, and disappear.
--
Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.
-The Little Prince
“I’m telling you, Dean, she’s not a regular mom like the other ones.”
“She seems fine to me. Not like the last one.”
“Whatever. At least the last one was human. This one, I swear, man, she’s something else.”
“You mean the implants are something else. Because dude, I’ve seen some--”
“Gross, Dean.”
“Just sayin’. You know, I think we could’ve scored gold this time. She doesn’t look like she’s going to keep as good an eye on us as the last few.”
“That’s because she’s busy finding cats to murder for their eyeballs.”
“And what now?”
“Cats. I found them in the trash out back. Without their eyeballs.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. I’m telling you, this one, she’s not--”
“We need to get back to Dad.”
“That’s what I’ve been telling you. But it never lasts, you know that, some teacher sees a black eye and it’s not like we can tell her you got it trying to hold a possessed guy down while I did the exorcism.”
“Cat eyes, Sammy--”
“Sam.”
“--boy. We can worry about the adults who think they’re protecting us when we’ve just saved their asses later.”
“Yeah.”
“Oh for Christ’s sake, what now?”
“I just.... Don’t you ever wish, you know? That it could just. Last?”
“I--nah, man. ‘Sides, what you need’s always going to be here. Me.”
“You are so full of shit sometimes.”
“Hey. Don’t get all mushy on me, now.”
“Get the fuck off me. We have work to do.”
--
No one knew them. No one knew where they had come from.
-The Boxcar Children
John’s still a little drunk when he wakes up, the last echoes of the buzz fading at the back of his mind while the first throbs of the hangover crowd into the front. His tongue sticks fuzzily to the roof of his mouth and he rolls over, pulling the tangle of sheets and blankets with him, dragging a pillow over his head. The room lies still in the early hours of morning, silent. He goes back to sleep.
When John wakes a second time, the angle of the sun through the drawn drapes suggests midmorning. John opens his eyes, checks the next bed.
Which is empty.
Sam and Dean, who he left curled into respective lumps identifiable as children only because of the noses peeking from beneath the blankets, have disappeared.
He’s out of bed, splashing ice-cold water on his face to wake himself up, in a matter of seconds. Shit, he thinks. Kidnapped? But there’s no evidence they went unwillingly; their bed is made. When he checks back on a sudden hunch, he notices their duffels are gone as well. The trunk of the Impala is missing Sammy’s blades, Dean’s shotgun, an assortment of amulets. Two weeks’ worth of ammo.
John knows how to fight evil. He knows its haunts, can feel the way it displaces the air around itself; his blades and bullets find it in the dark without conscious guidance.
He has no idea what to do when his sons leave, apparently of their own accord, to make their way in the world. His heart pulses against the inside of his throat; he can feel his body throbbing with it. His mind, though, his mind stays completely blank, uncomprehending. I can’t do this, he thinks, and calls Jim.
“Go look for them,” Jim says as if it’s the most logical thing in the world. “They won’t have gone far. They’re not stupid.”
John wants to believe it. Wants to believe they’ll make it to wherever they’re headed, that they won’t be waylaid by a spirit or werewolf or even just the guy who talks to himself at the back of the bus.
He drives into town. It’s a tiny place, little more than a handful of cabins huddled together beneath the chill of the too-vast sky. Always, out here, always too much sky, crowding the horizons down, reflecting the earth and trapping it. He goes in slow, doesn’t want to rouse too much interest. He’s raised his boys well--first hint that someone’s onto them, they’ll be across state lines, preying on diner waitresses for free pie.
It’s harder than he expected. It takes him almost five days, the burn of panic in his stomach as he wonders whether he might’ve been wrong about it, whether they were kidnapped by something smart enough to make it look like--no. He can feel the relief like a gentle summer storm when he overhears rumors in the bar about a couple of kids running around in the woods, maybe living in the abandoned McPherson cabin three miles away. No evidence of any kids when the sheriff went out there to check it out, though. No evidence of anyone period, no smoke, no tracks, nothing.
“Weird,” John says. The man he’s talking to nods, raises his glass.
“’s not just that, either. Supposedly, something was haunting that old barn at the edge of town, getting pretty damn testy if anything walked through the door, but it’s been quiet going on three days now.”
“Who do you think the kids are?” John asks. He has no interest in the barn. It was something he’d been meaning to look into, but it looks like Dean probably beat him to it, and now all he wants is to check the grounds for evidence that his sons have been there.
“You know,” the barkeep says, leaning in, “I don’t put much stock in the paranormal, but man, if those are real kids, they’re doing a pretty damn impossible job of keeping their signs covered.”
It’s not impossible, John knows. They’ve trained for hours--go out a mile, cover all your tracks, don’t let me find you--and in a strange, terrifying way, he’s proud of them.
By the time John discovers their camp, the green of the trees has turned red and gold and begun to drop to the earth. Sam is resting, wrapped in a sleeping bag, Dean keeping watch over him. They both snap to alert as they perceive John’s presence, but Dean lowers his shotgun almost immediately.
“Hello, boys,” John says. They look back at him with wide, tremulous eyes. Dean freezes, jaw set, and stares, but Sammy shakes himself free of the sleeping bag and runs into his father’s arms. It surprises John. He expected to work for this.
“I want to go home,” Sam sniffles as John tangles fingers through his too-long hair.
“I want you to come home,” says John. He stares over Sam’s head at Dean, who stands motionless, the gun at his side.
“We have conditions,” Dean says.
Dean is small and wiry and defiant. He includes Sammy in the we because it has never occurred to him to do otherwise.
“Name your terms,” says John.
--
Though silence is not necessarily an admission, it is not a denial, either.
-Marcus Tullius Cicero
They never talk about that night. Sometimes John traces his fingers over Mary’s scars, smooths them with lips and tongue. He falls asleep curled tight around her.
She wakes with a jolt from dreams of fire and screaming pain across her belly. Dreams of John’s face as he registered her blood on the back of his hand, the terrible acceptance in his eyes when he met hers.
“Shh,” John whispers, breath warm and humid at the nape of her neck. “Shh, Mary, it’s okay, you’re okay.” His words dangle, drunk with sleep.
“It wanted to kill me,” she says. She’s not sure she said it out loud until John’s body tightens against her. She presses on. “What if it comes back? What if it comes for someone else?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know.”
She turns in his arms until they lie forehead-to-forehead, noses almost touching. “We have to do something.” She can’t let it do this to another family, to another mother and her sons. Her husband.
The next morning, it’s all over the papers. She suspects it’s been all over the papers for years, but when she looks up from the microfiche in the library, her eyes tearing from squinting at the print and reading the same stories over and over, she knows that this time it’s up to them. There are patterns: mysterious cattle deaths, electrical outages. Men called crazy, claiming their wives burned to death pinned to the ceiling. Infants just barely saved.
And then...nothing. Infants grow up into young men, fathers go back to their jobs and try to forget it ever happened.
She prints the articles she needs and takes them home, drops them on the dinner table in front of John’s plate. “We have to do something,” she says.
The next day, the call comes. “Hello?” says the voice on the other end. “I’m calling for Mary Winchester.”
“This is she,” Mary says. Pauses. “Who’s this?”
“The name’s Jim,” says the voice on the other end. “I’m a pastor at St. Catherine’s. I think we might have some things to talk about.”
--
Every mother is a working mother.
The day Dean graduates from high school, Mary is walking through a cave trying to track a spirit that’s been driving campers in the area insane for two weeks. Dean's robe is awkward and sticks to his wrists in plastic sweaty folds below the too-short cuffs of his dress shirt. His shoes pinch, the tag on his shirt tickles, and the stupid fucking square hat thing keeps whacking him in the face with its tassel. He walks across the stage to dedicated cheering from Sam, but it’s a pinpoint of sound, and goddamnit, he wants his mother to be there.
It’s not like he got into Harvard or anything, but it’s a decent school, and he got everything but his rent paid for because he’s fucking poor. He buys a ticket out there, leaves Sammy sleeping on the next motel bed. His mother’s not back yet.
He thinks he should maybe be surprised that she’s waiting for him at the bus stop. She’s dressed as she has been since, well, since: jeans, boots, a canvas jacket slung over a flannel shirt. Her presence hurts, escalating pressure inside his ribcage. “Hey,” he says.
“I’m sorry I missed it,” she says. She looks tired, slumped, her fingernails cracked and dirty. Sometimes when Dean looks at her, he can still see the reflection of the fire in her eyes.
He shrugs. “It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not.” They stand a careful distance from one another. Dean tries not to breathe too deeply.
“Your father would’ve been proud of you,” she says. “I’m proud of you.”
He’s not going to cry. Winchesters don’t cry. But he feels something hard and painful lodge behind his collarbone, and his eyes grit like he’s spent too much time staring at the sun. “I’ll be back,” he says. His voice grates hoarse against the back of his throat. “I swear, Mom, I’ll--”
She sweeps him into a hug, her wiry arms wrapped around him, her face buried in his shirt. She makes him feel enormous, like he might break her if he squeezes too hard, so he embraces her gently, rests his chin atop her head. They remain like that, locked together, until Dean’s bus pulls into the station and long after it pulls out.
“I’m sorry,” Mary says, disentangling herself, straightening her shirt. “I’ll get you another ticket.”
As they wait together for the next bus, Mary speaks in short bursts. “Remember to salt all the entrances,” she says. “And carve those protection symbols I taught you. You can ink them if you absolutely have to, but carving’s safer. Hang the pentagram just as soon as you get there. Make sure you always have a weapon within arm’s reach. Keep your chin down and your elbows in and for god’s sake keep your right side protected.” She runs on, and Dean stops listening to the words, just memorizes the cadence of her voice, feels it wash over him like a baptism.
Sam turns up three years later with the news that Mom’s disappeared on a hunting trip. Dean thinks about the way picking up girls at frat parties is even easier than trying to do it at bars without his mother noticing. He thinks about the way the sun warms his skin when he wakes for an early-morning run, the way the ground feels beneath his feet as he stretches his strides. Not running from something, just running. Knowing that eventually, the road will turn home. He thinks about the final exams he has next week.
And then he gets in the car with his brother. “Where did you last see her?” he asks.
Sam lets out a little breath like a waterfall and accelerates.