That Story (The Transformations Remix) [Supernatural]
This is my entry for the remixredux08 fic exchange. It is a remix of Salvation Lets Their Wings Unfold, by raynos, which just happens to be one of my all-time favorite Supernatual fics (so go read it). Other notes are behind the cut, at the end.
Title: That Story (The Transformations Remix)
Series: Supernatural
Characters: John Winchester, Mary Winchester, brief appearances by the boys and Bobby
Rating: PG
Summary: The more he puts together the pieces of Mary's life, the more his own falls apart.
There is a story John liked to tell after he'd had a beer or two, just for the hell of it and because he loved to hear Mary laugh.
"I always remember the day I met her. Mary drove up to the garage in that Impala--she looked like she'd just about had it, but I'm telling you--it was love at first sight."
Here, John would pause and look thoughtful, as if lost in a happy memory. Then the corner of his mouth would lift, and his eyes would spark with mischief. "Took me a bit longer to see the charms of the girl who was driving her."
That was Mary's cue to laugh and try to hip-check him off his bar stool. This happened many times, but the time he remembers most clearly was when she was heavily pregnant with her firstborn, sipping at lemonade instead of the usual beer. Her face was full and fresh, and the reflected Christmas lights made her glossy black car shine like a bottle full of stars.
The battered car and the half-starved woman who'd wandered into his life like a stray cat might just as well have been something out of a story. You know, the one about the man who offers kindness to a raggedy old woman, and she turns into a golden-haired princess? Or in this case, transforms from runaway to suburban housewife? That story.
*****
The retired soldier, honorably discharged and with a Silver Star tarnishing in his bedside drawer. His beautiful, golden-haired wife, kind and gentle and strong in ways he didn't have the words to admire properly. Two handsome baby boys, the older one with green eyes so like his mother's, and the younger looking so much like John it stilled his breath.
They had a perfect, ordinary life (just look at their names--John and Mary--so ordinary it was almost a joke). They'd made it to happily-ever-after. It was the story you saw over and over in magazine ads. It was Eisenhower America. It was Ozzie and Harriet. You know--that story.
That was the fairy tale. Real life turned out to be him and two hungry, unhappy boys, traveling without hope of rest in a car that already seemed well-accustomed to being lived in.
It was the sort of story you read about in newspapers and dismissed before moving on to the comics. From well-fed and blandly contented to eating out of bags and always looking over your shoulder. It was too bad, but at least it didn't happen to anyone you know. One of those stories.
*****
John was the sort of man who lacked the sort of self-awareness and the sense of poetry to say to himself that he was no Prince Charming. No, no thought like that ever crossed his mind.
What he did think, though, as he watched Mary work her way through a half-dozen donuts and then watched her work double-shifts at the diner to pay for the repairs to her car (she insisted, when he first foolishly refused to hand her the invoice) was that in truth he had done nothing to rescue her. Nothing at all. He had just been there.
Six years later, John would think the same thing almost word for word after the fire rushed out around and over her. She had blazed up in a flash, and was gone.
He tells himself the story over and over again down the years that followed, one time getting there a few minutes earlier, the next taking her place, but no matter how many times he told the story, the ending always remained the same.
Later, John wonders if he'd known then what he knows now, things might have been different.
Probably, he decides, but he's not sure if things would have been any better.
*****
Eight years after Mary dies, John knows enough esoterica about enough creatures, spirits, jinxes, seals, sigils, folklore, ghosts, ghouls and legends to fuel a dozen dissertations.
He knows enough to point out the obvious flaws in the storybooks that Sam brings home from the school library. The ones with pictures of green-faced, smiling witches and bumbling vampires who look like Eddie Munster's yokel cousin.
Those storybooks.
It's around then he finally remembers all the electrical problems they had back in the Lawrence house. He remembers Mary getting after him to fix them, and him blaming her irrational anxiety about it on Sammy's (and therefore her own) sleeplessness.
His story--their story--begins to change, begins to not-so-slowly become something else. And no matter how much salt he pours across windowsill and threshold, no matter how much holy water he casts about, no matter what kind of sigil he draws on the ceiling, he cannot stop the story from changing.
He and Sam fight about the books, of course. These are some of their first fights, some the first signs of Sam's jutting chin and thinned lips, the first signs of John's intractable stubbornness.
Later, those same books (or their successors, really) become a way of teaching Sam, once he is ready to be taught. Vampires only show their fangs when they feed. There are many kinds of witches, and these are the kinds who can back you up on a hunt, and these are the kind who need a silver blade through the heart. There is no such thing as a friendly ghost.
Some stories, though, John doesn't know how to explain or explain away. Not even to himself.
*****
Mary was always the one to tell Dean his bedtime stories. John didn't tell stories; instead, he made promises about what they'd do the next day, or that weekend, or what kinds of games they would play when Sammy was old enough.
No, there was one story John would tell Dean. It was the story about how he met Mary, and the point of the telling wasn't the story, it was waiting for Dean to laugh at the silly notion that Mary was anything other than the beautiful, golden Mommy he had always known. Then, once all that nonsense was over, it was time for the real stories and then for lights-out.
John recognized a few of Mary's stories, but he didn't recognize at the time how Mary would soften the endings of those stories with a happily ever after or a daring last-minute rescue.
"Sleep tight. Angels are watching over you." That's how Mary's stories always ended, with those exact words and a whisper-quiet kiss on her son's forehead.
Later, much later, Bobby and Jim would explain the hidden, bloody truths behind some of the oldest stories, but the stories Mary told Dean contained no problems, no setbacks that couldn't simply be kissed away.
And Sam? Sam always read to himself. Mary was no longer around, and John is no fan of stories.
Unless, of course, the story tells him how to kill something that needs to be killed. Most of the time, though, the stories get it wrong. Which just goes to show you how much stories are worth.
As far as John is concerned, they're worth just about as much as angels.
*****
As a boy, when John had been required to read something for school, he had gravitated towards stories about sports heroes rather than stories about woodcutter's daughters and brave huntsmen. He read bowdlerized biographies with line drawings and orange, library-bound covers. He sought out stories about flying aces and space missions.
Those stories. Yes, the books in the school library may have left out details about Ty Cobb's temper and racism and what exactly Benjamin Franklin got up to when he was in Paris, but that was okay. No one ever died from not knowing these things.
Some things, though, you pick up just because they are old stories, so old that you don't need to be told them in order to remember them. Maybe John didn't remember the story of Bluebeard and the one door his wife wasn't supposed to open. He may have heard the story of Cupid and Psyche in Social Studies, but he also may have been reading Sports Illustrated under his desk.
Even so, as he watched the light through the window silver the curve of Mary's hip and waist as she slept, and he sleepily wondered what she had run away from, he knew that he should not ask. All that was in the past.
The streetlight flickered, and Mary disappeared for a moment. When the light flickered back on, Mary was sitting up straight, staring out the window at the sputtering light. Although she was turned away from him, John knew the look on her face.
"I'll check it in the morning," John promised, trying very hard not to sound testy. He'd already replaced every fuse in the house. He rested a hand on her bare arm and gently pulled her back down next to him. "Are you cold? You feel cold."
"I'm fine," she said in a way John knew meant she was not. He wondered if he should ask, if it was okay to ask, but then Sammy started crying and Mary headed to the nursery, leaving only a sliver of lamplight where she had once been.
He did not remember when she returned to bed, and when he woke up in the morning, she was already up and out with the boys in tow to hit the grocery store before the Saturday crowds got to be too bad.
When he went outside to take a look at the wires coming into the house (if this was the city's fault, he was going to make them pay for every fuse he had replaced), he saw nothing. Well, nothing on the wires. No fallen branches, no frayed lines. What he did see as he walked back into the house was a symbol chalked on the side of the front steps, almost out of sight. It looked like something from the cover of a Led Zeppelin album. It also looked like something else he'd seen once upon a time but he couldn't quite remember what.
"Damn kids." John spit on his fingertips and smeared the chalk away.
When Mary came home, he almost mentioned the vandalism, but she made him wait until she told him about how Dean had flirted--flirted!--with the cashier, and by the time she was done, John was laughing so hard he had no breath to say anything.
Lately, John thinks about that last Saturday more and more. He wonders what would have changed, what would have stayed the same, if he had found the breath to tell his story.
*****
The same sign (a sigil, he now knows to call it) is scratched into the metal under the mat in the Impala's trunk. It has been there for a while, but John has to go check before he's sure he's drawn it right. He's not sure what prompts him to ask now, after all these years, but once the thought lights in his mind, it's there to stay.
"It's for protection." Bobby sees it for less than a second, upside down, and he knows what it is, just as John thought he would.
"Could it have stopped a high-ranking demon?" John hopes the answer is no, and he holds his breath as Bobby thinks it over, sipping at his beer and staring off into the middle distance.
"By itself, no," Bobby says at last. "As part of a wider system of protection, it might have helped shore up a vulnerable point."
John tries not to wonder about the odd bits and pieces he wiped up or picked up around the house in those last days. A streak of red mud low on the wall by Sammy's nursery. A few leaves tied together with red yarn. What he thought was one of Mary's earrings, minus its wire hook. A small striped rock with a few lines scratched in it. An old coin. Nothing that couldn't be explained by the presence of a hyperactive little boy who sometimes seemed to be half magpie.
He remembers Dean's tearful protests that no, he hadn't drawn on the nursery door, he hadn't he hadn't. Mary said she would take care of it later, and that she would take care of Dean, and wasn't it time he left for work?
He and Bobby have a few more beers, a few too many more, as John sorts through what he knows and what he thought he knew. He means to sort through it all quietly, but the story forces its way out, and once out, cannot be stopped.
He may have killed his wife, he says. He was the one who wiped away that sigil and threw away God knows how many amulets and talismans. Maybe it made no difference in the end, the demon was powerful, too powerful, but Mary might be dead because of him. It might be his fault, and Bobby, you'd better shut the hell up because do you have any idea...
He's not sure what happens next but two minutes later Dean is driving them out of the salvage yard hell-for-leather, and when John dares to look back, he sees Bobby standing on that rickety old porch, head bowed and gun pointing at the ground. John is glad that the bill of Bobby's trucker cap hides his face.
John turns back around, eyes on the road ahead of them. That's the way it's supposed to be. There's too much lore about the dangers of looking back for him to ignore. Best not to look back, he's heard. He's heard it as a soldier, he's heard it as a hunter. Don't look back, because that's when what's behind you catches up with you.
Don't look back, he hears in Mary's voice, but he doesn't wonder why. More to the point, he refuses to wonder why.
Later, he overhears Sam complaining to Dean about how Dad has pissed off yet another friend of theirs--same old story, in Sam Winchester's opinion.
It's not. The story is changing. Later that night, John thinks he might tell Dean the story that would always make him laugh and laugh (once upon a time). Instead, he decides to have a few shots at the bar next to the motel. He thinks about Mary, rosy-cheeked and swollen-bellied, laughing and alive. He remembers the car, shining deep in the black, like a heaven he no longer believes in.
When he gets back to the room, John is not quite walking straight. It's not something that he allows to happen often, but that doesn't stop Sam from once again muttering something about the "same old story" when he thinks John can't hear.
*****
"Tell me a story, Mary."
He's back in their bed, back in Lawrence, back in a life that seems like the dream he knows this is. They lie on their sides, facing each other, eyes inches apart, so close that they should feel each other's breath when they speak.
"I don't have any stories to tell you." The air is still. She smiles at him.
The sheet covers Mary only up to her hips, and in the dim, steady moonlight she looks like a mermaid. Other than the sheet, she is only wearing a white lace ribbon around her neck. John runs a hand through her hair (cool and smooth as water).
"No stories?" He speaks low and laughingly, knowing this is a dream and knowing his heart will ache in the morning, but for now, for now... "Not even about this?" he teases.
Mary laughs and bats his hand away when it reaches for the ribbon. In his dream he knows she's done this dozens of times before. "You don't want to do that," she says kindly.
John runs a finger down her jaw line, then flicks his hand down towards the ribbon, pulling it back before she can swat him. She sticks her tongue out at him. "Tell me a story, Mary."
"Angels are watching over you."
This time, she does not stop him when he pulls at the ribbon around her throat. Then she is gone, and the red, red ribbon now flows down from the ceiling, covering him and choking him until he wakes up.
For a few minutes, John wonders what it all means, but there's a poltergeist to take care of, and by the time the bones of the starved, abused child are salted and burned, he no longer remembers the dream.
*****
"She had a sister? Mary had a sister?"
A few days ago, John sent Dean off on his first solo hunt. Dean was flabbergasted and delighted when John said that he'd be taking the truck and leaving Dean with the Impala. It was meant to sound rational, but there was nothing rational about sending off his oldest boy. He wants to make sure that he has a chance to think things through before telling Dean whatever Jim tells him. But then, what Jim tells him is nothing John had ever expected to hear.
"Anna." Pastor Jim has already told him the last name, and it's familiar to John. Ellen Harvelle had mentioned someone by that name not too long ago. She'd never met him, but she'd heard enough about him that he was one of the first to come to mind as a bad example, as a cautionary tale. Died back in seventy-seven, messy death, stupid death, took three other hunters out with him. Or so the story went. In any case, he was someone to keep in mind when you were trying too hard to avenge the past.
John had ignored Ellen. He has always had little time for stories, even less now that he's so close to finding the demon that had killed Mary.
"I thought you had news for me about the demon, Jim." John doesn't know what to do with the news that the boys have an aunt, so it's best to focus on what he does know, best to focus on what has become his story: finding the thing that killed his Mary.
Pastor Jim doesn't look him in the eye. Instead, he slides a photo across the kitchen table. It's an old photo, the kind with scalloped edges and color that's fading to pinks and yellows. Mary must have been no more than ten (he recognizes her at once, all the same). The girl next to her may have been three, maybe four years old. Her hair was a darker blond than her sister's, but the mischievous smile was the same.
"I do. There's something you need to know about how Anna died."
Anna--it must be Anna, and John knows exactly what color her eyes are despite the fading of the photograph--looks so much like Dean that he cannot breathe. The photo nearly creases in his hand, he's holding it so tight.
"Right. Tell me. Go on."
Mary is crouched down so her head is level with her sister's, and her arm is slung protectively around Anna's shoulders. She looks like she'll never, no, not ever let her baby sister go.
Jim takes a deep breath and it's clear he's going to take a roundabout way into the tale. It doesn't matter, though. John already knows how Anna's story ends.
It's one John's told himself a million times before.
*****
He no longer recognizes Lawrence. The population's grown by half. There's a brewery he's pretty sure wasn't there back in eighty-three. The place seems like more of a college town than before, a bit more gentrified, a bit more cleaned up. Not much, but enough that he notices. Enough that it seems almost foreign, as if he'd taken a wrong turn and wound up in Paris, or Rome, or Never-never land.
Of course, he's used to rougher living now, he thinks as he pulls a tarp over his truck. The town may be the same. Maybe it just looks different now that he knows the truth, now that he knows what's out there.
Everything he knows (thought he knew) looks different, now.
The wistful look he sometimes saw when Mary was watching Dean wasn't because her little boy was growing up so fast. John now knew she was seeing someone else, someone she had left behind, someone who had died the same year Dean was born, without Mary ever knowing. Maybe Mary knew then what John now knows now about Sam. Maybe she left for the same reason that John can't show his face to his boys. What are you supposed to say to someone when you know that saving them might well mean killing them?
He hears the old bedtime ritual, hears Mary's familiar "angels are watching over you," and knows now it wasn't reassurance but a plea and a desperate hope hidden behind a mother's sweet smile.
He hears her calmly tut-tutting and telling him not to make such a fuss as he tells her about the crazy crap Dean brought into the house this time, and he now knows it's not because she was being soft on the boy. (The one good thing here is now he thinks that maybe Mary would understand about the credit card scams, the fake IDs, and all the other tricks they use to keep from getting caught. Understand, and maybe even approve.)
John always used to wonder what would have changed if he knew then what he knew now. He wonders again, but the wondering has changed along with the story.
*****
The boys do a fine job exorcising the ghosts from their childhood home. As he waits for Missouri to come back and fill him in on the details, John leans back on her couch, head resting on the old zig-zag afghan. He turns his wedding ring round and around his finger.
Missouri comes back. He means to ask about the demon, about what she saw when she looked at Sam, but he asks her about Mary.
He asks her if she thought Mary had saved the boys (saved them the way she couldn't save Anna).
"I do."
As far as John can tell, Missouri is telling the truth.
In any case, it's a nice story. A story a man can cling to for a while, when nothing else seems solid. That story.
*****
Notes: Many thanks to aishuu for serving as a sounding-board during the writing and to arliss for her awesome beta skills. The titles and one of the repeated phrases throughout the story are lifted from Anne Sexton.
Title: That Story (The Transformations Remix)
Series: Supernatural
Characters: John Winchester, Mary Winchester, brief appearances by the boys and Bobby
Rating: PG
Summary: The more he puts together the pieces of Mary's life, the more his own falls apart.
There is a story John liked to tell after he'd had a beer or two, just for the hell of it and because he loved to hear Mary laugh.
"I always remember the day I met her. Mary drove up to the garage in that Impala--she looked like she'd just about had it, but I'm telling you--it was love at first sight."
Here, John would pause and look thoughtful, as if lost in a happy memory. Then the corner of his mouth would lift, and his eyes would spark with mischief. "Took me a bit longer to see the charms of the girl who was driving her."
That was Mary's cue to laugh and try to hip-check him off his bar stool. This happened many times, but the time he remembers most clearly was when she was heavily pregnant with her firstborn, sipping at lemonade instead of the usual beer. Her face was full and fresh, and the reflected Christmas lights made her glossy black car shine like a bottle full of stars.
The battered car and the half-starved woman who'd wandered into his life like a stray cat might just as well have been something out of a story. You know, the one about the man who offers kindness to a raggedy old woman, and she turns into a golden-haired princess? Or in this case, transforms from runaway to suburban housewife? That story.
*****
The retired soldier, honorably discharged and with a Silver Star tarnishing in his bedside drawer. His beautiful, golden-haired wife, kind and gentle and strong in ways he didn't have the words to admire properly. Two handsome baby boys, the older one with green eyes so like his mother's, and the younger looking so much like John it stilled his breath.
They had a perfect, ordinary life (just look at their names--John and Mary--so ordinary it was almost a joke). They'd made it to happily-ever-after. It was the story you saw over and over in magazine ads. It was Eisenhower America. It was Ozzie and Harriet. You know--that story.
That was the fairy tale. Real life turned out to be him and two hungry, unhappy boys, traveling without hope of rest in a car that already seemed well-accustomed to being lived in.
It was the sort of story you read about in newspapers and dismissed before moving on to the comics. From well-fed and blandly contented to eating out of bags and always looking over your shoulder. It was too bad, but at least it didn't happen to anyone you know. One of those stories.
*****
John was the sort of man who lacked the sort of self-awareness and the sense of poetry to say to himself that he was no Prince Charming. No, no thought like that ever crossed his mind.
What he did think, though, as he watched Mary work her way through a half-dozen donuts and then watched her work double-shifts at the diner to pay for the repairs to her car (she insisted, when he first foolishly refused to hand her the invoice) was that in truth he had done nothing to rescue her. Nothing at all. He had just been there.
Six years later, John would think the same thing almost word for word after the fire rushed out around and over her. She had blazed up in a flash, and was gone.
He tells himself the story over and over again down the years that followed, one time getting there a few minutes earlier, the next taking her place, but no matter how many times he told the story, the ending always remained the same.
Later, John wonders if he'd known then what he knows now, things might have been different.
Probably, he decides, but he's not sure if things would have been any better.
*****
Eight years after Mary dies, John knows enough esoterica about enough creatures, spirits, jinxes, seals, sigils, folklore, ghosts, ghouls and legends to fuel a dozen dissertations.
He knows enough to point out the obvious flaws in the storybooks that Sam brings home from the school library. The ones with pictures of green-faced, smiling witches and bumbling vampires who look like Eddie Munster's yokel cousin.
Those storybooks.
It's around then he finally remembers all the electrical problems they had back in the Lawrence house. He remembers Mary getting after him to fix them, and him blaming her irrational anxiety about it on Sammy's (and therefore her own) sleeplessness.
His story--their story--begins to change, begins to not-so-slowly become something else. And no matter how much salt he pours across windowsill and threshold, no matter how much holy water he casts about, no matter what kind of sigil he draws on the ceiling, he cannot stop the story from changing.
He and Sam fight about the books, of course. These are some of their first fights, some the first signs of Sam's jutting chin and thinned lips, the first signs of John's intractable stubbornness.
Later, those same books (or their successors, really) become a way of teaching Sam, once he is ready to be taught. Vampires only show their fangs when they feed. There are many kinds of witches, and these are the kinds who can back you up on a hunt, and these are the kind who need a silver blade through the heart. There is no such thing as a friendly ghost.
Some stories, though, John doesn't know how to explain or explain away. Not even to himself.
*****
Mary was always the one to tell Dean his bedtime stories. John didn't tell stories; instead, he made promises about what they'd do the next day, or that weekend, or what kinds of games they would play when Sammy was old enough.
No, there was one story John would tell Dean. It was the story about how he met Mary, and the point of the telling wasn't the story, it was waiting for Dean to laugh at the silly notion that Mary was anything other than the beautiful, golden Mommy he had always known. Then, once all that nonsense was over, it was time for the real stories and then for lights-out.
John recognized a few of Mary's stories, but he didn't recognize at the time how Mary would soften the endings of those stories with a happily ever after or a daring last-minute rescue.
"Sleep tight. Angels are watching over you." That's how Mary's stories always ended, with those exact words and a whisper-quiet kiss on her son's forehead.
Later, much later, Bobby and Jim would explain the hidden, bloody truths behind some of the oldest stories, but the stories Mary told Dean contained no problems, no setbacks that couldn't simply be kissed away.
And Sam? Sam always read to himself. Mary was no longer around, and John is no fan of stories.
Unless, of course, the story tells him how to kill something that needs to be killed. Most of the time, though, the stories get it wrong. Which just goes to show you how much stories are worth.
As far as John is concerned, they're worth just about as much as angels.
*****
As a boy, when John had been required to read something for school, he had gravitated towards stories about sports heroes rather than stories about woodcutter's daughters and brave huntsmen. He read bowdlerized biographies with line drawings and orange, library-bound covers. He sought out stories about flying aces and space missions.
Those stories. Yes, the books in the school library may have left out details about Ty Cobb's temper and racism and what exactly Benjamin Franklin got up to when he was in Paris, but that was okay. No one ever died from not knowing these things.
Some things, though, you pick up just because they are old stories, so old that you don't need to be told them in order to remember them. Maybe John didn't remember the story of Bluebeard and the one door his wife wasn't supposed to open. He may have heard the story of Cupid and Psyche in Social Studies, but he also may have been reading Sports Illustrated under his desk.
Even so, as he watched the light through the window silver the curve of Mary's hip and waist as she slept, and he sleepily wondered what she had run away from, he knew that he should not ask. All that was in the past.
The streetlight flickered, and Mary disappeared for a moment. When the light flickered back on, Mary was sitting up straight, staring out the window at the sputtering light. Although she was turned away from him, John knew the look on her face.
"I'll check it in the morning," John promised, trying very hard not to sound testy. He'd already replaced every fuse in the house. He rested a hand on her bare arm and gently pulled her back down next to him. "Are you cold? You feel cold."
"I'm fine," she said in a way John knew meant she was not. He wondered if he should ask, if it was okay to ask, but then Sammy started crying and Mary headed to the nursery, leaving only a sliver of lamplight where she had once been.
He did not remember when she returned to bed, and when he woke up in the morning, she was already up and out with the boys in tow to hit the grocery store before the Saturday crowds got to be too bad.
When he went outside to take a look at the wires coming into the house (if this was the city's fault, he was going to make them pay for every fuse he had replaced), he saw nothing. Well, nothing on the wires. No fallen branches, no frayed lines. What he did see as he walked back into the house was a symbol chalked on the side of the front steps, almost out of sight. It looked like something from the cover of a Led Zeppelin album. It also looked like something else he'd seen once upon a time but he couldn't quite remember what.
"Damn kids." John spit on his fingertips and smeared the chalk away.
When Mary came home, he almost mentioned the vandalism, but she made him wait until she told him about how Dean had flirted--flirted!--with the cashier, and by the time she was done, John was laughing so hard he had no breath to say anything.
Lately, John thinks about that last Saturday more and more. He wonders what would have changed, what would have stayed the same, if he had found the breath to tell his story.
*****
The same sign (a sigil, he now knows to call it) is scratched into the metal under the mat in the Impala's trunk. It has been there for a while, but John has to go check before he's sure he's drawn it right. He's not sure what prompts him to ask now, after all these years, but once the thought lights in his mind, it's there to stay.
"It's for protection." Bobby sees it for less than a second, upside down, and he knows what it is, just as John thought he would.
"Could it have stopped a high-ranking demon?" John hopes the answer is no, and he holds his breath as Bobby thinks it over, sipping at his beer and staring off into the middle distance.
"By itself, no," Bobby says at last. "As part of a wider system of protection, it might have helped shore up a vulnerable point."
John tries not to wonder about the odd bits and pieces he wiped up or picked up around the house in those last days. A streak of red mud low on the wall by Sammy's nursery. A few leaves tied together with red yarn. What he thought was one of Mary's earrings, minus its wire hook. A small striped rock with a few lines scratched in it. An old coin. Nothing that couldn't be explained by the presence of a hyperactive little boy who sometimes seemed to be half magpie.
He remembers Dean's tearful protests that no, he hadn't drawn on the nursery door, he hadn't he hadn't. Mary said she would take care of it later, and that she would take care of Dean, and wasn't it time he left for work?
He and Bobby have a few more beers, a few too many more, as John sorts through what he knows and what he thought he knew. He means to sort through it all quietly, but the story forces its way out, and once out, cannot be stopped.
He may have killed his wife, he says. He was the one who wiped away that sigil and threw away God knows how many amulets and talismans. Maybe it made no difference in the end, the demon was powerful, too powerful, but Mary might be dead because of him. It might be his fault, and Bobby, you'd better shut the hell up because do you have any idea...
He's not sure what happens next but two minutes later Dean is driving them out of the salvage yard hell-for-leather, and when John dares to look back, he sees Bobby standing on that rickety old porch, head bowed and gun pointing at the ground. John is glad that the bill of Bobby's trucker cap hides his face.
John turns back around, eyes on the road ahead of them. That's the way it's supposed to be. There's too much lore about the dangers of looking back for him to ignore. Best not to look back, he's heard. He's heard it as a soldier, he's heard it as a hunter. Don't look back, because that's when what's behind you catches up with you.
Don't look back, he hears in Mary's voice, but he doesn't wonder why. More to the point, he refuses to wonder why.
Later, he overhears Sam complaining to Dean about how Dad has pissed off yet another friend of theirs--same old story, in Sam Winchester's opinion.
It's not. The story is changing. Later that night, John thinks he might tell Dean the story that would always make him laugh and laugh (once upon a time). Instead, he decides to have a few shots at the bar next to the motel. He thinks about Mary, rosy-cheeked and swollen-bellied, laughing and alive. He remembers the car, shining deep in the black, like a heaven he no longer believes in.
When he gets back to the room, John is not quite walking straight. It's not something that he allows to happen often, but that doesn't stop Sam from once again muttering something about the "same old story" when he thinks John can't hear.
*****
"Tell me a story, Mary."
He's back in their bed, back in Lawrence, back in a life that seems like the dream he knows this is. They lie on their sides, facing each other, eyes inches apart, so close that they should feel each other's breath when they speak.
"I don't have any stories to tell you." The air is still. She smiles at him.
The sheet covers Mary only up to her hips, and in the dim, steady moonlight she looks like a mermaid. Other than the sheet, she is only wearing a white lace ribbon around her neck. John runs a hand through her hair (cool and smooth as water).
"No stories?" He speaks low and laughingly, knowing this is a dream and knowing his heart will ache in the morning, but for now, for now... "Not even about this?" he teases.
Mary laughs and bats his hand away when it reaches for the ribbon. In his dream he knows she's done this dozens of times before. "You don't want to do that," she says kindly.
John runs a finger down her jaw line, then flicks his hand down towards the ribbon, pulling it back before she can swat him. She sticks her tongue out at him. "Tell me a story, Mary."
"Angels are watching over you."
This time, she does not stop him when he pulls at the ribbon around her throat. Then she is gone, and the red, red ribbon now flows down from the ceiling, covering him and choking him until he wakes up.
For a few minutes, John wonders what it all means, but there's a poltergeist to take care of, and by the time the bones of the starved, abused child are salted and burned, he no longer remembers the dream.
*****
"She had a sister? Mary had a sister?"
A few days ago, John sent Dean off on his first solo hunt. Dean was flabbergasted and delighted when John said that he'd be taking the truck and leaving Dean with the Impala. It was meant to sound rational, but there was nothing rational about sending off his oldest boy. He wants to make sure that he has a chance to think things through before telling Dean whatever Jim tells him. But then, what Jim tells him is nothing John had ever expected to hear.
"Anna." Pastor Jim has already told him the last name, and it's familiar to John. Ellen Harvelle had mentioned someone by that name not too long ago. She'd never met him, but she'd heard enough about him that he was one of the first to come to mind as a bad example, as a cautionary tale. Died back in seventy-seven, messy death, stupid death, took three other hunters out with him. Or so the story went. In any case, he was someone to keep in mind when you were trying too hard to avenge the past.
John had ignored Ellen. He has always had little time for stories, even less now that he's so close to finding the demon that had killed Mary.
"I thought you had news for me about the demon, Jim." John doesn't know what to do with the news that the boys have an aunt, so it's best to focus on what he does know, best to focus on what has become his story: finding the thing that killed his Mary.
Pastor Jim doesn't look him in the eye. Instead, he slides a photo across the kitchen table. It's an old photo, the kind with scalloped edges and color that's fading to pinks and yellows. Mary must have been no more than ten (he recognizes her at once, all the same). The girl next to her may have been three, maybe four years old. Her hair was a darker blond than her sister's, but the mischievous smile was the same.
"I do. There's something you need to know about how Anna died."
Anna--it must be Anna, and John knows exactly what color her eyes are despite the fading of the photograph--looks so much like Dean that he cannot breathe. The photo nearly creases in his hand, he's holding it so tight.
"Right. Tell me. Go on."
Mary is crouched down so her head is level with her sister's, and her arm is slung protectively around Anna's shoulders. She looks like she'll never, no, not ever let her baby sister go.
Jim takes a deep breath and it's clear he's going to take a roundabout way into the tale. It doesn't matter, though. John already knows how Anna's story ends.
It's one John's told himself a million times before.
*****
He no longer recognizes Lawrence. The population's grown by half. There's a brewery he's pretty sure wasn't there back in eighty-three. The place seems like more of a college town than before, a bit more gentrified, a bit more cleaned up. Not much, but enough that he notices. Enough that it seems almost foreign, as if he'd taken a wrong turn and wound up in Paris, or Rome, or Never-never land.
Of course, he's used to rougher living now, he thinks as he pulls a tarp over his truck. The town may be the same. Maybe it just looks different now that he knows the truth, now that he knows what's out there.
Everything he knows (thought he knew) looks different, now.
The wistful look he sometimes saw when Mary was watching Dean wasn't because her little boy was growing up so fast. John now knew she was seeing someone else, someone she had left behind, someone who had died the same year Dean was born, without Mary ever knowing. Maybe Mary knew then what John now knows now about Sam. Maybe she left for the same reason that John can't show his face to his boys. What are you supposed to say to someone when you know that saving them might well mean killing them?
He hears the old bedtime ritual, hears Mary's familiar "angels are watching over you," and knows now it wasn't reassurance but a plea and a desperate hope hidden behind a mother's sweet smile.
He hears her calmly tut-tutting and telling him not to make such a fuss as he tells her about the crazy crap Dean brought into the house this time, and he now knows it's not because she was being soft on the boy. (The one good thing here is now he thinks that maybe Mary would understand about the credit card scams, the fake IDs, and all the other tricks they use to keep from getting caught. Understand, and maybe even approve.)
John always used to wonder what would have changed if he knew then what he knew now. He wonders again, but the wondering has changed along with the story.
*****
The boys do a fine job exorcising the ghosts from their childhood home. As he waits for Missouri to come back and fill him in on the details, John leans back on her couch, head resting on the old zig-zag afghan. He turns his wedding ring round and around his finger.
Missouri comes back. He means to ask about the demon, about what she saw when she looked at Sam, but he asks her about Mary.
He asks her if she thought Mary had saved the boys (saved them the way she couldn't save Anna).
"I do."
As far as John can tell, Missouri is telling the truth.
In any case, it's a nice story. A story a man can cling to for a while, when nothing else seems solid. That story.
*****
Notes: Many thanks to aishuu for serving as a sounding-board during the writing and to arliss for her awesome beta skills. The titles and one of the repeated phrases throughout the story are lifted from Anne Sexton.