Peace of Mind for yanyann
Title: Peace of Mind
Author: desertport
Recipient: yanyann
Characters: Mary, Dean, Sam, and John Winchester
Rating: PG
Word Count: 3,370
Warnings: None.
Author's Notes: Please enjoy!
Summary: Eight years after Mary and the demon came to an agreement that left John alive and her parents dead, she woke in the master bedroom of her home to the sound of her son over the baby monitor.
Eight years after Mary and the demon came to an agreement that left John alive and her parents dead, she woke in the master bedroom of her home to the sound of her son over the baby monitor.
Chasing after him all day had left her beat, so when the monitor gargled and fizzed, Mary turned over and slapped her arm across the bed to check for John. Her hand met only the cool depression on his side of the mattress, and she sighed. It was hard to get used to his nightly absence.
"Fine," she murmured. The monitor continued to crackle as her son made noise in his crib, but he was also loud enough to hear down the hall. Luckily, he didn't sound upset, just very awake. At two years old and change, Dean had started sleeping the entire night and needing Mary less before morning, but Mary was still accustomed to going to him when he made noise. She automatically kicked out from under the covers and pulled on a sweater before trudging to the nursery.
The hall was too dark to see anything, but the path from bed to crib was a well-traveled one, and she made it without stubbing a toe. Dean's nightlight edged the bottom of his door, the light pale and weak. She opened the door and entered the small, windowless room. The space had always felt claustrophobic to Mary, the crib taking up most of the space, the robin's-egg-blue walls pressing inward. Even after dressing it up with toys and quilts, Mary still felt uneasy in the nursery. Not enough to turn it into a storage room and move Dean's crib into the master bedroom, squeezed between the bureau and dresser, but enough that she kept her and Dean's time there to a minimum.
"Hey, big boy," she said as she entered. "What's got you…"
The air was wrong. She flashed back fifteen years to a haunted house she and her mother had cleaned out. The air had been just as wrong then, when she and Mom had discovered four small skeletons in a corner of the cellar. The wrongness in the atmosphere had only gotten worse in the minutes before four tiny spirits stepped out from the shadows to protect their own bones. Mom had covered Mary using salt shot and holy water, the only palliative for the fear so thick in the room.
Without Mom watching her back, Mary felt the wrongness in Dean's nursery more acutely. Dean sat in his crib facing away from the door, arms outstretched toward the overstuffed armchair on the back wall, where Mary usually sat when breastfeeding him. The chair was empty, no toys there for him to long after. He was chattering his half-coherent baby talk, aiming it at the chair, happy as you please. He paused at intervals, broke into giggles the way he did when someone delighted him with a surprising hand gesture or played peek-a-boo with him.
If anything, his lack of fear added to Mary's unease. He was too young to be wary of strangers. And the nursery felt… crowded.
A shadow darted up from the floor.
"Dean." She snatched him up, ignoring his startled yelp, and retreated to her bedroom, where she slammed shut the door. Dean clung to her, a very warm weight at her hip that Mary instinctively held close and gently rocked up and down.
For ten minutes, nothing happened. Mary turned on all the lights, bedside lamps and overhead, but no shadows moved That didn't mean anything; her bedroom was warded, but so was the nursery. If something had gotten in there, so near to Dean, then it could get in here too. Mary considered putting Dean down on her bed and going to the attic for a gun, but she didn't want to leave him alone, and she wasn't carrying him around the house either.
Effectively trapped, Mary resolved to keep watch until morning. It was a long night, with only unmoving shadows and her sleepy son for company. Dean fell asleep clutching the corner of John's pillow in his little hands, and every time Mary felt herself dropping off to sleep herself, she looked at him and narrowed her eyes at herself and loved him so hard that she stayed awake the entire night.
~~
When John didn't return in the morning, Mary found herself relieved. He would not understand a single thing she had to do.
At seven-thirty, Mary dropped Dean at Anise's house across the street. The older woman gave her a long eye at the early hour and lack of notice but had never declined an offer to baby-sit before and didn't now.
Alone, Mary searched the nursery for signs of the intruder, something that could cast a shadow without exhibiting a body. A ghost, maybe a wraith, though a wraith would have attacked right off, so that was out. Her search turned up no evidence of an intruder, no hair, sulfur, ectoplasm; nothing knocked over or out of place, the wards as secure as she had left them, hidden from John's eye but powerful nonetheless.
John's frequent absences had given Mary time not only to ward every room of the house, but to secretly renovate a corner of the attic as well. She had not hunted since that terrible night eight years ago, but Mary had inherited everything her parents left behind, quite a stash of weaponry, books, and artifacts. Everything had lived in storage until finances got tight with the baby. At that point, Mary had spent a week constructing a false wall in the attic, teaching herself carpentry as she went along. John never came up there, would never notice a wall where once there had been an alcove.
Mary told herself she kept the hunting supplies as a link to her dead parents, or maybe a final act of denial; letting go of the supplies would mean letting go of her mom and dad. Poetic and true, in their own way, but those were not the real reasons. In two years, someone was coming over, and Mary would be ready.
If John ever saw her collection of hunting supplies, he would probably be torn between admiration and confusion. The shotguns and handguns were of a quality that, as a military man, he would have to respect, and her knives were beyond compare, fatally sharp. The dozen bags of rock salt might give him pause, the jugs of holy water, the charms, crucifixes, amulets… her mother and father's hunting journals. Mary's own old hunting journal, half-full, half-empty.
She kept it all in good condition, oiled the weapons from time to time, made sure the ammo stayed dry… but the hidden room was like a mausoleum to Mary, one she wished she didn't have to come pay her respects to every so often.
Mary paused in digging out the EMF detector long enough to look at the photo of her parents tacked to the wall. She kissed her fingers and pressed them to their faces, remembering everything they had done to keep her safe. What had been wise, what had been futile, what she appreciated and what she still resented. Her own child wouldn't grow up that way, but she would use her heritage to keep him innocent and safe.
~~
When the EMF detector found nothing abnormal in the nursery or the rest of the house, Mary let herself wonder whether she had imagined the shadow near Dean's crib. But that was what civilians did; they talked themselves out of protecting themselves, and Mary knew that at heart, she could only ever pretend to be a civilian. Dean had been in conversation with a … presence. And then a shadow had jumped. Those were the plain facts.
Suddenly, Mary wanted John. If he knew about her world, he would be so good at protecting their family from everything that threatened them. If he knew, maybe they would stop fighting, find themselves partners in more than just the home, but in their backgrounds, in the experience of battle, of risking your life, of handling weapons and knowing how to use them. Nothing she would glorify, but something that might still bring them together, make them trust each other more.
But that was not to be, and Mary felt good about that. She had chosen a partner for the home and given up fighting. Impossible to regret, especially since that decision had yielded Dean, for whom she had no words sufficient to express her love and care and pride.
She pulled her parents' journals down from the shelves and took them downstairs, then collected Dean from Anise.
"Say bye-bye, Dean," she told him as they left.
"Nuh," he said, and hid behind her legs. Mary smiled apologetically at her friend. Normally, she would try to get her son to practice good manners, but she hadn't slept and a creature had visited her house last night, so her own manners would have to do for both of them.
"I guess he's a little grumpy today," she said.
"Oh, you should have seen him earlier," Anise replied. "He was having a wonderful time chatting away with someone only he could see."
Mary caught her breath and picked up her son, who yawned widely and laid his head on her shoulder.
~~
The EMF detector didn't show anything abnormal when Mary waved it over Dean, but that was good; it meant she could rule out standard ghosts and poltergeists. Already she had narrowed down the list of likely culprits.
The shadow was a handy clue, she thought as she fed Dean his breakfast, trying to make a spoonful of oatmeal appear enticing. So was the ability of children to see the creature when adults apparently could not.
That part was a little creepy, she thought, grimacing. It was also frustrating, since Dean spoke very little. After a brief period of nonstop babble when his vocabulary went live some months back, Dean had since gone back to keeping his thoughts to himself. It worried John, but Mary hadn't begrudged Dean his silence. He was still good company, still her only son, and he still needed her so.
With that in mind, Mary resolved on a course of action.
"Dean, let's take a nap," she said once he had emptied the bowl. Half the oatmeal was on the placemat, but she considered him eating the rest a victory. Normally he would be full of energy after breakfast, but she had broken up his routine by running him over to Anise's first, so he was confused and pliable enough to assent to a nap in her bedroom. Mary closed the door and put Dean down beside her. Exhausted, she lay down and closed her eyes. She had a lot to do, and this might be her only chance to sleep for a while.
The wrongness in the air returned in the attic room where she sat turning the heavy pages of a photo album. Someone stood behind her as she gazed at her mother's faded face. In the picture, Mom was holding her grandson; behind Mary, the presence laid one hand on her shoulder and squeezed.
Mary woke herself with a restrained sob. She was still on her bed, her hand resting on Dean's little back. She let his sleep-breaths lull her back into calmness, then turned over and didn't immediately recognize the tall man standing in the doorway. Still half-asleep, she briefly imagined it was her dad.
"John!" Her heart was pounding. "How long have you been there?"
John's soft expression turned considering. "A little while. You look pretty out of it. Dean tiring you out?"
"Something like that." She smoothed her son's hair self-consciously. He would need a haircut soon. "Home for a shower?"
John nodded. "I got some sleep at the Exxon after my shift. Might catch some more before I go in to the shop."
Which meant he would be home for a few hours. Great. "There's sandwich meat in the fridge."
"Okay."
While John took his shower, Mary tried to sleep some more, but Dean woke up and started pulling her hair. "Okay, okay. What's up, little boy?" She yawned widely and turned over to see him pointing past the bed, eyes fixed on something over her shoulder. Mary looked, but saw nothing.
She knew better than that and searched the wall and floor for a shadow that didn't belong to the furniture and piles of laundry near the bed.
There. A shadow like sunlight through dark glass on a hot day, bent into a right angle from floor to wall. It backed up a bit, then stayed still again.
Mary moved her hand under the pillow, where a silver knife was sheathed and ready, but she didn't move otherwise. She didn't need to yet; Dean was behind her, blocked from the presence, but vulnerable if she initiated a fight.
A few minutes passed in a silent standoff, long enough that Mary began to worry that John would come back and startle her or the presence into making a first move.
She risked a glance at Dean. He watched her and the space where the presence had to be with wide eyes, not quite scared but solemn.
"What do you see, Dean?" she whispered.
For once, she had little patience with his reticence. "Tell me."
Perhaps understanding that, for the first time, Mommy really needed his words, Dean said, "Big man."
"What is he doing, Dean?"
"Looking at you. He's really sorry, Mommy."
"Fabulous," she breathed, tightening her grip on the hilt of her knife under her pillow. John's shower was still running. Her instinct was to slash at the foot of the creature's shadow and see what happened, but her family was so near and unprepared to deal with an angry… thing.
"Why are you here?" she asked, voice intent.
When nothing happened, Mary asked Dean, "Is he saying anything?"
Dean had his fingers in his mouth and Mary suddenly felt ridiculous. Dean was two years old. He said in a small voice, "Hiding," and then rightly would say nothing more.
"Hiding," Mary repeated, at least sure that the Big Man could hear and understand her. "Is something bigger than you going to come find you and kill us all?"
The shadow on the wall shivered a bit at the top.
"Is that a yes or a no?" Mary demanded.
"No!" Dean volunteered. "Sammy says no!"
Mary sat back, stunned. As usual when reminded of her father, she flashed back to the final moments of his possession and felt her stomach roil. "You're not him," she bit out.
"Mary, what the hell-"
Mary turned to see John in his bathrobe at the door. He frowned. She had to look a little crazy, staring at empty space and talking angrily to the air. She looked back at the spot where the presence had been standing, then at the floor and wall. It was gone.
"Daddy!" Dean yelled, crawling eagerly to the edge of the bed. He wanted hugs and to be swung around, and John obliged. Hanging Dean upside-down over his back to make him laugh and squeal, John sent Mary a loaded look. She grimaced back and surreptitiously pushed the hidden knife deeper into the stack of pillows.
~~
Sam watched from the doorway as his parents largely avoided direct communication. John kept shooting Mary worried glances, while Mary was clearly a little nervous her husband would find the weapon she had hidden under the pillows.
He shook his head sadly. Even before he was born, his family was messed up because of hunting. Dean waved at him from where he sat on John's shoulders, giggling, and Sam waved back. He didn't know why children could see him, but it had been a relief to have anybody to interact with after so long on his own. Dean was still himself, loving and smart, and he even had many of the same mannerisms and facial expressions as the man Sam had grown up with.
Over the next few days, he kept out of sight of Dean and Mary. He had managed to freak out his mother without meaning to and felt genuinely sorry for it. She had two years to live; she should not have had to spend them like this, worrying unnecessarily over Sam's presence.
Mary spent most of the time John was gone beefing up her home's security. The flowerbeds edging the yard would never grow anything again after how much salt she poisoned them with, and the floorboards in the entryway no longer looked quite so tidy, since she had pulled them up, poured in salt and goofer dust, and nailed them back in again. She carved sigils into the undersides of the window ledges and planted sprigs of special herbs in the same pots as her other plants.
None of her precautions worked on Sam. He walked freely through the house no matter what she did, but kept entirely out of her and Dean's way. Despite his efforts, Mary continued warding the house and reading her parents' journals. Good instincts.
Then, one day at noon, Mary came down from the attic holding a Ouija board. Sam laughed out loud. It had worked with Dean in the hospital five years ago, but Dean had been a restless spirit, while Sam was… still human, just… out of his own time for a while.
"I want to explain it all to you," he said as she set up the board on the floor of the living room. John was at his auto shop and would go straight from there to his second job as an all-night gas attendant at an Exxon station. "But it would take forever on this thing," he joked weakly. "And I don't want you to know what happens. It would be cruel, Mom."
He sometimes thought his entire life was a cruelty, Dean's life too. Dad's for that matter, and Mom… Mom had had to deal directly with Azazel and had lost both her parents in the process. The more he watched her, the less he thought she had left the experience behind.
"You're here," she told the room at large. "So I'm not bothering with this ‘hello' business. Tell me what you want."
Sam sighed. L-E-A-V-I-N-G, he spelled. He supposed he had to, since Mary would go insane if he didn't. Escaping into the past had only been a delaying tactic anyway.
"Wait!" Mary said. "Dean called you Sam. Are you…." She trailed off and stared fiercely down at the board, obviously embarrassed to be asking a question that left her so open.
On impulse, Sam pushed the planchette to ‘Yes.' Mary gasped.
"Dad?" she asked, still doubting. "You're not. He wouldn't bother me the way you have."
Through his teenage years and all of Dad's questionable decisions, Sam had wondered where he and Dean got their smarts from. Now he knew. But that didn't mean he couldn't bend the truth a little.
~~
Mary stared at the planchette as it glided swiftly from letter to letter.
W-A-N-T-E-D T-O S-E-E Y-O-U
I L-O-V-E Y-O-U M-A-R-Y
I-T-S A-L-L O-K-A-Y
The shadow faded from where it crouched on the floor across from her, and Mary stared for a long time after. She didn't know how it could all be okay, and if that was Dad, then she was Nancy Reagan. But someone wanted her to feel safe, maybe even believed she would be comforted by the effort.
From a corner of the living room strewn with Tonka cars and stuffed animals, Dean watched Mary with a singular attention, eyes fixed on her as she folded up the board and put it back in its box. Mary smiled, trying to put him at ease. Lately, he had absorbed her seriousness, tuned in to her apprehension. If anyone should feel safe, it should be Dean, not her.
"No more Big Man?" she asked, picking him up.
He shook his head solemnly and his lower lip wobbled. Maybe she was asking him that too often. "Come here, baby." She held him close. "Let's get you a cookie."
End.
Author: desertport
Recipient: yanyann
Characters: Mary, Dean, Sam, and John Winchester
Rating: PG
Word Count: 3,370
Warnings: None.
Author's Notes: Please enjoy!
Summary: Eight years after Mary and the demon came to an agreement that left John alive and her parents dead, she woke in the master bedroom of her home to the sound of her son over the baby monitor.
Eight years after Mary and the demon came to an agreement that left John alive and her parents dead, she woke in the master bedroom of her home to the sound of her son over the baby monitor.
Chasing after him all day had left her beat, so when the monitor gargled and fizzed, Mary turned over and slapped her arm across the bed to check for John. Her hand met only the cool depression on his side of the mattress, and she sighed. It was hard to get used to his nightly absence.
"Fine," she murmured. The monitor continued to crackle as her son made noise in his crib, but he was also loud enough to hear down the hall. Luckily, he didn't sound upset, just very awake. At two years old and change, Dean had started sleeping the entire night and needing Mary less before morning, but Mary was still accustomed to going to him when he made noise. She automatically kicked out from under the covers and pulled on a sweater before trudging to the nursery.
The hall was too dark to see anything, but the path from bed to crib was a well-traveled one, and she made it without stubbing a toe. Dean's nightlight edged the bottom of his door, the light pale and weak. She opened the door and entered the small, windowless room. The space had always felt claustrophobic to Mary, the crib taking up most of the space, the robin's-egg-blue walls pressing inward. Even after dressing it up with toys and quilts, Mary still felt uneasy in the nursery. Not enough to turn it into a storage room and move Dean's crib into the master bedroom, squeezed between the bureau and dresser, but enough that she kept her and Dean's time there to a minimum.
"Hey, big boy," she said as she entered. "What's got you…"
The air was wrong. She flashed back fifteen years to a haunted house she and her mother had cleaned out. The air had been just as wrong then, when she and Mom had discovered four small skeletons in a corner of the cellar. The wrongness in the atmosphere had only gotten worse in the minutes before four tiny spirits stepped out from the shadows to protect their own bones. Mom had covered Mary using salt shot and holy water, the only palliative for the fear so thick in the room.
Without Mom watching her back, Mary felt the wrongness in Dean's nursery more acutely. Dean sat in his crib facing away from the door, arms outstretched toward the overstuffed armchair on the back wall, where Mary usually sat when breastfeeding him. The chair was empty, no toys there for him to long after. He was chattering his half-coherent baby talk, aiming it at the chair, happy as you please. He paused at intervals, broke into giggles the way he did when someone delighted him with a surprising hand gesture or played peek-a-boo with him.
If anything, his lack of fear added to Mary's unease. He was too young to be wary of strangers. And the nursery felt… crowded.
A shadow darted up from the floor.
"Dean." She snatched him up, ignoring his startled yelp, and retreated to her bedroom, where she slammed shut the door. Dean clung to her, a very warm weight at her hip that Mary instinctively held close and gently rocked up and down.
For ten minutes, nothing happened. Mary turned on all the lights, bedside lamps and overhead, but no shadows moved That didn't mean anything; her bedroom was warded, but so was the nursery. If something had gotten in there, so near to Dean, then it could get in here too. Mary considered putting Dean down on her bed and going to the attic for a gun, but she didn't want to leave him alone, and she wasn't carrying him around the house either.
Effectively trapped, Mary resolved to keep watch until morning. It was a long night, with only unmoving shadows and her sleepy son for company. Dean fell asleep clutching the corner of John's pillow in his little hands, and every time Mary felt herself dropping off to sleep herself, she looked at him and narrowed her eyes at herself and loved him so hard that she stayed awake the entire night.
~~
When John didn't return in the morning, Mary found herself relieved. He would not understand a single thing she had to do.
At seven-thirty, Mary dropped Dean at Anise's house across the street. The older woman gave her a long eye at the early hour and lack of notice but had never declined an offer to baby-sit before and didn't now.
Alone, Mary searched the nursery for signs of the intruder, something that could cast a shadow without exhibiting a body. A ghost, maybe a wraith, though a wraith would have attacked right off, so that was out. Her search turned up no evidence of an intruder, no hair, sulfur, ectoplasm; nothing knocked over or out of place, the wards as secure as she had left them, hidden from John's eye but powerful nonetheless.
John's frequent absences had given Mary time not only to ward every room of the house, but to secretly renovate a corner of the attic as well. She had not hunted since that terrible night eight years ago, but Mary had inherited everything her parents left behind, quite a stash of weaponry, books, and artifacts. Everything had lived in storage until finances got tight with the baby. At that point, Mary had spent a week constructing a false wall in the attic, teaching herself carpentry as she went along. John never came up there, would never notice a wall where once there had been an alcove.
Mary told herself she kept the hunting supplies as a link to her dead parents, or maybe a final act of denial; letting go of the supplies would mean letting go of her mom and dad. Poetic and true, in their own way, but those were not the real reasons. In two years, someone was coming over, and Mary would be ready.
If John ever saw her collection of hunting supplies, he would probably be torn between admiration and confusion. The shotguns and handguns were of a quality that, as a military man, he would have to respect, and her knives were beyond compare, fatally sharp. The dozen bags of rock salt might give him pause, the jugs of holy water, the charms, crucifixes, amulets… her mother and father's hunting journals. Mary's own old hunting journal, half-full, half-empty.
She kept it all in good condition, oiled the weapons from time to time, made sure the ammo stayed dry… but the hidden room was like a mausoleum to Mary, one she wished she didn't have to come pay her respects to every so often.
Mary paused in digging out the EMF detector long enough to look at the photo of her parents tacked to the wall. She kissed her fingers and pressed them to their faces, remembering everything they had done to keep her safe. What had been wise, what had been futile, what she appreciated and what she still resented. Her own child wouldn't grow up that way, but she would use her heritage to keep him innocent and safe.
~~
When the EMF detector found nothing abnormal in the nursery or the rest of the house, Mary let herself wonder whether she had imagined the shadow near Dean's crib. But that was what civilians did; they talked themselves out of protecting themselves, and Mary knew that at heart, she could only ever pretend to be a civilian. Dean had been in conversation with a … presence. And then a shadow had jumped. Those were the plain facts.
Suddenly, Mary wanted John. If he knew about her world, he would be so good at protecting their family from everything that threatened them. If he knew, maybe they would stop fighting, find themselves partners in more than just the home, but in their backgrounds, in the experience of battle, of risking your life, of handling weapons and knowing how to use them. Nothing she would glorify, but something that might still bring them together, make them trust each other more.
But that was not to be, and Mary felt good about that. She had chosen a partner for the home and given up fighting. Impossible to regret, especially since that decision had yielded Dean, for whom she had no words sufficient to express her love and care and pride.
She pulled her parents' journals down from the shelves and took them downstairs, then collected Dean from Anise.
"Say bye-bye, Dean," she told him as they left.
"Nuh," he said, and hid behind her legs. Mary smiled apologetically at her friend. Normally, she would try to get her son to practice good manners, but she hadn't slept and a creature had visited her house last night, so her own manners would have to do for both of them.
"I guess he's a little grumpy today," she said.
"Oh, you should have seen him earlier," Anise replied. "He was having a wonderful time chatting away with someone only he could see."
Mary caught her breath and picked up her son, who yawned widely and laid his head on her shoulder.
~~
The EMF detector didn't show anything abnormal when Mary waved it over Dean, but that was good; it meant she could rule out standard ghosts and poltergeists. Already she had narrowed down the list of likely culprits.
The shadow was a handy clue, she thought as she fed Dean his breakfast, trying to make a spoonful of oatmeal appear enticing. So was the ability of children to see the creature when adults apparently could not.
That part was a little creepy, she thought, grimacing. It was also frustrating, since Dean spoke very little. After a brief period of nonstop babble when his vocabulary went live some months back, Dean had since gone back to keeping his thoughts to himself. It worried John, but Mary hadn't begrudged Dean his silence. He was still good company, still her only son, and he still needed her so.
With that in mind, Mary resolved on a course of action.
"Dean, let's take a nap," she said once he had emptied the bowl. Half the oatmeal was on the placemat, but she considered him eating the rest a victory. Normally he would be full of energy after breakfast, but she had broken up his routine by running him over to Anise's first, so he was confused and pliable enough to assent to a nap in her bedroom. Mary closed the door and put Dean down beside her. Exhausted, she lay down and closed her eyes. She had a lot to do, and this might be her only chance to sleep for a while.
The wrongness in the air returned in the attic room where she sat turning the heavy pages of a photo album. Someone stood behind her as she gazed at her mother's faded face. In the picture, Mom was holding her grandson; behind Mary, the presence laid one hand on her shoulder and squeezed.
Mary woke herself with a restrained sob. She was still on her bed, her hand resting on Dean's little back. She let his sleep-breaths lull her back into calmness, then turned over and didn't immediately recognize the tall man standing in the doorway. Still half-asleep, she briefly imagined it was her dad.
"John!" Her heart was pounding. "How long have you been there?"
John's soft expression turned considering. "A little while. You look pretty out of it. Dean tiring you out?"
"Something like that." She smoothed her son's hair self-consciously. He would need a haircut soon. "Home for a shower?"
John nodded. "I got some sleep at the Exxon after my shift. Might catch some more before I go in to the shop."
Which meant he would be home for a few hours. Great. "There's sandwich meat in the fridge."
"Okay."
While John took his shower, Mary tried to sleep some more, but Dean woke up and started pulling her hair. "Okay, okay. What's up, little boy?" She yawned widely and turned over to see him pointing past the bed, eyes fixed on something over her shoulder. Mary looked, but saw nothing.
She knew better than that and searched the wall and floor for a shadow that didn't belong to the furniture and piles of laundry near the bed.
There. A shadow like sunlight through dark glass on a hot day, bent into a right angle from floor to wall. It backed up a bit, then stayed still again.
Mary moved her hand under the pillow, where a silver knife was sheathed and ready, but she didn't move otherwise. She didn't need to yet; Dean was behind her, blocked from the presence, but vulnerable if she initiated a fight.
A few minutes passed in a silent standoff, long enough that Mary began to worry that John would come back and startle her or the presence into making a first move.
She risked a glance at Dean. He watched her and the space where the presence had to be with wide eyes, not quite scared but solemn.
"What do you see, Dean?" she whispered.
For once, she had little patience with his reticence. "Tell me."
Perhaps understanding that, for the first time, Mommy really needed his words, Dean said, "Big man."
"What is he doing, Dean?"
"Looking at you. He's really sorry, Mommy."
"Fabulous," she breathed, tightening her grip on the hilt of her knife under her pillow. John's shower was still running. Her instinct was to slash at the foot of the creature's shadow and see what happened, but her family was so near and unprepared to deal with an angry… thing.
"Why are you here?" she asked, voice intent.
When nothing happened, Mary asked Dean, "Is he saying anything?"
Dean had his fingers in his mouth and Mary suddenly felt ridiculous. Dean was two years old. He said in a small voice, "Hiding," and then rightly would say nothing more.
"Hiding," Mary repeated, at least sure that the Big Man could hear and understand her. "Is something bigger than you going to come find you and kill us all?"
The shadow on the wall shivered a bit at the top.
"Is that a yes or a no?" Mary demanded.
"No!" Dean volunteered. "Sammy says no!"
Mary sat back, stunned. As usual when reminded of her father, she flashed back to the final moments of his possession and felt her stomach roil. "You're not him," she bit out.
"Mary, what the hell-"
Mary turned to see John in his bathrobe at the door. He frowned. She had to look a little crazy, staring at empty space and talking angrily to the air. She looked back at the spot where the presence had been standing, then at the floor and wall. It was gone.
"Daddy!" Dean yelled, crawling eagerly to the edge of the bed. He wanted hugs and to be swung around, and John obliged. Hanging Dean upside-down over his back to make him laugh and squeal, John sent Mary a loaded look. She grimaced back and surreptitiously pushed the hidden knife deeper into the stack of pillows.
~~
Sam watched from the doorway as his parents largely avoided direct communication. John kept shooting Mary worried glances, while Mary was clearly a little nervous her husband would find the weapon she had hidden under the pillows.
He shook his head sadly. Even before he was born, his family was messed up because of hunting. Dean waved at him from where he sat on John's shoulders, giggling, and Sam waved back. He didn't know why children could see him, but it had been a relief to have anybody to interact with after so long on his own. Dean was still himself, loving and smart, and he even had many of the same mannerisms and facial expressions as the man Sam had grown up with.
Over the next few days, he kept out of sight of Dean and Mary. He had managed to freak out his mother without meaning to and felt genuinely sorry for it. She had two years to live; she should not have had to spend them like this, worrying unnecessarily over Sam's presence.
Mary spent most of the time John was gone beefing up her home's security. The flowerbeds edging the yard would never grow anything again after how much salt she poisoned them with, and the floorboards in the entryway no longer looked quite so tidy, since she had pulled them up, poured in salt and goofer dust, and nailed them back in again. She carved sigils into the undersides of the window ledges and planted sprigs of special herbs in the same pots as her other plants.
None of her precautions worked on Sam. He walked freely through the house no matter what she did, but kept entirely out of her and Dean's way. Despite his efforts, Mary continued warding the house and reading her parents' journals. Good instincts.
Then, one day at noon, Mary came down from the attic holding a Ouija board. Sam laughed out loud. It had worked with Dean in the hospital five years ago, but Dean had been a restless spirit, while Sam was… still human, just… out of his own time for a while.
"I want to explain it all to you," he said as she set up the board on the floor of the living room. John was at his auto shop and would go straight from there to his second job as an all-night gas attendant at an Exxon station. "But it would take forever on this thing," he joked weakly. "And I don't want you to know what happens. It would be cruel, Mom."
He sometimes thought his entire life was a cruelty, Dean's life too. Dad's for that matter, and Mom… Mom had had to deal directly with Azazel and had lost both her parents in the process. The more he watched her, the less he thought she had left the experience behind.
"You're here," she told the room at large. "So I'm not bothering with this ‘hello' business. Tell me what you want."
Sam sighed. L-E-A-V-I-N-G, he spelled. He supposed he had to, since Mary would go insane if he didn't. Escaping into the past had only been a delaying tactic anyway.
"Wait!" Mary said. "Dean called you Sam. Are you…." She trailed off and stared fiercely down at the board, obviously embarrassed to be asking a question that left her so open.
On impulse, Sam pushed the planchette to ‘Yes.' Mary gasped.
"Dad?" she asked, still doubting. "You're not. He wouldn't bother me the way you have."
Through his teenage years and all of Dad's questionable decisions, Sam had wondered where he and Dean got their smarts from. Now he knew. But that didn't mean he couldn't bend the truth a little.
~~
Mary stared at the planchette as it glided swiftly from letter to letter.
W-A-N-T-E-D T-O S-E-E Y-O-U
I L-O-V-E Y-O-U M-A-R-Y
I-T-S A-L-L O-K-A-Y
The shadow faded from where it crouched on the floor across from her, and Mary stared for a long time after. She didn't know how it could all be okay, and if that was Dad, then she was Nancy Reagan. But someone wanted her to feel safe, maybe even believed she would be comforted by the effort.
From a corner of the living room strewn with Tonka cars and stuffed animals, Dean watched Mary with a singular attention, eyes fixed on her as she folded up the board and put it back in its box. Mary smiled, trying to put him at ease. Lately, he had absorbed her seriousness, tuned in to her apprehension. If anyone should feel safe, it should be Dean, not her.
"No more Big Man?" she asked, picking him up.
He shook his head solemnly and his lower lip wobbled. Maybe she was asking him that too often. "Come here, baby." She held him close. "Let's get you a cookie."
End.