SPN Fic: The Burning of Paper Instead of Children
Title: The Burning of Paper Instead of Children
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: PG-13
Summary: The human body is mostly water. Mary, John, assorted others.
Word Count: ~4000
Spoilers/Warnings: Massive spoilers for 4.03 In the Beginning, some dark themes.
Disclaimer
No matter what the specific historical origins are for self-immolation, there is a definite connection between fire and the act of sacrifice.
The human body is mostly water.
*****
Her father told her a story once about a hunter who swallowed a rosary and blessed himself. After that, whatever he pissed on was sanctified, and any evil thing he spat on burned. No demon could ever posses him, and after the first one, no demon ever tried.
Her father told her the story while they were sitting around a campfire. It was a small campfire; they didn’t want to tip off the manticore they were tracking. Her mother, who would have smacked her father with a spoon had he told that story at the dinner table, just rolled her eyes and laughed. The rules were different when they were hunting, but even then, Mary knew this wasn’t the life she wanted.
*****
The human body, along with water, also contains iron and salt, but not enough of either to keep a demon out.
*****
After her parents die, she takes John to the hospital. He’s confused, disoriented, and she tells the staff he fell and hit his head, that he’s still a little messed up from the war, that they shouldn’t believe anything he says.
Then, while they’re looking him over, she finds a payphone and calls her uncle. She tells him what happened, or the important parts of it anyway. She tells him where her parents’ bodies are.
When the hospital gives John back to her- he’s fine, hale as a horse and nobody’d believe he’d been dead three hours ago- she asks to go back to his place.
He says okay, but when they get there, he’s still got questions on his face, so she puts one of his hands on her hip, the other on her breast, and he doesn’t ask any questions after that.
She wakes up the next morning, an orphan and naked.
John still has questions though, fuzzy memories of what happened. She slips something into his morning coffee, mumbles something her grandmother taught her. After that, he doesn’t remember anything about the day before. He’s shocked and pleased to see the car he bought.
“I can’t believe I’d forget buying a beauty like this!” he crows with a wide, boyish smile, running his hands over the Impala’s sleek lines.
The smile turns sly and he slants a glance at Mary.
“Why, she’s almost as pretty as you.”
She laughs then, tremulous but real.
That afternoon, she reports her parents as missing.
The police never do find them.
*****
They get married two months after that. John thinks they should wait, but Mary convinces him not to. It’s a small ceremony, and her uncle walks her down the aisle. The dozen or so hunters that show up she passes off as cousins. John and his relatives smile uneasily at them, but no one pulls a knife at the reception, so Mary considers it a success.
Two months was just about the amount of time it took for Mary to sort through her parents’ possessions and put them in the basement. She doesn’t like the idea of having those kinds of things in her house, but she likes the idea of parting with them less.
John moves into her parents’ house with her, and it has enough charms and protections to keep most anything out, iron and salt laid into the foundations. But that thing got in, so she knows her house isn’t as strong as she’d like, and she knows in ten years, it’ll be back.
John jokes awkwardly about her parents coming back, walking in and shocked to see the two of them having set up house.
Mary never smiles at that, and after awhile, John stops saying it.
******
There was never a moment in her childhood when her parents sat her down and explained the truth about the world. It was something she always knew. Her name was Mary, Dad was a Republican, and monsters were real.
Her parents didn’t start training her until she was six, didn’t start taking her on hunts until she was nine. Before that, her father would leave for weeks, usually with her uncle. Sometimes her mother would go, and Mary would be sent to stay at her grandmother’s.
She met a lot of hunters when she started going with her parents, in bars and roadside diners and occasionally hunting with them if the prey was large enough and scary enough.
Some of them said, “This is no life for a kid, Samuel.”
And some of them said, “Good. She’ll grow up knowing how to protect herself.”
*****
“Have you ever considered having a funeral for your parents?” asks John one night, two years into their marriage. He has black grease smeared across one cheek.
Mary looks up. She’s sitting at the dining room table, studying. She’s taking classes at the university, hoping to become a teacher.
“No,” she says sharply.
John packs a picnic lunch the next morning and convinces her into the car with him. They drive west, into the prairie, until the only thing she can see is the flat, gold earth and the great blue arc of heaven. She always liked it out here; you could see a threat coming a mile away. She thinks maybe that’s why her parents moved to Kansas in the first place. If you know what’s coming, it’s easier to stop it.
John stops in the middle of a dirt crossroads and gets out. Mary follows.
He has a flask in his hand and he raises it to the sky.
“To Samuel and Deanna Campbell,” he says somberly, pouring some of the amber liquid onto the dirt. Then, he tips his head back and drinks from the flask.
He wipes his mouth when he’s done and hands the flask to Mary.
She stares at him, and he stares back with a solemn, level gaze. She turns away.
Then, she lifts the flask up.
“To Mom and Dad,” she says, and her voice is strong. It doesn’t waver or crack. She tips the flask down and watches more of the alcohol pour out and darken the earth. She drinks from it and it burns going down, but she doesn’t cough.
She’s never allowed herself to grieve for her parents, but she does then. She drops her head and sobs, great, body wracking sobs, her arms held tight to her sides, sobs that make her body shake, that make her throat hurt, that make her nauseous.
John wraps his arms around her and doesn’t say anything. He just holds her, steady and close.
*****
John’s not really a religious man, but Mary was raised in the faith. Her family went to church every Sunday, unless they were on a hunt. On those Sundays, they would sit in a circle together, heads bowed, as her father read from the Bible in his harsh, hard voice. Her father had a voice like iron.
After she finds out she’s pregnant, she makes John start going to church with her.
“This is important to me,” she says, placing a hand on her still-flat belly. “I want my baby growing up knowing they’re protected.”
“They will be protected Mary,” sighs John. “You think I’m not going to look after my own kid?”
But he starts going with her anyway.
*****
At five months pregnant, she starts laying salt down again. When John catches her at it, she tells him she’s nesting.
*****
John has nightmares sometimes, from the war. He always drinks too much the day after he has a nightmare, and she worries about him.
“Maybe you should get help,” she says. “Talk to someone.”
He shakes his head. “I’m fine Mary,” he says gruffly. “They’ll go away eventually.”
“Well maybe you shouldn’t drink so much,” she says.
“This is the only time I ever drink,” he tells her, and his eyes are hollow, dark. “You know what it's like to watch someone die?” he asks.
She does, but she knows she’s not supposed to say so. He’s allowed to talk about what he’s seen, but these are the only times he ever does.
He shakes his head to clear it, then stands up.
“You’re right though,” he says, and she can see him mentally locking the memories away, forcing them back and her own John coming back to her.
She hides the whiskey and knows she’s lucky that he came back so normal.
*****
First time she ever saw someone die, she was thirteen. She and her family were working with some other hunters to clear out a vampire nest in Kansas City. One of the hunters got his neck snapped. It wasn’t a clean, swift sound like a bullet or an arrow, but a meaty k-k-crunch that reverbed through Mary’s dreams for months.
Second time she saw someone die, she was sixteen and holding her grandmother’s hand, watching the light ebb out of her grandmother’s eyes. Her grandmother had cancer. She weighed 87 pounds at the time of her death, a frail husk of a woman.
Mary realized then that there was no good way to die.
A year later, she killed a shapeshifter in Kentucky. It looked like her mother.
“It seemed human,” she said, looking down at the corpse with her mother’s face. “You’re sure it’s not a human? Just one with…” She grasped for the word, “powers?”
“It was just a monster,” said her father, clasping her on her shoulder. “You did the right thing Mary. I’m proud of you.”
She never really stops dreaming about the dead shapeshifter with her mother’s face. Mary never saw her mother’s body, and when she closes her eyes and imagines her mother’s death, the shapeshifter is what she sees.
Both times, she was responsible for the death. The demon wanted her.
*****
She spends seventeen hours in labor with Dean. He weighs 8 pounds, 3 ounces.
She names him after her mother because she still hasn’t forgiven her father.
She loves him more than she’s ever loved anything, but she knows he isn’t the one the demon will want. Angels are watching over him.
Giving birth, she thinks with Dean’s small, rosy mouth on her nipple for the first time, is a lot harder than killing someone.
*****
She decides to quit her job as teacher aide in a third grade classroom to take care of Dean.
“It’s almost the 80s,” says the teacher, Ms. Langdon. She’s practically a child herself and has bright pink lipstick and feathered hair. “You can be a mommy and have a career, Mary.”
Later, Mary realizes Ms. Langdon’s probably just a year or two older than she is.
*****
There are things she could teach Dean. Charms she could sing as lullabies, special powders she could teach as recipes. She could tell him the truth, before he’s too old to be afraid of it. There are a lot of things she could tell him. She wonders if making him aware will keep him safe, or drag him into a life she doesn’t want for him. She wonders if she needs to teach him how to protect himself; she knows she can’t wish away the dark things in the world. But most people live their whole lives without being touched by the supernatural. It’s the unlucky and unwise who have to worry.
He’s her baby boy, she decides eventually. She’ll tell him when he’s older, old enough to understand.
But when he’s two and just talking and tells her monsters are under his bed, she checks.
“You shouldn’t humor him,” sighs John. “Just tell him monsters aren’t real. You don’t want him growing up afraid of the dark, do you?”
*****
She has a loving husband, a beautiful son, a large house, and a college education. She has a wonderful life, and she’s very, very, very happy.
*****
She and John met at a community softball game. She was pitcher. She liked softball because it made her feel normal. He was umpire because he knew all the rules and didn’t mind people yelling at him. But also because he was a tiny bit bossy. She didn’t mind though. She chewed him out after the game for making a bad call that almost made her team lose. And he just smiled at her and said, “Well, how about I buy you a coke and we’ll discuss it?”
John was just that way. Sweet, always willing to listen to what she had to say.
*****
John mouths at her breasts. “A little girl, one of each.” Lips at her sternum: “Or another boy, a brother for Dean to play with.”
She twines her fingers in his hair and tilts his face up.
“Dean’s enough,” she says.
She is very careful.
*****
After she finds out she's pregnant, she drops Dean off at a friend’s while John's at work and goes to the Planned Parenthood clinic. She picks up some pamphlets and talks to a nice lady with dyed red hair.
“It’s legal now,” the woman says earnestly. “So it’s much safer than before. And you don’t have to tell your husband if you don’t want to. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want.”
The woman holds her hand as she cries, and in the end, she leaves the pamphlets behind.
“Dean,” she says later, after she’s strapped him into his carseat and is sitting behind the steering wheel. “How would you feel about having a little brother or sister?”
She watches her little boy’s face bloom with excitement in the rearview mirror.
*****
It might be a Rumpelstiltskin thing. Fairytales often hide deeper truths, and names really do have power. She finds the demon’s name, maybe she can find his weakness. She sees the threat on the horizon, so she has time to prepare. Her parents’ books are dusty in the basement, but she doesn’t bring them upstairs in case John finds them.
She enrolls Dean in preschool, and from 8 to 12 every morning, Monday through Thursday, she brings a lantern downstairs and reads.
She calls up hunters her parents knew, people she hasn’t spoken to since the wedding. They say she thought she retired. She says she did, but there’s one more thing she needs to do.
No one’s ever heard of a demon with yellow eyes. They give her more people to call. She winds her way through the hunter phone-tree, and, one Tuesday, has Dean stay late for the afternoon preschool and drives across town to a woman people say is psychic.
The psychic is a disappointment. She takes one look at Mary, standing hopeful-faced and five months pregnant in the doorway and says, “There’s nothing I can do for you miss. That child you’re carrying has a destiny you’ll have no control over.”
She invites Mary in for tea though, but Mary says no, thank you. She has to go pick up her son.
*****
She hears about a man who's becoming an expert on demons. She wonders what kind of tragedy would lead a man to do that. She thinks she knows. When she finally gets in touch with him, she doesn’t ask him about his demons, she asks him about one with yellow eyes. He promises to call back in a few days.
He calls back as promised, and Mary darts for the phone, but John picks it up first.
John listens for a second, and then he looks at Mary.
“It’s for you,” he says. “Guy named Bobby?”
She understands what he’s asking and says in reply, “He’s an old friend of my parents.” Which isn’t strictly true, but is pretty close.
John sighs. “Mary,” he says. “I don’t mind you having male friends. It’s all the secrets that worry me. I don’t even know what your parents did that they know so many people.”
“I need to take this call,” she says, and takes the phone.
“Of course you do,” grumbles John.
“Mary Campbell?” says the man on the telephone. She’s been using her maiden name, doesn’t want to drag John into this. “It’s Bobby Singer.”
“Bobby,” she breathes, “any news?”
“I’m sorry,” says Bobby, and he sounds it. “But whoever this bastard is, I can’t find him. Either he hasn’t been topside in awhile, or he keeps a hell of a low profile.”
“Thanks anyway,” she tells him politely and hangs up the phone.
John’s staring grimly at her when she turns to face him, and she’s already on the jagged edge of tears. She breathes in deep and steadies herself against the counter. She doesn’t want to have this fight.
“Mary,” he begins.
“John,” she cuts him off. “I’m sorry, but half the time I didn’t know what it was my parents were doing. They were pretty secretive people.”
John visibly deflates at that. He looks tired, worn out. He’s been working extra hours at the garage so he can take time off after the baby is born. He rubs his face.
“I guess that’s one way you take after them,” he says dully.
“I guess so,” she echoes back.
*****
She always liked domestic chores as a kid. Doing the dishes, sweeping, folding the laundry- things like that. They were more pleasant than the other kinds of chores- cleaning the guns, sharpening the knives, gravedigging. The kinds of chores that always ended in fire and blood and death.
All chores have the same result though, the same impetus: purification.
******
At seven months pregnant, Mary lugs the books up from the basement. None of them say anything that can help. It takes her an hour to get all the books up stairs, and then she has to rest. Then another half hour to get them all into her car.
There’s gasoline in the garage, but she doesn’t want John asking questions if he realizes some is missing. She buys a couple gallons.
There’s a place she and her parents used to bring bodies of things they killed in town. It wasn’t used very often- a werewolf when she was eleven, a family of redcaps when she was fifteen, a zombie the year before she met John.
The firepit’s still there. Scorched and blackened, but usable. She drags the books into the pit, then douses them with gasoline. She lights a match. She throws it in.
And she watches the books burn.
“Mommy!” cries Dean when she comes to pick him up from preschool. He runs up and attempts to hug her, then tips his head back and wrinkles his nose. “Mommy,” he whines. “You smell like smoke!”
She smooths her hand over his hair. “I know baby,” she says. “Don’t tell Daddy, okay? This will be a Mommy and Dean secret.”
Dean stares at her gravely and nods his head.
“Okay,” he says. Then, brightly: “Can we go to McDonald’s? I want a Happy Meal!”
*****
Her second child is two weeks early, and she’s in labor with him for twelve hours. He’s smaller than Dean, weighing in at exactly 7 pounds.
He’s quieter, and she loves him, but it makes her uneasy.
“You’re what the demon wants,” she tells him. “I don’t know why or for what. I’m sorry.”
This child, she knows, has to know the truth from the beginning. He was doomed before he was born, and she’ll have to teach him how to protect himself.
She names him Samuel. After her father.
Sam.
*****
Her father loved her. She knows that. He just didn’t understand her.
“Mary,” he said, when she told him she wanted to go to college. “Can’t you see this is more important than anything else you could do?”
This had included the car, the haunted forest all around them, and the black and silent night.
******
“This is your baby brother,” she says to Dean when they bring Sam home. “You’re his big brother Dean. That means you have to look after him.”
His eyes are very big and very green and very solemn when he promises he will.
*****
“We should get them baptized,” she tells John, when Sam’s a month old.
He gives her a confused look. “I thought we were going to wait until they were older and could decide for themselves,” he says.
She shakes her head. “I changed my mind.”
John looks like he might argue, half a decade of regular church going hasn’t turned him into a religious man.
“I dunno…” he says.
“Please,” she begs, and he gives in.
She calls a friend of her father’s, a priest, who she knows will do it, who she trusts to do it. He drives 900 miles in a day and a night, and she remembers what kind of devotion her family name inspired.
“It’s good to see you Mary,” he says when they meet him at the bank of the Kansas River. Dean and Sam are dressed all in white. John still looks uneasy.
“Are you sure Sammy can handle this?” he asks Mary in an undertone, then turns to the priest. “How do you know my wife again?” he asks, knowing Mary never told him.
“Samuel will be fine,” says the priest, answering the first question. “Newborns are natural swimmers. Their original environment was water.”
He favors John with a thin smile. “It’s just as we grow older, we forget.”
Dean’s submerged first, and Mary’s heart clenches when he goes under. John grabs her hand and holds tight. Dean pops back up with a gasp.
“Cool,” he shouts, clamoring out of the river. “Can I do it again when Sammy’s done?”
Sam wails, sharp and loud, when Mary hands him over to the priest, and she almost takes him back.
“Shh,” says the priest, shaking his head at her. He tweaks Sam’s nose. “Shhh.”
Sam calms down, and the priest walks into the water with him.
“Samuel Winchester,” says the priest gravely, holding Sam up and looking him in the eyes. “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”
He pushes Sam into the water, and Mary almost screams.
The priest’s eyes look yellow.
They aren’t though. It’s just her head, a trick of the light, and right behind that thought is a worse one, brief and terrifying: She hopes he keeps holding Sam under.
Because she knows what’s coming, and she thinks it might be kinder just to kill her baby now.
*****
That night, when Dean and Sam are asleep, John follows her into the shower. The tiles are cold against her back, and she follows the line of his shoulder with her mouth. She tastes the salt of his skin, and it clings, slick and bitter, to her tongue.
*****
She could take Sam and run away, leave behind the man she loves and her eldest son to protect the youngest. She could give Sam to hunters, to friends of her parents, people who would raise him and protect him and teach him. She could abandon him, knowing that all children with destinies eventually find their way home. She could tell John the truth, all of it, everything she’s hidden the last ten years, and they could all leave. Go somewhere far away and safe, or keep on traveling, always staying ahead of the threat.
But it’s a demon, and a strong one, so she knows none of those plans will work.
This is her home and her family, so she’s going to wait. In the end, she knows she will meet it.
*****
She lies awake late into the night now, listening to the baby monitor, listening to her baby breathe.
*****
The war was something she never really thought about, even though it lasted most of her childhood. It was something that happened to other people, in a distant land, too far removed from the blood and smoke reality of her own existence.
There was one photo that stood out though, from when she was a child, before the fighting had even really begun. It was of a monk, sitting in the street, who had set himself on fire.
Self-immolation the caption said, and the word always stuck with her, that and the expression of serenity on the monk’s face, the way the fire seemed to embrace him.
There was another picture that stayed with her. This one was taken years later.
There was no fire this time, but napalm, and the children running down the street, screaming.
*****
The human body is mostly water.
But it will still burn.
End.
AN: Title taken from Adrienne Rich poem of same name. Though I like to think Mary was a lot happier than the speaker in the poem, other than the whole demon thing. I took great liberties with the rite of baptism. As far as I understand it, Catholics don’t practice full immersion (submersion) baptism, and sects that do generally don’t baptize children. Probably because they, like John, suspect there’s something dangerous about dunking an infant underwater. The opening quote I took from this site, which has to do with the monks who self-immolated themselves during the Vietnam conflict. The photos referred to in the story are here and here respectively.
Feedback is good karma. Thanks for reading.
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: PG-13
Summary: The human body is mostly water. Mary, John, assorted others.
Word Count: ~4000
Spoilers/Warnings: Massive spoilers for 4.03 In the Beginning, some dark themes.
Disclaimer
No matter what the specific historical origins are for self-immolation, there is a definite connection between fire and the act of sacrifice.
The human body is mostly water.
*****
Her father told her a story once about a hunter who swallowed a rosary and blessed himself. After that, whatever he pissed on was sanctified, and any evil thing he spat on burned. No demon could ever posses him, and after the first one, no demon ever tried.
Her father told her the story while they were sitting around a campfire. It was a small campfire; they didn’t want to tip off the manticore they were tracking. Her mother, who would have smacked her father with a spoon had he told that story at the dinner table, just rolled her eyes and laughed. The rules were different when they were hunting, but even then, Mary knew this wasn’t the life she wanted.
*****
The human body, along with water, also contains iron and salt, but not enough of either to keep a demon out.
*****
After her parents die, she takes John to the hospital. He’s confused, disoriented, and she tells the staff he fell and hit his head, that he’s still a little messed up from the war, that they shouldn’t believe anything he says.
Then, while they’re looking him over, she finds a payphone and calls her uncle. She tells him what happened, or the important parts of it anyway. She tells him where her parents’ bodies are.
When the hospital gives John back to her- he’s fine, hale as a horse and nobody’d believe he’d been dead three hours ago- she asks to go back to his place.
He says okay, but when they get there, he’s still got questions on his face, so she puts one of his hands on her hip, the other on her breast, and he doesn’t ask any questions after that.
She wakes up the next morning, an orphan and naked.
John still has questions though, fuzzy memories of what happened. She slips something into his morning coffee, mumbles something her grandmother taught her. After that, he doesn’t remember anything about the day before. He’s shocked and pleased to see the car he bought.
“I can’t believe I’d forget buying a beauty like this!” he crows with a wide, boyish smile, running his hands over the Impala’s sleek lines.
The smile turns sly and he slants a glance at Mary.
“Why, she’s almost as pretty as you.”
She laughs then, tremulous but real.
That afternoon, she reports her parents as missing.
The police never do find them.
*****
They get married two months after that. John thinks they should wait, but Mary convinces him not to. It’s a small ceremony, and her uncle walks her down the aisle. The dozen or so hunters that show up she passes off as cousins. John and his relatives smile uneasily at them, but no one pulls a knife at the reception, so Mary considers it a success.
Two months was just about the amount of time it took for Mary to sort through her parents’ possessions and put them in the basement. She doesn’t like the idea of having those kinds of things in her house, but she likes the idea of parting with them less.
John moves into her parents’ house with her, and it has enough charms and protections to keep most anything out, iron and salt laid into the foundations. But that thing got in, so she knows her house isn’t as strong as she’d like, and she knows in ten years, it’ll be back.
John jokes awkwardly about her parents coming back, walking in and shocked to see the two of them having set up house.
Mary never smiles at that, and after awhile, John stops saying it.
******
There was never a moment in her childhood when her parents sat her down and explained the truth about the world. It was something she always knew. Her name was Mary, Dad was a Republican, and monsters were real.
Her parents didn’t start training her until she was six, didn’t start taking her on hunts until she was nine. Before that, her father would leave for weeks, usually with her uncle. Sometimes her mother would go, and Mary would be sent to stay at her grandmother’s.
She met a lot of hunters when she started going with her parents, in bars and roadside diners and occasionally hunting with them if the prey was large enough and scary enough.
Some of them said, “This is no life for a kid, Samuel.”
And some of them said, “Good. She’ll grow up knowing how to protect herself.”
*****
“Have you ever considered having a funeral for your parents?” asks John one night, two years into their marriage. He has black grease smeared across one cheek.
Mary looks up. She’s sitting at the dining room table, studying. She’s taking classes at the university, hoping to become a teacher.
“No,” she says sharply.
John packs a picnic lunch the next morning and convinces her into the car with him. They drive west, into the prairie, until the only thing she can see is the flat, gold earth and the great blue arc of heaven. She always liked it out here; you could see a threat coming a mile away. She thinks maybe that’s why her parents moved to Kansas in the first place. If you know what’s coming, it’s easier to stop it.
John stops in the middle of a dirt crossroads and gets out. Mary follows.
He has a flask in his hand and he raises it to the sky.
“To Samuel and Deanna Campbell,” he says somberly, pouring some of the amber liquid onto the dirt. Then, he tips his head back and drinks from the flask.
He wipes his mouth when he’s done and hands the flask to Mary.
She stares at him, and he stares back with a solemn, level gaze. She turns away.
Then, she lifts the flask up.
“To Mom and Dad,” she says, and her voice is strong. It doesn’t waver or crack. She tips the flask down and watches more of the alcohol pour out and darken the earth. She drinks from it and it burns going down, but she doesn’t cough.
She’s never allowed herself to grieve for her parents, but she does then. She drops her head and sobs, great, body wracking sobs, her arms held tight to her sides, sobs that make her body shake, that make her throat hurt, that make her nauseous.
John wraps his arms around her and doesn’t say anything. He just holds her, steady and close.
*****
John’s not really a religious man, but Mary was raised in the faith. Her family went to church every Sunday, unless they were on a hunt. On those Sundays, they would sit in a circle together, heads bowed, as her father read from the Bible in his harsh, hard voice. Her father had a voice like iron.
After she finds out she’s pregnant, she makes John start going to church with her.
“This is important to me,” she says, placing a hand on her still-flat belly. “I want my baby growing up knowing they’re protected.”
“They will be protected Mary,” sighs John. “You think I’m not going to look after my own kid?”
But he starts going with her anyway.
*****
At five months pregnant, she starts laying salt down again. When John catches her at it, she tells him she’s nesting.
*****
John has nightmares sometimes, from the war. He always drinks too much the day after he has a nightmare, and she worries about him.
“Maybe you should get help,” she says. “Talk to someone.”
He shakes his head. “I’m fine Mary,” he says gruffly. “They’ll go away eventually.”
“Well maybe you shouldn’t drink so much,” she says.
“This is the only time I ever drink,” he tells her, and his eyes are hollow, dark. “You know what it's like to watch someone die?” he asks.
She does, but she knows she’s not supposed to say so. He’s allowed to talk about what he’s seen, but these are the only times he ever does.
He shakes his head to clear it, then stands up.
“You’re right though,” he says, and she can see him mentally locking the memories away, forcing them back and her own John coming back to her.
She hides the whiskey and knows she’s lucky that he came back so normal.
*****
First time she ever saw someone die, she was thirteen. She and her family were working with some other hunters to clear out a vampire nest in Kansas City. One of the hunters got his neck snapped. It wasn’t a clean, swift sound like a bullet or an arrow, but a meaty k-k-crunch that reverbed through Mary’s dreams for months.
Second time she saw someone die, she was sixteen and holding her grandmother’s hand, watching the light ebb out of her grandmother’s eyes. Her grandmother had cancer. She weighed 87 pounds at the time of her death, a frail husk of a woman.
Mary realized then that there was no good way to die.
A year later, she killed a shapeshifter in Kentucky. It looked like her mother.
“It seemed human,” she said, looking down at the corpse with her mother’s face. “You’re sure it’s not a human? Just one with…” She grasped for the word, “powers?”
“It was just a monster,” said her father, clasping her on her shoulder. “You did the right thing Mary. I’m proud of you.”
She never really stops dreaming about the dead shapeshifter with her mother’s face. Mary never saw her mother’s body, and when she closes her eyes and imagines her mother’s death, the shapeshifter is what she sees.
Both times, she was responsible for the death. The demon wanted her.
*****
She spends seventeen hours in labor with Dean. He weighs 8 pounds, 3 ounces.
She names him after her mother because she still hasn’t forgiven her father.
She loves him more than she’s ever loved anything, but she knows he isn’t the one the demon will want. Angels are watching over him.
Giving birth, she thinks with Dean’s small, rosy mouth on her nipple for the first time, is a lot harder than killing someone.
*****
She decides to quit her job as teacher aide in a third grade classroom to take care of Dean.
“It’s almost the 80s,” says the teacher, Ms. Langdon. She’s practically a child herself and has bright pink lipstick and feathered hair. “You can be a mommy and have a career, Mary.”
Later, Mary realizes Ms. Langdon’s probably just a year or two older than she is.
*****
There are things she could teach Dean. Charms she could sing as lullabies, special powders she could teach as recipes. She could tell him the truth, before he’s too old to be afraid of it. There are a lot of things she could tell him. She wonders if making him aware will keep him safe, or drag him into a life she doesn’t want for him. She wonders if she needs to teach him how to protect himself; she knows she can’t wish away the dark things in the world. But most people live their whole lives without being touched by the supernatural. It’s the unlucky and unwise who have to worry.
He’s her baby boy, she decides eventually. She’ll tell him when he’s older, old enough to understand.
But when he’s two and just talking and tells her monsters are under his bed, she checks.
“You shouldn’t humor him,” sighs John. “Just tell him monsters aren’t real. You don’t want him growing up afraid of the dark, do you?”
*****
She has a loving husband, a beautiful son, a large house, and a college education. She has a wonderful life, and she’s very, very, very happy.
*****
She and John met at a community softball game. She was pitcher. She liked softball because it made her feel normal. He was umpire because he knew all the rules and didn’t mind people yelling at him. But also because he was a tiny bit bossy. She didn’t mind though. She chewed him out after the game for making a bad call that almost made her team lose. And he just smiled at her and said, “Well, how about I buy you a coke and we’ll discuss it?”
John was just that way. Sweet, always willing to listen to what she had to say.
*****
John mouths at her breasts. “A little girl, one of each.” Lips at her sternum: “Or another boy, a brother for Dean to play with.”
She twines her fingers in his hair and tilts his face up.
“Dean’s enough,” she says.
She is very careful.
*****
After she finds out she's pregnant, she drops Dean off at a friend’s while John's at work and goes to the Planned Parenthood clinic. She picks up some pamphlets and talks to a nice lady with dyed red hair.
“It’s legal now,” the woman says earnestly. “So it’s much safer than before. And you don’t have to tell your husband if you don’t want to. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want.”
The woman holds her hand as she cries, and in the end, she leaves the pamphlets behind.
“Dean,” she says later, after she’s strapped him into his carseat and is sitting behind the steering wheel. “How would you feel about having a little brother or sister?”
She watches her little boy’s face bloom with excitement in the rearview mirror.
*****
It might be a Rumpelstiltskin thing. Fairytales often hide deeper truths, and names really do have power. She finds the demon’s name, maybe she can find his weakness. She sees the threat on the horizon, so she has time to prepare. Her parents’ books are dusty in the basement, but she doesn’t bring them upstairs in case John finds them.
She enrolls Dean in preschool, and from 8 to 12 every morning, Monday through Thursday, she brings a lantern downstairs and reads.
She calls up hunters her parents knew, people she hasn’t spoken to since the wedding. They say she thought she retired. She says she did, but there’s one more thing she needs to do.
No one’s ever heard of a demon with yellow eyes. They give her more people to call. She winds her way through the hunter phone-tree, and, one Tuesday, has Dean stay late for the afternoon preschool and drives across town to a woman people say is psychic.
The psychic is a disappointment. She takes one look at Mary, standing hopeful-faced and five months pregnant in the doorway and says, “There’s nothing I can do for you miss. That child you’re carrying has a destiny you’ll have no control over.”
She invites Mary in for tea though, but Mary says no, thank you. She has to go pick up her son.
*****
She hears about a man who's becoming an expert on demons. She wonders what kind of tragedy would lead a man to do that. She thinks she knows. When she finally gets in touch with him, she doesn’t ask him about his demons, she asks him about one with yellow eyes. He promises to call back in a few days.
He calls back as promised, and Mary darts for the phone, but John picks it up first.
John listens for a second, and then he looks at Mary.
“It’s for you,” he says. “Guy named Bobby?”
She understands what he’s asking and says in reply, “He’s an old friend of my parents.” Which isn’t strictly true, but is pretty close.
John sighs. “Mary,” he says. “I don’t mind you having male friends. It’s all the secrets that worry me. I don’t even know what your parents did that they know so many people.”
“I need to take this call,” she says, and takes the phone.
“Of course you do,” grumbles John.
“Mary Campbell?” says the man on the telephone. She’s been using her maiden name, doesn’t want to drag John into this. “It’s Bobby Singer.”
“Bobby,” she breathes, “any news?”
“I’m sorry,” says Bobby, and he sounds it. “But whoever this bastard is, I can’t find him. Either he hasn’t been topside in awhile, or he keeps a hell of a low profile.”
“Thanks anyway,” she tells him politely and hangs up the phone.
John’s staring grimly at her when she turns to face him, and she’s already on the jagged edge of tears. She breathes in deep and steadies herself against the counter. She doesn’t want to have this fight.
“Mary,” he begins.
“John,” she cuts him off. “I’m sorry, but half the time I didn’t know what it was my parents were doing. They were pretty secretive people.”
John visibly deflates at that. He looks tired, worn out. He’s been working extra hours at the garage so he can take time off after the baby is born. He rubs his face.
“I guess that’s one way you take after them,” he says dully.
“I guess so,” she echoes back.
*****
She always liked domestic chores as a kid. Doing the dishes, sweeping, folding the laundry- things like that. They were more pleasant than the other kinds of chores- cleaning the guns, sharpening the knives, gravedigging. The kinds of chores that always ended in fire and blood and death.
All chores have the same result though, the same impetus: purification.
******
At seven months pregnant, Mary lugs the books up from the basement. None of them say anything that can help. It takes her an hour to get all the books up stairs, and then she has to rest. Then another half hour to get them all into her car.
There’s gasoline in the garage, but she doesn’t want John asking questions if he realizes some is missing. She buys a couple gallons.
There’s a place she and her parents used to bring bodies of things they killed in town. It wasn’t used very often- a werewolf when she was eleven, a family of redcaps when she was fifteen, a zombie the year before she met John.
The firepit’s still there. Scorched and blackened, but usable. She drags the books into the pit, then douses them with gasoline. She lights a match. She throws it in.
And she watches the books burn.
“Mommy!” cries Dean when she comes to pick him up from preschool. He runs up and attempts to hug her, then tips his head back and wrinkles his nose. “Mommy,” he whines. “You smell like smoke!”
She smooths her hand over his hair. “I know baby,” she says. “Don’t tell Daddy, okay? This will be a Mommy and Dean secret.”
Dean stares at her gravely and nods his head.
“Okay,” he says. Then, brightly: “Can we go to McDonald’s? I want a Happy Meal!”
*****
Her second child is two weeks early, and she’s in labor with him for twelve hours. He’s smaller than Dean, weighing in at exactly 7 pounds.
He’s quieter, and she loves him, but it makes her uneasy.
“You’re what the demon wants,” she tells him. “I don’t know why or for what. I’m sorry.”
This child, she knows, has to know the truth from the beginning. He was doomed before he was born, and she’ll have to teach him how to protect himself.
She names him Samuel. After her father.
Sam.
*****
Her father loved her. She knows that. He just didn’t understand her.
“Mary,” he said, when she told him she wanted to go to college. “Can’t you see this is more important than anything else you could do?”
This had included the car, the haunted forest all around them, and the black and silent night.
******
“This is your baby brother,” she says to Dean when they bring Sam home. “You’re his big brother Dean. That means you have to look after him.”
His eyes are very big and very green and very solemn when he promises he will.
*****
“We should get them baptized,” she tells John, when Sam’s a month old.
He gives her a confused look. “I thought we were going to wait until they were older and could decide for themselves,” he says.
She shakes her head. “I changed my mind.”
John looks like he might argue, half a decade of regular church going hasn’t turned him into a religious man.
“I dunno…” he says.
“Please,” she begs, and he gives in.
She calls a friend of her father’s, a priest, who she knows will do it, who she trusts to do it. He drives 900 miles in a day and a night, and she remembers what kind of devotion her family name inspired.
“It’s good to see you Mary,” he says when they meet him at the bank of the Kansas River. Dean and Sam are dressed all in white. John still looks uneasy.
“Are you sure Sammy can handle this?” he asks Mary in an undertone, then turns to the priest. “How do you know my wife again?” he asks, knowing Mary never told him.
“Samuel will be fine,” says the priest, answering the first question. “Newborns are natural swimmers. Their original environment was water.”
He favors John with a thin smile. “It’s just as we grow older, we forget.”
Dean’s submerged first, and Mary’s heart clenches when he goes under. John grabs her hand and holds tight. Dean pops back up with a gasp.
“Cool,” he shouts, clamoring out of the river. “Can I do it again when Sammy’s done?”
Sam wails, sharp and loud, when Mary hands him over to the priest, and she almost takes him back.
“Shh,” says the priest, shaking his head at her. He tweaks Sam’s nose. “Shhh.”
Sam calms down, and the priest walks into the water with him.
“Samuel Winchester,” says the priest gravely, holding Sam up and looking him in the eyes. “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”
He pushes Sam into the water, and Mary almost screams.
The priest’s eyes look yellow.
They aren’t though. It’s just her head, a trick of the light, and right behind that thought is a worse one, brief and terrifying: She hopes he keeps holding Sam under.
Because she knows what’s coming, and she thinks it might be kinder just to kill her baby now.
*****
That night, when Dean and Sam are asleep, John follows her into the shower. The tiles are cold against her back, and she follows the line of his shoulder with her mouth. She tastes the salt of his skin, and it clings, slick and bitter, to her tongue.
*****
She could take Sam and run away, leave behind the man she loves and her eldest son to protect the youngest. She could give Sam to hunters, to friends of her parents, people who would raise him and protect him and teach him. She could abandon him, knowing that all children with destinies eventually find their way home. She could tell John the truth, all of it, everything she’s hidden the last ten years, and they could all leave. Go somewhere far away and safe, or keep on traveling, always staying ahead of the threat.
But it’s a demon, and a strong one, so she knows none of those plans will work.
This is her home and her family, so she’s going to wait. In the end, she knows she will meet it.
*****
She lies awake late into the night now, listening to the baby monitor, listening to her baby breathe.
*****
The war was something she never really thought about, even though it lasted most of her childhood. It was something that happened to other people, in a distant land, too far removed from the blood and smoke reality of her own existence.
There was one photo that stood out though, from when she was a child, before the fighting had even really begun. It was of a monk, sitting in the street, who had set himself on fire.
Self-immolation the caption said, and the word always stuck with her, that and the expression of serenity on the monk’s face, the way the fire seemed to embrace him.
There was another picture that stayed with her. This one was taken years later.
There was no fire this time, but napalm, and the children running down the street, screaming.
*****
The human body is mostly water.
But it will still burn.
End.
AN: Title taken from Adrienne Rich poem of same name. Though I like to think Mary was a lot happier than the speaker in the poem, other than the whole demon thing. I took great liberties with the rite of baptism. As far as I understand it, Catholics don’t practice full immersion (submersion) baptism, and sects that do generally don’t baptize children. Probably because they, like John, suspect there’s something dangerous about dunking an infant underwater. The opening quote I took from this site, which has to do with the monks who self-immolated themselves during the Vietnam conflict. The photos referred to in the story are here and here respectively.
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