SPN Fic: Trying to Get to the Bar (Gen, PG)
Here's my summergen story -- thank you to everyone who already read and left feedback. ♥
Title: Trying to get to the bar
Author: dotfic
Recipient: faithintheboys
Rating: PG
Spoilers: For season 4
Warning: canon deaths
WC: 3,700
Author's Notes: Written for the spn_summergen 2009 exchange for faithintheboys, who asked for John, Mary and her parents in the afterlife. Discuss the boy, hunting and other things. Title by Talking Heads. Many thanks to deirdre_c for the beta.
Summary: Once a hunter, always a hunter. Even in Heaven.
Where Samuel is now doesn't seem like the kind of place where you're supposed to be riled up, but Samuel is riled up.
First he had a long argument with a strange, pale old man in the dark suit, pleading, raging, explaining how his family still needed him, but the old man was patient, and Samuel knows far too much about what spirits are like. He would rather rot in Hell than become that. So here he is, in this place, which doesn't seem to be Hell, can't be with its cool green lawn and bees droning in the garden and the big house that looks a lot like his Gram's.
But it might as well be.
There's no one else here. He wanders from room to room, calling for Deanna and Mary, gets only silence in return. Outside he gets only the twittering of birds. He sets out to do a reconnoiter and finds that while it looks like only a few hundred yards to the fence, he can't get any closer to it no matter how long he walks.
The sky is perfect, not a cloud in it. The whole situation is completely unacceptable.
He curses and kicks at a very nice bed of marigolds, sending the yellow petals up in clouds.
"Oh, Samuel. Really, is that going to do any good?"
It's Deanna.
After he hugs her, holding her close enough he lifts her feet off the ground, he puts her down and curses again. "You got killed." He knows he sounds accusing.
"Pot, kettle." She pats her hand against his chest, and frowns. "Sorry, babe. I tried. But that yellow-eyed bastard...I fought hard."
"I know you did."
"So." Her eyes sweep around the gardens. "Are we where I think we are?"
"Yeah. Heaven." He about spits the word.
Deanna sighs. "This isn't good. I mean, it could be worse. But it's not good. We need to be back there, with Mary." She looks off towards the fence line. "You tried to get out?"
"Tried. Can't get near the damn fence."
"Well, then, there's no sense working ourselves up over something we haven't figured out how to fix yet," Deanna says, emphasizing the yet. She hooks her arm through his. "You want some lemonade while we talk it over?"
"Sure."
Heaven has cookies, which is a point in its favor. Deanna makes them, the smell filling the house, and he eats them hot and still soft from the oven.
There's no booze to speak of, which is points off, but he's got Deanna, so he comes out way ahead.
They both struggle against it, but after a while it seems less important to keep trying to walk to the fence line or talk about how big the property is or speculate about what's happening to Mary.
"She's got John to look after her," Deanna says.
"Oh, I feel so much better."
"Samuel! He's a nice boy."
Samuel snorts and reaches for another cookie.
"Also there's that hunter." Deanna puts a finger to her lips thoughtfully. "Don't know what it was about him, but he's good people. So is John," she adds, in her this-argument-is-over voice.
Samuel thinks there's something on the tip of his brain about that hunter, something he heard through the confused nightmare rush of having that thing take over his body, but it's gone already.
"Sneaky little bastards. They're death machines, devouring everything in their path, and they've got a defense mechanism, a fluid. It's like wax. Or they give off a secretion. They feed, and when that victim is dead, they move on to the next."
"Yes, dear." Deanna kisses him on the top of his head, then goes into the house, leaving him to prepare his weapon.
He's got a plastic spray bottle from the kitchen. With the same care he always gave to the preparing of holy water, Samuel adds dish soap to the water in the bottle, swishes it around, and attempts a practice spray.
Those aphids are going down.
As he kneels in the garden spraying intruders, he notices a hole in the dirt, probably gophers. Well, he'll take them out too.
Once a hunter, always a hunter.
Meanwhile, Deanna bakes a lot of cookies and pie in a variety of flavors, because apparently, if Heaven is climateless, that also means every conceivable berry and fruit can grow in their garden. Samuel watches her throw herself into the work, flour dusting her hands, her nose, her hair.
She always liked cooking, but not like this. The energy she puts into it, the gleam of intentness in her eyes as she describes her tactics for keeping the piecrust from getting soggy in the oven, is familiar.
He makes a few more half-hearted attempts to reach the fence line. Sometimes Deanna walks with him.
Then they start forgetting to try at all.
Samuel's got his gardening tools spread out on the kitchen table as he oils and cleans the prongs of a hand rake. Gardening's not that different from hunting. There are different tools for different tasks, well-maintained ones serve better than neglected ones. There are enemies to fight.
Like that damned gopher. He wonders if it's okay to think damned in Heaven. He hasn't stopped cursing, despite Deanna's sharp looks. She always looked at him like that when he cursed back on earth. So far not one bolt of lighting has struck him--not that there is any lightning in Heaven--but it seems wrong. He does it anyway. Screw Heaven.
Nope, no lightning.
He wonders that Heaven has pests of all kinds, but no storms or rain.
He's reaching for the dandelion weeder when he hears Deanna's cry through the open window, where she's making sun tea on the porch.
Samuel grabs the hand rake and runs.
There's a very tall woman in a white nightgown, long blonde hair falling over her shoulders, standing on the porch. "Hi, Daddy," she says, and Samuel lowers the hand rake.
Deanna has her hands pressed to her mouth, her eyes huge and full of tears.
It takes Samuel ten seconds to recognize the woman. A jolt of grief follows the quick stab of joy. "Mary?"
Her face looks calm, at peace, but there's terrible sadness in her eyes. "It took me a long time to get here," she says, and then falls into Deanna's arms.
"My boys." Mary sits in an armchair with her hands knitted together in her lap, back rigid. Samuel recognizes the posture from old family fights. "They're all hunters."
"Your boys?" Deanna pours out more tea into Mary's glass.
"John. And our sons, Sam and Dean. All hunters, because of me." She bites her lip. "Because of what happened to me." She glances up at Samuel and suddenly she looks like his little girl again, wanting him to fix it.
Something clicks in Samuel's brain. "Wait, did you say..."
"Dean?" Deanna finishes his sentence.
"Yes," Mary says, with a slow patient smile, like she thinks they've gone a little mad. Samuel remembers that look of his daughter's, too. "My oldest."
A memory, sharp and clear, cuts through the haze of remembered impressions. "That's not possible," he says.
"Oh, it's very possible," Deanna answers. She nods firmly. "It's no more outlandish than demons being real. And he was determined and sassy enough to be one of ours."
"What are you two talking about?" A crease forms in the middle of Mary's forehead.
It takes a while to explain. When they're done, Mary swallows hard, and says, "I'm glad you got to meet him, and I'm sorry you never got to see Sam." The grief in her face softens away as she turns to Samuel, and her mouth twitches. "He looks a lot like you."
Mary's worse than Samuel, can't seem to settle. She paces when she's in the house. She works on the garden with Samuel or helps Deanna with baking, her hands skillful and strong but moving as if her mind isn't on the work.
She tells them everything, about her deal, about her death, about being a ghost and getting to see her children grown up, once, for a few moments.
It's because of Mary's restlessness that they try to walk to the edge again. They still can't seem to get there. The whole world is a long sprawl of green grass and trees and the fence always, always in the distance.
Samuel feels like they're in a terrarium, like something might be watching them.
"This isn't Heaven," Mary says, her jaw jutting. She picks up a pebble and hurls it across the lawn. "John and the boys aren't here."
"Then we know they're alive," Deanna says, hand resting on Mary's shoulder.
Or in the other place, Samuel thinks, but keeps it to himself.
After a while, Mary forgets to try to walk to the edge. She's still restless. The three of them fall into a routine and it starts to feel like this is all there has ever been, this place with no weather, only the house and the grounds, his wife and his daughter and different kinds of pie.
When the lanky young man Samuel doesn't recognize appears in the garden while he and Mary are attacking aphids, Samuel's first detached thought is he looks like me.
Even before Mary, crouched among the flowers, raises her head and her face changes, Samuel realizes who the boy is.
Standing in a patch of begonias, the boy turns, looking confused, and then freezes when his gaze falls on Mary.
Mary slowly gets to her feet as the spray can falls. "Sam?"
Samuel has never seen anyone look the way his daughter does now.
"Oh, Sam." Mary walks towards the boy. "Oh, no, no. You're here."
"I'm sorry," Sam mumbles, as Mary takes his face between her hands. "I didn't want to go but she said it was hurting him for me to stay and so I finally said yes and--" Sam's knees buckle and Mary takes his weight as if it's nothing, as if he's a small child. She kneels with him on the soft dirt of the garden, crushing the flowers, and holds him as he says, almost incoherent, "I left him, I shouldn't have left him, he's still back there he's alone and I shouldn't have--it's my fault, I..."
Mary makes hushing sounds and smoothes his hair. "It's all right, it's not your fault, it's not your fault."
Finally Sam's breathing slows. He sniffs hard, wipes his palm over his damp face, and then helps his mother to her feet.
"Hi, Sam," Mary says, and smiles her slow, wide smile.
He smiles back, welcoming lines forming in his cheeks. "Hi, Mom," Sam says.
Deanna is at Samuel's side now, and she makes a small sound, a gasp, almost a squeak, of emotion.
"Sam." Samuel steps forward; someone has to do something or they'll all just keep staring and beaming at each other literally for eternity. He holds out his hand and Sam grasps it. The boy's grip is strong. "I believe I'm your grandfather."
Sam's jaw drops, and then he looks at Deanna. "And you're my grandmother?"
"This one's smart as a whip," she says, dimpling, and Sam looks like he's biting back a laugh before he steps forward to hug her. His arms are so long, and he's so tall, that he almost surrounds Deanna.
Then Sam steps back and looks around him; Samuel notes the way his gaze tracks rapidly over the house, the grounds, the trees and distant fence line. He's got the stare of a hunter.
Sam's attention snaps back to Mary. "The demon, the one that killed you, he has a plan, and Dean's still--" His hand clenches into a fist, down by his thigh. "I shouldn't have agreed to go."
"It's all right, sweetheart," Mary says, and then turns to Samuel. "Maybe we can try again to reach the fence line." Her voice hardens. "We have to get out somehow."
Sam suddenly raises his head. His body flickers in and out, the way ghosts do. "Dean?" He says, sharp and urgent.
He vanishes.
They keep trying to reach the fence, which seems to be getting closer with each attempt, or so it seems. Samuel checks his assessment with Deanna and Mary, who agree with him. They're definitely getting closer.
Mary traps the gopher (which seems to come back no matter how many times Samuel kills it), takes it into the woods, and lets it go while Samuel teases her about being a softie.
She rolls her eyes. "It's a cute little furry woodland creature, Dad, not a gulon." Looking off into the trees, Mary frowns. "Do you hear something?"
"Nope." Samuel peers down at some kind of animal tracks in the muddy banks of the creek.
"Sounded like voices--a lot of them. Far off."
Must be the cabin fever getting to her, Samuel thinks.
Samuel can't reconcile the man standing in the living room with the boy Mary once dated. That skinny, puppy-faced kid turned into this bearded, muscular, and imposing man? He seems too big for all the furniture.
He and Mary don't stop staring into each other's eyes, not for a moment. God himself could swing by for a visit and they probably wouldn't stop. It's been like that since he appeared.
"You're John Winchester?" Samuel snorts. "You sure?"
"Pretty goddamned sure," he says, still staring at Mary.
The both of them are acting the same way they did when they were dating. Samuel gives up on trying to get anyone to have a coherent conversation, and lets Deanna drag him off to the kitchen, promising to make him a sandwich.
"So the boys are okay?" Deanna says, as they all eat muffins in the sunroom (at least that's what Deanna calls it).
"Saw them with my own eyes," John says, and the soft way he says it doesn't fit with the way he looks, road-worn and roughened as much as any hunter Samuel has ever known.
"Well thank goodness for that," Deanna says, reaching for the butter. "I'm glad they're together. And that yellow-eyed son of a bitch is gone," she adds, a hard iron edge in her voice that Samuel has heard before.
Samuel smells sulfur for a moment, remembering the black smoke streaming right at him.
"Doesn't mean they're safe." John pushes away his plate, hard enough to make the china clatter. "And we're sitting here cooling our heels and watching the marigolds bloom." Mary grabs his hand and squeezes. "Thought I was ready to move on, get some peace, but this doesn't feel peaceful."
A bird twitters outside the open window.
"No, it doesn't." Samuel looks around the table.
Deanna moves all the breakfast dishes to one side, and Mary puts the salt-shaker in the middle.
"So this is the house," she says, glancing from John to Samuel. "We keep walking, but can't ever seem to reach the fence." Mary runs her finger across the table, pressing hard into the tablecloth, and stops when she reaches the plates.
"It's like the fence moves." Samuel nods.
"Closer we walk to it, the farther away it looks," says Deanna, gnawing on her lower lip as she thinks.
"It looks," John says, with emphasis.
His eyes go far away, and then his gaze snaps back hard to the salt shaker, his knuckles pressing against the table, and Samuel all of a sudden has the weird feeling that he'd be able to follow this man's orders, which is ludicrous. He's a thick-headed boy, wet behind the ears despite having been to 'Nam.
John turns to Deanna. "We need cloth napkins," he says, "cut into strips. Or use sheets, make 'em about this long." He holds up his hands.
"What? What're we going to do with cloth napkins?" The moment's gone; no way is Samuel going to take orders from John Winchester.
"I've got an idea."
"You're a crazy son of a bitch, you know that?" Samuel can barely keep still as the cloth covers his eyes. He feels the tug of Deanna's fingers at the back of his head, tying the blindfold into place.
"I hear that a lot," John says, and Mary laughs.
"Ready?" Deanna says.
"Ready," Samuel, John, and Mary reply together.
"On three," Deanna says. "One, two, three."
They start walking. Samuel feels Deanna's hand gripping his, can feel by the pull of things that her other hand is holding Mary's. Samuel peeks down beneath the bottom of the blindfold and sees they're linked together in a chain, John holding Mary's hand, Mary holding Deanna's, Deanna's holding Samuel's. If one stumbles, the others will keep them upright.
He feels the terrain change under his feet, from grass, to the garden, and then the softer ground beneath the trees. The creek is nearby, the water gurgling.
"Wait," Mary says, and the line stops. "I hear something...the voices again. They're talking."
"Who's talking? Mary, what's going on?" There's worry in John's voice, and it's an echo of Samuel's own.
"Oh my goodness," Mary breathes. "I think it's--it's angels. I can hear them."
"Holy shit," John says.
For a second, Samuel thinks that maybe his little girl has gone insane, but given everything else, it's no less logical than there being no rain in Heaven, but the flowers growing anyway. Like Deanna said, no more outlandish than demons being real.
It's all too strange being blindfolded, though. Samuel starts to feel stifled, he needs to see, right now. His hand goes to the knot but Deanna makes a sharp sound next to him and he thinks better of it. He's not sure how Deanna knows; but she's always been able to pick up on things like that.
"What're they saying?" John asks.
"They're going to lay siege to Hell," Mary says. "There's something--no, someone there they want, a soul."
"We should keep moving," Samuel says, his skin prickling. If Heaven had storms, it would be that prickly feeling before a storm rolls in.
He can tell by the coolness and the brush of leaves against his arms that they're deeper into the woods. He thinks they've never gotten this far. Deanna stumbles and Samuel tightens his grip on her, keeping her on her feet.
Samuel hears a thump, and then his body comes into contact with a flat wooden surface.
The fence.
"We have to let go of each other to climb over," John says. "Whatever you do, don't remove your blindfold, you'll probably get pulled right back to the house. Take it off after you've landed on the other side."
Letting go of Deanna's hand is one of the most difficult things Samuel has ever done. He puts his palms against the wood, feeling a knothole and rough wood--his guess is the fence isn't painted. Heaven went for the rustic look. The boards shake--must be the others, pulling themselves up. Samuel grips the top, puts the soles of his shoes against the wood, and hauls himself over. He drops to the other side and pulls off the blindfold.
The four of them stand blinking on a ledge of grass maybe six feet wide that drops off into nothing. Thin wisps of fog drift before them.
Not fog. Clouds.
Together, Samuel and Deanna and Mary and John inch forward and peer over. Clouds, and cliff-face straight down, too far down to see how far, with twisted pine trees growing out sideways here and there, clinging to the rock. Across the divide, snow-topped mountains appear for a moment during a break in the misty clouds.
"Well, shit," John says.
It's cold, the wind humming with a high-pitched whine. Mary crouches close to the edge and leans as if she's listening with her whole body. She goes still, then jerks back from the edge, eyes widening as she grabs John's wrist. He crouches beside her and she grips his arms, turns to face him. The distress on Mary's face makes Samuel wish she were six years old again so he could tell her everything's going to be okay; but that won't work, not now, not here.
"What?" John's voice scratches low.
"The angels--the voices I've been hearing, they found the soul they wanted." Mary puts her hand to her throat. "They keep saying one thing, over and over. 'Dean Winchester is saved.'"
Samuel watches John's face change, the color draining out of it as he catches on. "Dean was in Hell?" John looks out towards the mountains, now hidden behind the mist.
"Sam," Mary says. "Because of Sam."
"He made a deal." John moves from the edge, curls his hand into a fist, and then slams it so hard against the wood the entire line of fence shakes, farther than Samuel can see. "Dean made a deal."
"But..." Deanna hugs her arms and shivers; Samuel pulls her against him. "But the angels said he's safe now."
After a few deep breaths, John seems calmer. "Bet those angel assholes are the same ones who built the trick fence and kept us shut up in that fishbowl for so long."
"John!" Mary sounds a little shocked. "Maybe we shouldn't--I mean, they're angels. I don't think we should call them assholes."
"What do we do now?" Deanna asks, voice calm and low and steady. "Do any of us want to go back?"
Nobody says anything.
"Didn't think so," Deanna murmurs.
The mist curls itself into shapes that almost resemble something, but don't. They all peer down into bottomless fall, then turn to look down along the fence, which curves in a line that appears infinite.
Heaven can go screw itself, Samuel thinks.
In single file, they start walking.
Title: Trying to get to the bar
Author: dotfic
Recipient: faithintheboys
Rating: PG
Spoilers: For season 4
Warning: canon deaths
WC: 3,700
Author's Notes: Written for the spn_summergen 2009 exchange for faithintheboys, who asked for John, Mary and her parents in the afterlife. Discuss the boy, hunting and other things. Title by Talking Heads. Many thanks to deirdre_c for the beta.
Summary: Once a hunter, always a hunter. Even in Heaven.
Where Samuel is now doesn't seem like the kind of place where you're supposed to be riled up, but Samuel is riled up.
First he had a long argument with a strange, pale old man in the dark suit, pleading, raging, explaining how his family still needed him, but the old man was patient, and Samuel knows far too much about what spirits are like. He would rather rot in Hell than become that. So here he is, in this place, which doesn't seem to be Hell, can't be with its cool green lawn and bees droning in the garden and the big house that looks a lot like his Gram's.
But it might as well be.
There's no one else here. He wanders from room to room, calling for Deanna and Mary, gets only silence in return. Outside he gets only the twittering of birds. He sets out to do a reconnoiter and finds that while it looks like only a few hundred yards to the fence, he can't get any closer to it no matter how long he walks.
The sky is perfect, not a cloud in it. The whole situation is completely unacceptable.
He curses and kicks at a very nice bed of marigolds, sending the yellow petals up in clouds.
"Oh, Samuel. Really, is that going to do any good?"
It's Deanna.
After he hugs her, holding her close enough he lifts her feet off the ground, he puts her down and curses again. "You got killed." He knows he sounds accusing.
"Pot, kettle." She pats her hand against his chest, and frowns. "Sorry, babe. I tried. But that yellow-eyed bastard...I fought hard."
"I know you did."
"So." Her eyes sweep around the gardens. "Are we where I think we are?"
"Yeah. Heaven." He about spits the word.
Deanna sighs. "This isn't good. I mean, it could be worse. But it's not good. We need to be back there, with Mary." She looks off towards the fence line. "You tried to get out?"
"Tried. Can't get near the damn fence."
"Well, then, there's no sense working ourselves up over something we haven't figured out how to fix yet," Deanna says, emphasizing the yet. She hooks her arm through his. "You want some lemonade while we talk it over?"
"Sure."
Heaven has cookies, which is a point in its favor. Deanna makes them, the smell filling the house, and he eats them hot and still soft from the oven.
There's no booze to speak of, which is points off, but he's got Deanna, so he comes out way ahead.
They both struggle against it, but after a while it seems less important to keep trying to walk to the fence line or talk about how big the property is or speculate about what's happening to Mary.
"She's got John to look after her," Deanna says.
"Oh, I feel so much better."
"Samuel! He's a nice boy."
Samuel snorts and reaches for another cookie.
"Also there's that hunter." Deanna puts a finger to her lips thoughtfully. "Don't know what it was about him, but he's good people. So is John," she adds, in her this-argument-is-over voice.
Samuel thinks there's something on the tip of his brain about that hunter, something he heard through the confused nightmare rush of having that thing take over his body, but it's gone already.
"Sneaky little bastards. They're death machines, devouring everything in their path, and they've got a defense mechanism, a fluid. It's like wax. Or they give off a secretion. They feed, and when that victim is dead, they move on to the next."
"Yes, dear." Deanna kisses him on the top of his head, then goes into the house, leaving him to prepare his weapon.
He's got a plastic spray bottle from the kitchen. With the same care he always gave to the preparing of holy water, Samuel adds dish soap to the water in the bottle, swishes it around, and attempts a practice spray.
Those aphids are going down.
As he kneels in the garden spraying intruders, he notices a hole in the dirt, probably gophers. Well, he'll take them out too.
Once a hunter, always a hunter.
Meanwhile, Deanna bakes a lot of cookies and pie in a variety of flavors, because apparently, if Heaven is climateless, that also means every conceivable berry and fruit can grow in their garden. Samuel watches her throw herself into the work, flour dusting her hands, her nose, her hair.
She always liked cooking, but not like this. The energy she puts into it, the gleam of intentness in her eyes as she describes her tactics for keeping the piecrust from getting soggy in the oven, is familiar.
He makes a few more half-hearted attempts to reach the fence line. Sometimes Deanna walks with him.
Then they start forgetting to try at all.
Samuel's got his gardening tools spread out on the kitchen table as he oils and cleans the prongs of a hand rake. Gardening's not that different from hunting. There are different tools for different tasks, well-maintained ones serve better than neglected ones. There are enemies to fight.
Like that damned gopher. He wonders if it's okay to think damned in Heaven. He hasn't stopped cursing, despite Deanna's sharp looks. She always looked at him like that when he cursed back on earth. So far not one bolt of lighting has struck him--not that there is any lightning in Heaven--but it seems wrong. He does it anyway. Screw Heaven.
Nope, no lightning.
He wonders that Heaven has pests of all kinds, but no storms or rain.
He's reaching for the dandelion weeder when he hears Deanna's cry through the open window, where she's making sun tea on the porch.
Samuel grabs the hand rake and runs.
There's a very tall woman in a white nightgown, long blonde hair falling over her shoulders, standing on the porch. "Hi, Daddy," she says, and Samuel lowers the hand rake.
Deanna has her hands pressed to her mouth, her eyes huge and full of tears.
It takes Samuel ten seconds to recognize the woman. A jolt of grief follows the quick stab of joy. "Mary?"
Her face looks calm, at peace, but there's terrible sadness in her eyes. "It took me a long time to get here," she says, and then falls into Deanna's arms.
"My boys." Mary sits in an armchair with her hands knitted together in her lap, back rigid. Samuel recognizes the posture from old family fights. "They're all hunters."
"Your boys?" Deanna pours out more tea into Mary's glass.
"John. And our sons, Sam and Dean. All hunters, because of me." She bites her lip. "Because of what happened to me." She glances up at Samuel and suddenly she looks like his little girl again, wanting him to fix it.
Something clicks in Samuel's brain. "Wait, did you say..."
"Dean?" Deanna finishes his sentence.
"Yes," Mary says, with a slow patient smile, like she thinks they've gone a little mad. Samuel remembers that look of his daughter's, too. "My oldest."
A memory, sharp and clear, cuts through the haze of remembered impressions. "That's not possible," he says.
"Oh, it's very possible," Deanna answers. She nods firmly. "It's no more outlandish than demons being real. And he was determined and sassy enough to be one of ours."
"What are you two talking about?" A crease forms in the middle of Mary's forehead.
It takes a while to explain. When they're done, Mary swallows hard, and says, "I'm glad you got to meet him, and I'm sorry you never got to see Sam." The grief in her face softens away as she turns to Samuel, and her mouth twitches. "He looks a lot like you."
Mary's worse than Samuel, can't seem to settle. She paces when she's in the house. She works on the garden with Samuel or helps Deanna with baking, her hands skillful and strong but moving as if her mind isn't on the work.
She tells them everything, about her deal, about her death, about being a ghost and getting to see her children grown up, once, for a few moments.
It's because of Mary's restlessness that they try to walk to the edge again. They still can't seem to get there. The whole world is a long sprawl of green grass and trees and the fence always, always in the distance.
Samuel feels like they're in a terrarium, like something might be watching them.
"This isn't Heaven," Mary says, her jaw jutting. She picks up a pebble and hurls it across the lawn. "John and the boys aren't here."
"Then we know they're alive," Deanna says, hand resting on Mary's shoulder.
Or in the other place, Samuel thinks, but keeps it to himself.
After a while, Mary forgets to try to walk to the edge. She's still restless. The three of them fall into a routine and it starts to feel like this is all there has ever been, this place with no weather, only the house and the grounds, his wife and his daughter and different kinds of pie.
When the lanky young man Samuel doesn't recognize appears in the garden while he and Mary are attacking aphids, Samuel's first detached thought is he looks like me.
Even before Mary, crouched among the flowers, raises her head and her face changes, Samuel realizes who the boy is.
Standing in a patch of begonias, the boy turns, looking confused, and then freezes when his gaze falls on Mary.
Mary slowly gets to her feet as the spray can falls. "Sam?"
Samuel has never seen anyone look the way his daughter does now.
"Oh, Sam." Mary walks towards the boy. "Oh, no, no. You're here."
"I'm sorry," Sam mumbles, as Mary takes his face between her hands. "I didn't want to go but she said it was hurting him for me to stay and so I finally said yes and--" Sam's knees buckle and Mary takes his weight as if it's nothing, as if he's a small child. She kneels with him on the soft dirt of the garden, crushing the flowers, and holds him as he says, almost incoherent, "I left him, I shouldn't have left him, he's still back there he's alone and I shouldn't have--it's my fault, I..."
Mary makes hushing sounds and smoothes his hair. "It's all right, it's not your fault, it's not your fault."
Finally Sam's breathing slows. He sniffs hard, wipes his palm over his damp face, and then helps his mother to her feet.
"Hi, Sam," Mary says, and smiles her slow, wide smile.
He smiles back, welcoming lines forming in his cheeks. "Hi, Mom," Sam says.
Deanna is at Samuel's side now, and she makes a small sound, a gasp, almost a squeak, of emotion.
"Sam." Samuel steps forward; someone has to do something or they'll all just keep staring and beaming at each other literally for eternity. He holds out his hand and Sam grasps it. The boy's grip is strong. "I believe I'm your grandfather."
Sam's jaw drops, and then he looks at Deanna. "And you're my grandmother?"
"This one's smart as a whip," she says, dimpling, and Sam looks like he's biting back a laugh before he steps forward to hug her. His arms are so long, and he's so tall, that he almost surrounds Deanna.
Then Sam steps back and looks around him; Samuel notes the way his gaze tracks rapidly over the house, the grounds, the trees and distant fence line. He's got the stare of a hunter.
Sam's attention snaps back to Mary. "The demon, the one that killed you, he has a plan, and Dean's still--" His hand clenches into a fist, down by his thigh. "I shouldn't have agreed to go."
"It's all right, sweetheart," Mary says, and then turns to Samuel. "Maybe we can try again to reach the fence line." Her voice hardens. "We have to get out somehow."
Sam suddenly raises his head. His body flickers in and out, the way ghosts do. "Dean?" He says, sharp and urgent.
He vanishes.
They keep trying to reach the fence, which seems to be getting closer with each attempt, or so it seems. Samuel checks his assessment with Deanna and Mary, who agree with him. They're definitely getting closer.
Mary traps the gopher (which seems to come back no matter how many times Samuel kills it), takes it into the woods, and lets it go while Samuel teases her about being a softie.
She rolls her eyes. "It's a cute little furry woodland creature, Dad, not a gulon." Looking off into the trees, Mary frowns. "Do you hear something?"
"Nope." Samuel peers down at some kind of animal tracks in the muddy banks of the creek.
"Sounded like voices--a lot of them. Far off."
Must be the cabin fever getting to her, Samuel thinks.
Samuel can't reconcile the man standing in the living room with the boy Mary once dated. That skinny, puppy-faced kid turned into this bearded, muscular, and imposing man? He seems too big for all the furniture.
He and Mary don't stop staring into each other's eyes, not for a moment. God himself could swing by for a visit and they probably wouldn't stop. It's been like that since he appeared.
"You're John Winchester?" Samuel snorts. "You sure?"
"Pretty goddamned sure," he says, still staring at Mary.
The both of them are acting the same way they did when they were dating. Samuel gives up on trying to get anyone to have a coherent conversation, and lets Deanna drag him off to the kitchen, promising to make him a sandwich.
"So the boys are okay?" Deanna says, as they all eat muffins in the sunroom (at least that's what Deanna calls it).
"Saw them with my own eyes," John says, and the soft way he says it doesn't fit with the way he looks, road-worn and roughened as much as any hunter Samuel has ever known.
"Well thank goodness for that," Deanna says, reaching for the butter. "I'm glad they're together. And that yellow-eyed son of a bitch is gone," she adds, a hard iron edge in her voice that Samuel has heard before.
Samuel smells sulfur for a moment, remembering the black smoke streaming right at him.
"Doesn't mean they're safe." John pushes away his plate, hard enough to make the china clatter. "And we're sitting here cooling our heels and watching the marigolds bloom." Mary grabs his hand and squeezes. "Thought I was ready to move on, get some peace, but this doesn't feel peaceful."
A bird twitters outside the open window.
"No, it doesn't." Samuel looks around the table.
Deanna moves all the breakfast dishes to one side, and Mary puts the salt-shaker in the middle.
"So this is the house," she says, glancing from John to Samuel. "We keep walking, but can't ever seem to reach the fence." Mary runs her finger across the table, pressing hard into the tablecloth, and stops when she reaches the plates.
"It's like the fence moves." Samuel nods.
"Closer we walk to it, the farther away it looks," says Deanna, gnawing on her lower lip as she thinks.
"It looks," John says, with emphasis.
His eyes go far away, and then his gaze snaps back hard to the salt shaker, his knuckles pressing against the table, and Samuel all of a sudden has the weird feeling that he'd be able to follow this man's orders, which is ludicrous. He's a thick-headed boy, wet behind the ears despite having been to 'Nam.
John turns to Deanna. "We need cloth napkins," he says, "cut into strips. Or use sheets, make 'em about this long." He holds up his hands.
"What? What're we going to do with cloth napkins?" The moment's gone; no way is Samuel going to take orders from John Winchester.
"I've got an idea."
"You're a crazy son of a bitch, you know that?" Samuel can barely keep still as the cloth covers his eyes. He feels the tug of Deanna's fingers at the back of his head, tying the blindfold into place.
"I hear that a lot," John says, and Mary laughs.
"Ready?" Deanna says.
"Ready," Samuel, John, and Mary reply together.
"On three," Deanna says. "One, two, three."
They start walking. Samuel feels Deanna's hand gripping his, can feel by the pull of things that her other hand is holding Mary's. Samuel peeks down beneath the bottom of the blindfold and sees they're linked together in a chain, John holding Mary's hand, Mary holding Deanna's, Deanna's holding Samuel's. If one stumbles, the others will keep them upright.
He feels the terrain change under his feet, from grass, to the garden, and then the softer ground beneath the trees. The creek is nearby, the water gurgling.
"Wait," Mary says, and the line stops. "I hear something...the voices again. They're talking."
"Who's talking? Mary, what's going on?" There's worry in John's voice, and it's an echo of Samuel's own.
"Oh my goodness," Mary breathes. "I think it's--it's angels. I can hear them."
"Holy shit," John says.
For a second, Samuel thinks that maybe his little girl has gone insane, but given everything else, it's no less logical than there being no rain in Heaven, but the flowers growing anyway. Like Deanna said, no more outlandish than demons being real.
It's all too strange being blindfolded, though. Samuel starts to feel stifled, he needs to see, right now. His hand goes to the knot but Deanna makes a sharp sound next to him and he thinks better of it. He's not sure how Deanna knows; but she's always been able to pick up on things like that.
"What're they saying?" John asks.
"They're going to lay siege to Hell," Mary says. "There's something--no, someone there they want, a soul."
"We should keep moving," Samuel says, his skin prickling. If Heaven had storms, it would be that prickly feeling before a storm rolls in.
He can tell by the coolness and the brush of leaves against his arms that they're deeper into the woods. He thinks they've never gotten this far. Deanna stumbles and Samuel tightens his grip on her, keeping her on her feet.
Samuel hears a thump, and then his body comes into contact with a flat wooden surface.
The fence.
"We have to let go of each other to climb over," John says. "Whatever you do, don't remove your blindfold, you'll probably get pulled right back to the house. Take it off after you've landed on the other side."
Letting go of Deanna's hand is one of the most difficult things Samuel has ever done. He puts his palms against the wood, feeling a knothole and rough wood--his guess is the fence isn't painted. Heaven went for the rustic look. The boards shake--must be the others, pulling themselves up. Samuel grips the top, puts the soles of his shoes against the wood, and hauls himself over. He drops to the other side and pulls off the blindfold.
The four of them stand blinking on a ledge of grass maybe six feet wide that drops off into nothing. Thin wisps of fog drift before them.
Not fog. Clouds.
Together, Samuel and Deanna and Mary and John inch forward and peer over. Clouds, and cliff-face straight down, too far down to see how far, with twisted pine trees growing out sideways here and there, clinging to the rock. Across the divide, snow-topped mountains appear for a moment during a break in the misty clouds.
"Well, shit," John says.
It's cold, the wind humming with a high-pitched whine. Mary crouches close to the edge and leans as if she's listening with her whole body. She goes still, then jerks back from the edge, eyes widening as she grabs John's wrist. He crouches beside her and she grips his arms, turns to face him. The distress on Mary's face makes Samuel wish she were six years old again so he could tell her everything's going to be okay; but that won't work, not now, not here.
"What?" John's voice scratches low.
"The angels--the voices I've been hearing, they found the soul they wanted." Mary puts her hand to her throat. "They keep saying one thing, over and over. 'Dean Winchester is saved.'"
Samuel watches John's face change, the color draining out of it as he catches on. "Dean was in Hell?" John looks out towards the mountains, now hidden behind the mist.
"Sam," Mary says. "Because of Sam."
"He made a deal." John moves from the edge, curls his hand into a fist, and then slams it so hard against the wood the entire line of fence shakes, farther than Samuel can see. "Dean made a deal."
"But..." Deanna hugs her arms and shivers; Samuel pulls her against him. "But the angels said he's safe now."
After a few deep breaths, John seems calmer. "Bet those angel assholes are the same ones who built the trick fence and kept us shut up in that fishbowl for so long."
"John!" Mary sounds a little shocked. "Maybe we shouldn't--I mean, they're angels. I don't think we should call them assholes."
"What do we do now?" Deanna asks, voice calm and low and steady. "Do any of us want to go back?"
Nobody says anything.
"Didn't think so," Deanna murmurs.
The mist curls itself into shapes that almost resemble something, but don't. They all peer down into bottomless fall, then turn to look down along the fence, which curves in a line that appears infinite.
Heaven can go screw itself, Samuel thinks.
In single file, they start walking.