SPN FIC - Legend (Part Six: John, Mary, Dean, and Sam)
I'd heard whispered bits of the story since I was a kid. Just after Halloween, back in '83, the demon Azazel had crept into the nursery of a baby boy, intending to drip blood into the child's mouth and turn him into demon spawn. But Mary Campbell was waiting for him. She had a gun a stranger had brought to her family ten years before: a gun that could kill anything. She used it to kill Azazel that night. Saved her child. Then she disappeared.
Legends are told in bits and pieces, spread by word of mouth over the years. This is the story of Mary Campbell's family: the husband to whom she told the truth of who she was. The son who grieved the loss of her so deeply that he spent half his life on the road alone, searching for her. And the son who found success, and love, and peace ... until things went a little bit sideways.
Part One: Dean and Jo
Part Two: Dean, Sam, and Jessica
Part Three: John and Deacon
Part Four: Missouri and Pamela
Part Five: Sam and Dean
CHARACTERS: John, Mary, Dean, Sam
GENRE: Gen (AU)
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 3406 words
LEGEND
By Carol Davis
Part Six: John, Mary, Dean, and Sam
It's a college town, mostly - that's what draws people in. It's home to about 87,000 people, boasts the usual collection of restaurants and shopping malls, museums and libraries, movie theaters, bowling alleys and bars.
In the years leading up to the Civil War, it was a stop on the Underground Railroad, and the site of a bloody massacre led by a man named Quantrill.
A movie company laid waste to it a lot more recently, back in '82, for something they called The Day After.
It sits smack in between Topeka and Kansas City, on the banks of the Kansas and Wakarusa rivers; it gets a fair amount of snow in the winter and a fair amount of heat in the summer. It was home to writers Langston Hughes and William S. Burroughs, and according to U.S. News & World Report, it's one of the best places in the country to retire to.
It's not the prettiest place you could pick out.
It's not the most interesting place around, or the safest, or the most dangerous.
But some people call it home.
~~~~~~~~
There was a voice in John Winchester's head the whole time he was in Vietnam: something that said Go home. Keep yourself in one piece, so you can go home. Everyone who was there with him heard the same voice, he imagined; they all wanted the same thing, for sure, because it would make no sense not to. Get this done, and go home. That small, persistent voice reminded him of his common sense - made him more cautious, more alert.
He held onto that, long after he lost any desire to keep going back to Lawrence.
The way back was still familiar, though. East on the I-70, the Kansas 'Pike, then south on McDonald Drive, the green (now mostly brown, and snow-covered) spread of the country club visible off to the left.
Some things never change.
He couldn't put a finger on exactly when this place had stopped feeling like home. Not when Mary left; everything else stayed pretty much the same, after that night - the house, the job, the boys, the neighbors, the weather, the TV news, that sense of putting one foot in front of the other, of keeping it all going because not doing that was nothing he could imagine, or accept. And not when Dean left, though the pain and frustration of his son's departure was in some ways worse than what Mary's absence had spun into being around him.
When Sam left?
Maybe then.
Maybe then, because there was nothing left. Just the house. Four walls, a roof, a little bit of property surrounding it. Trees and a front lawn and a couple of small flower beds that bloomed year after year, apparently content with an annual dose of benign neglect. He kept working, kept showing up at the garage every day, even on Sundays, for almost a year after Sam said goodbye, because really, doing something - anything - was better than giving up. People tried inviting him to dinner, to movies, to Civil War reenactments and car shows, to Jayhawks games and concerts and cooking classes, and more often than not he went, because doing something was better than doing nothing.
Once in a while, Dean came back.
Once in a while, Sam did too.
Slowly, the "once in a whiles" grew farther and farther apart. "Come here," his boys told him. Come to California; it's warm out here. Come to El Paso or Pittsburgh or Casper or Peoria; there's something I need your help with.
His father had raised him to be a mechanic.
Slowly, but steadily, he became something else.
He became what Mary had been, and her parents before her, and their parents before them. Before the night in 1973 when Mary's parents died, he would not have imagined that there was such a thing as a hunter of the supernatural, because his only experience had been with evil that came in human form. Everything beyond that, the stories of ghosts and ghouls and werewolves and vampires, of things that haunted and thirsted, were simply that: just stories, as far as he knew, as far as experience had taught him.
When she sat down alongside him on a warm afternoon not long after the night when her father pursued them into the woods, when she said, "I need to talk to you about something," all he could think of was that she'd thought things through and had decided to make her way through the rest of her life without him.
She talked for a little while, then stopped and looked at him as if to say, "Do you have any questions?"
He frowned. It was all he could think of to do.
"You think I'm crazy," she said.
That wasn't it, not exactly. It seemed possible to him that she was spinning the beginnings of some sort of elaborate joke, some prank, the way his grandfather had, aiming to show him up as a gullible (if well-loved) fool, and he looked for the glimmer of hidden humor in her eyes. This was no time to be playing pranks, not with her parents only a couple of weeks dead and gone, but maybe the stress of all that had gotten to her. Maybe she needed something to be funny. Needed to play a game, when it had come down to that or going clean out of her mind.
"Do you know how my father died?" she asked him.
John's shoulder twitched in something that wasn't quite a shrug. Sam Campbell had snapped, they'd told him. Mary's old man had always been a little off-plumb, quick to anger, secretive, suspicious of anyone he didn't hold close to him (which, of course, was the entire population of Lawrence, save for his wife and daughter, and for all John knew it had included both of them, too). Things had happened to Sam Campbell during his boyhood, people speculated, things that made him brittle and closed-off, and he'd nurtured that pain through the years. Didn't like people. Viewed them as a threat. So when a young man newly returned from war had rekindled his relationship with Sam's daughter, Sam hadn't seen that innocent, well-intentioned romance as anything but a danger.
He'd gone off the deep end, people said. Got into a thundering argument with his wife, gave her a shove across the room and broke her neck. Then chased his daughter and her beau into the woods, went after the young man with a knife, and somehow - no one was at all clear on the specifics - ended up stabbing himself with one deep, sure thrust, into a place in his gut where the resulting bleeding would be fatal.
The only fingerprints on the blade were his wife's, and his own.
"He stabbed himself," John said.
"Do you know what he did to you?"
All John could remember was a stiff neck and a bone-deep chill from having laid on cold, damp ground for too long.
"He killed you," Mary told him.
"He," John said. "I'm sorry?"
"He grabbed your head in his hands and twisted it. He broke your neck, just like he broke my mother's. But it wasn't him. My dad."
"Then…who was it?"
Her gaze hadn't shifted from his face, not for an instant during this whole conversation. She had her sights locked on him. Target acquired, John thought, completely at a loss for what kind of joke this was going to turn into, and determined to ignore the squirming of worry at the back of his mind, the unease that suggested maybe Mary was a lot like her father, that through nature or nurture or both, she was (weird, was what people said; Sam Campbell was weird) not the girl he'd imagined her to be all these years, the one whose picture he'd carried through those years of war, the sweet-faced girl with the crystalline laugh he'd assumed would help him build a blissfully perfect future, would be his partner, his lover, his confidant, his great and unending joy.
"A demon," she said, and her voice was rock-steady. "He was possessed by a demon."
"A demon."
"Yes."
"Like…in that movie."
He thought of a young girl grinding out obscenities in an old crone's voice. A terrified priest. Cascades of green vomit.
He thought about leaving the room, but God, he was tired.
"I don't know where you're going with this," he sighed, "but…could we not do this? Please?"
"Come with me," she said.
"I don't think I want to do that, Mary."
She let out a long whistle of breath, her attention finally not fixed on him but on the floor in between her shoes.
"Come with me this one time," she said after a minute. "I need to show you something. If you want to leave after that, I won't stop you. I don't want to have to try to stop you. But if you'll - if you'll trust me -"
He was possessed by a demon.
Lions and tigers and bears, oh my, he thought as he guided his truck down the long ribbon of McDonald Drive, barely aware of the country club, or of Centennial Park rolling past as McDonald turned into Iowa Street, or of El Mezcal, the Mexican restaurant, or of the new Domino's Pizza he passed just before he made the left onto West Ninth.
He could map this place in his sleep, but it seemed like a place he'd wandered through in some other life.
No place like home...
He stopped the truck a few blocks before he reached the house, pulling it into a vacant parking spot at the curb outside the elementary school both his boys had attended. The school was closed for the holiday, its windows dark, its small parking lot empty except for a dozen splayed-out, wet sheets of newspaper that must have blown there out of someone's trash.
He'd brought Dean here by himself, the September after Mary left, Dean's small hand clasped in his, the squirming, warm bundle that was Sam clamped to his side, Sam's chubby legs wrapped viselike around his waist.
"I don' wanna," Dean told him when they reached the door of the kindergarten classroom.
That small face had broadcast what the boy was thinking: Don't leave me.
Don't.
It was Dean who'd first picked up Mary's journals, the summer after he turned ten. He wanted to understand, he said. He wanted to learn what it was that had lured his mother away, because the only thing he was willing to accept (at least, try to) was that she had been running toward something, and not away from something else.
Specifically, away from them. From him.
He'd come to John the summer before that, a few weeks before Sam was scheduled to follow his brother's footsteps and start going to school.
"I saw," he told John in a whisper.
"You…saw what?"
"That man."
"Man?"
"The one Mom killed. The man in the coat. I saw him, before she shot him."
John's gut did a slow but determined roll, like an old dog turning away from too much heat.
"Is the boogeyman a real thing?" Dean asked.
"I - no."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes." John laid that out there, like setting a package down on a table. Laid it right out there, plain and direct, with no space available in it that would allow for a misunderstanding. It wouldn't have blipped the needle on a polygraph. Pure truth, no lie, no hedging.
Dean blinked at him. "Dad. I saw it."
"You were only four years old."
"Almost five."
"It was the middle of the night."
"You can argue with me if you want," Dean said. "But I saw it. It looked like a man, but it wasn't. It wanted to do something bad to Sam, but Mom killed it. If she hadn't've killed it, it might've killed Sam."
The boy was as poker-faced as a judge. "You had a dream," John told him. "It was the middle of the night."
"She knew it was coming, didn't she?"
I don't think I want to do that, Mary.
She'd had no choice but to ask him for help; she wasn't strong enough to lift the corpse on her own, carry it out of the house, and wrestle it into the big, deep trunk of the old Impala - the car a stranger had convinced him to buy, the one he hadn't argued against buying because it seemed to say to him, we belong together. I'm a part of your life, and you know that already. She had no choice but to ask, and he had no choice but to agree, and together they carried the body of what looked like a man out of Sam's nursery, down the stairs, and out to the curb. Together they drove a dozen miles out of town, to a place Mary seemed to know was right, and together they dug a deep, anonymous grave.
She salted and burned the body all on her own.
"There was like…lightning," Dean said. "Coming out of its eyes and nose and mouth and stuff, after she shot it. Come on, Dad. That wasn't a person."
How much had he seen, John wondered. How much had he glimpsed, how much had he overheard and tried to make sense of?
How much had he made sense of?
Nine years old.
He was half inclined to ask Dean whether he'd been carrying on some sort of secret correspondence with his mother over the years, whether they talked now and then, or maybe more often than that - whether they exchanged letters, or met in secret, somewhere in town. At the school, maybe, or…
But Dean's expression didn't allow for that.
"It needed to be killed," John said.
"Because it would have hurt Sam," Dean offered with a nod, in a tone that said, Okay, we agree on that.
"Have you said anything about this to your brother?"
Dean's eyes narrowed.
"He's five years old, Dad," he said.
And you just told me you were almost five. As if that was old enough. As if that made you capable of understanding.
She had left the two of them with an infant to care for.
She had simply, and efficiently, disappeared. Left no note, made no phone call. She left behind nearly all of her belongings, both the everyday items and the ones her parents had involuntarily bequeathed to her, and the implication was not so much I don't need any of this as You're going to need it. Someday, if not now.
"It'd be good if you told me the truth," Dean said.
The truth.
First from Mary's lips, then from a succession of worn-looking, humorless people, most of them dressed in denim and flannel. Most of them wearing the look that said hard liquor was more familiar to them than water, or sunlight.
"Why?" he asked her.
Why tell me this?
Her parents were not quite three weeks dead. Not buried; the moment the coroner's office released them, they were claimed by someone Mary said was an uncle. There was no funeral, no site at the local cemetery they could visit on Sundays to pay their respects. "My uncle took them home," she told the few people who asked. "There's a family plot." She smiled at them, accepted their condolences (some given grudgingly, some awkwardly, some with a bit of genuine regret) and their gifts of casseroles and pie, and wore black, though whether that was to fulfill anyone's expectations of her or she was simply unwilling to carry any brighter color around, John was unable to decide.
Mostly, people seemed glad that Sam Campbell was dead. If they mourned anyone, even for a moment, it was Mary's mother.
"It's only fair," she told John. "I can't lie to you."
"It's crazy. It's - insane."
"It's the truth."
She told him the truth about everything, except where she was going, and why. Whether she would ever be back.
He sat in the truck staring at the school his children had attended, where they'd taken their first steps away from him into the rest of the world, watching the wet sheets of newspaper flutter and flop across the parking lot. It wasn't just the school that was dark and silent; the entire neighborhood seemed to be that way. The whole town, for that matter. Pretty much everything was closed for the holiday, and the day was too cold, too bleak, for anyone to be lured outdoors.
No place like home.
He thought of Deacon, of the way they'd spent the last couple of Thanksgivings: sharing Chinese food at Mama Chang's, then holing up at Deac's place for football, beer, reminiscences of times and places long past.
Funny that you could look on a war as being something worth reminiscing about.
The house Mary's parents had left to her, and she to him - it wasn't his any more, not really. His name was still on the deed, but he'd turned it over to Missouri Mosely a few years back. His repeated offers of sale were all turned down with a gentle, "You know that's not really what you want, John Winchester"; instead, she paid him rent every month, for the right to sleep under the Campbell family's roof and perform her psychic readings (some of them honest, most of them complete and utter bullshit) in their living room. That house was Missouri's home now, not his.
And yet…
He'd intended to go to Arkansas, to Deacon and Mama Chang's. Then he'd intended to go to Ohio, to find Dean.
Somehow, he'd ended up here.
In his mind, You know that's not really what you want became You know that's really what you want.
Home.
This place. The town he was born in, grew up in. The place he'd found Mary, the place where his boys were born.
He was fifty-seven years old. In spite of all the truths he'd been told, of all he'd seen and done, heard and witnessed, he wasn't about to let himself be persuaded that something had called him here - something other than nostalgia, liberally seasoned with loneliness and exhaustion. He had no home, not any more, not in that house with its untended flower beds and its uneven floors and its aging, knocking plumbing. Like Missouri, he'd received offers to make things permanent - from Sam, from Deacon, from a number of people he barely knew - but these past few years, the road had been his home, like it was Dean's.
The road that had led him back here.
He saw them coming long before they reached the truck: his boys, walking side-by-side down the middle of the street, the old black Impala visible behind them, parked smack alongside a fire hydrant a block or so away from the school. He had the window rolled down by the time they got close enough to hear him, and he said to Dean, "Testing your luck?"
"You figure they give out tickets on Thanksgiving?"
That barrier of steel and glass stood between them for a minute, then John pushed the door open and climbed out.
"Boys," he said.
They smelled of fast food french fries and of being cooped up in an overheated car. Or maybe that was just Dean. John reached for Sam first, hugged him fiercely and swiftly, then let him go, let him step back so John could get at Dean.
"Thought you were headed for Defiance," he said.
Dean's cheek muscles twitched. There was serious fatigue in his eyes, and something else, something John couldn't remember seeing anytime recently. He tugged the boy into his arms and held him there, held him long past the point where Dean should have pulled back, asking whether John thought he was a girl, or whether John was a girl, dusting himself off as if the embrace had liberally coated him with something objectionable. Floral-scented talcum powder, maybe.
"Dad," Dean said into John's shoulder.
Then he did step back. Looked deep into John's eyes and set his jaw in a way that made him look four years old again.
"Somebody call you?" John asked. "Tell you to come here?"
Dean shook his head. Glanced over at Sam, and Sam shook his head too.
Not somebody, then. Something.
"All right," John said. "Let's go find out what the hell's going on."
* * * * *
Legends are told in bits and pieces, spread by word of mouth over the years. This is the story of Mary Campbell's family: the husband to whom she told the truth of who she was. The son who grieved the loss of her so deeply that he spent half his life on the road alone, searching for her. And the son who found success, and love, and peace ... until things went a little bit sideways.
Part One: Dean and Jo
Part Two: Dean, Sam, and Jessica
Part Three: John and Deacon
Part Four: Missouri and Pamela
Part Five: Sam and Dean
CHARACTERS: John, Mary, Dean, Sam
GENRE: Gen (AU)
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 3406 words
LEGEND
By Carol Davis
Part Six: John, Mary, Dean, and Sam
It's a college town, mostly - that's what draws people in. It's home to about 87,000 people, boasts the usual collection of restaurants and shopping malls, museums and libraries, movie theaters, bowling alleys and bars.
In the years leading up to the Civil War, it was a stop on the Underground Railroad, and the site of a bloody massacre led by a man named Quantrill.
A movie company laid waste to it a lot more recently, back in '82, for something they called The Day After.
It sits smack in between Topeka and Kansas City, on the banks of the Kansas and Wakarusa rivers; it gets a fair amount of snow in the winter and a fair amount of heat in the summer. It was home to writers Langston Hughes and William S. Burroughs, and according to U.S. News & World Report, it's one of the best places in the country to retire to.
It's not the prettiest place you could pick out.
It's not the most interesting place around, or the safest, or the most dangerous.
But some people call it home.
~~~~~~~~
There was a voice in John Winchester's head the whole time he was in Vietnam: something that said Go home. Keep yourself in one piece, so you can go home. Everyone who was there with him heard the same voice, he imagined; they all wanted the same thing, for sure, because it would make no sense not to. Get this done, and go home. That small, persistent voice reminded him of his common sense - made him more cautious, more alert.
He held onto that, long after he lost any desire to keep going back to Lawrence.
The way back was still familiar, though. East on the I-70, the Kansas 'Pike, then south on McDonald Drive, the green (now mostly brown, and snow-covered) spread of the country club visible off to the left.
Some things never change.
He couldn't put a finger on exactly when this place had stopped feeling like home. Not when Mary left; everything else stayed pretty much the same, after that night - the house, the job, the boys, the neighbors, the weather, the TV news, that sense of putting one foot in front of the other, of keeping it all going because not doing that was nothing he could imagine, or accept. And not when Dean left, though the pain and frustration of his son's departure was in some ways worse than what Mary's absence had spun into being around him.
When Sam left?
Maybe then.
Maybe then, because there was nothing left. Just the house. Four walls, a roof, a little bit of property surrounding it. Trees and a front lawn and a couple of small flower beds that bloomed year after year, apparently content with an annual dose of benign neglect. He kept working, kept showing up at the garage every day, even on Sundays, for almost a year after Sam said goodbye, because really, doing something - anything - was better than giving up. People tried inviting him to dinner, to movies, to Civil War reenactments and car shows, to Jayhawks games and concerts and cooking classes, and more often than not he went, because doing something was better than doing nothing.
Once in a while, Dean came back.
Once in a while, Sam did too.
Slowly, the "once in a whiles" grew farther and farther apart. "Come here," his boys told him. Come to California; it's warm out here. Come to El Paso or Pittsburgh or Casper or Peoria; there's something I need your help with.
His father had raised him to be a mechanic.
Slowly, but steadily, he became something else.
He became what Mary had been, and her parents before her, and their parents before them. Before the night in 1973 when Mary's parents died, he would not have imagined that there was such a thing as a hunter of the supernatural, because his only experience had been with evil that came in human form. Everything beyond that, the stories of ghosts and ghouls and werewolves and vampires, of things that haunted and thirsted, were simply that: just stories, as far as he knew, as far as experience had taught him.
When she sat down alongside him on a warm afternoon not long after the night when her father pursued them into the woods, when she said, "I need to talk to you about something," all he could think of was that she'd thought things through and had decided to make her way through the rest of her life without him.
She talked for a little while, then stopped and looked at him as if to say, "Do you have any questions?"
He frowned. It was all he could think of to do.
"You think I'm crazy," she said.
That wasn't it, not exactly. It seemed possible to him that she was spinning the beginnings of some sort of elaborate joke, some prank, the way his grandfather had, aiming to show him up as a gullible (if well-loved) fool, and he looked for the glimmer of hidden humor in her eyes. This was no time to be playing pranks, not with her parents only a couple of weeks dead and gone, but maybe the stress of all that had gotten to her. Maybe she needed something to be funny. Needed to play a game, when it had come down to that or going clean out of her mind.
"Do you know how my father died?" she asked him.
John's shoulder twitched in something that wasn't quite a shrug. Sam Campbell had snapped, they'd told him. Mary's old man had always been a little off-plumb, quick to anger, secretive, suspicious of anyone he didn't hold close to him (which, of course, was the entire population of Lawrence, save for his wife and daughter, and for all John knew it had included both of them, too). Things had happened to Sam Campbell during his boyhood, people speculated, things that made him brittle and closed-off, and he'd nurtured that pain through the years. Didn't like people. Viewed them as a threat. So when a young man newly returned from war had rekindled his relationship with Sam's daughter, Sam hadn't seen that innocent, well-intentioned romance as anything but a danger.
He'd gone off the deep end, people said. Got into a thundering argument with his wife, gave her a shove across the room and broke her neck. Then chased his daughter and her beau into the woods, went after the young man with a knife, and somehow - no one was at all clear on the specifics - ended up stabbing himself with one deep, sure thrust, into a place in his gut where the resulting bleeding would be fatal.
The only fingerprints on the blade were his wife's, and his own.
"He stabbed himself," John said.
"Do you know what he did to you?"
All John could remember was a stiff neck and a bone-deep chill from having laid on cold, damp ground for too long.
"He killed you," Mary told him.
"He," John said. "I'm sorry?"
"He grabbed your head in his hands and twisted it. He broke your neck, just like he broke my mother's. But it wasn't him. My dad."
"Then…who was it?"
Her gaze hadn't shifted from his face, not for an instant during this whole conversation. She had her sights locked on him. Target acquired, John thought, completely at a loss for what kind of joke this was going to turn into, and determined to ignore the squirming of worry at the back of his mind, the unease that suggested maybe Mary was a lot like her father, that through nature or nurture or both, she was (weird, was what people said; Sam Campbell was weird) not the girl he'd imagined her to be all these years, the one whose picture he'd carried through those years of war, the sweet-faced girl with the crystalline laugh he'd assumed would help him build a blissfully perfect future, would be his partner, his lover, his confidant, his great and unending joy.
"A demon," she said, and her voice was rock-steady. "He was possessed by a demon."
"A demon."
"Yes."
"Like…in that movie."
He thought of a young girl grinding out obscenities in an old crone's voice. A terrified priest. Cascades of green vomit.
He thought about leaving the room, but God, he was tired.
"I don't know where you're going with this," he sighed, "but…could we not do this? Please?"
"Come with me," she said.
"I don't think I want to do that, Mary."
She let out a long whistle of breath, her attention finally not fixed on him but on the floor in between her shoes.
"Come with me this one time," she said after a minute. "I need to show you something. If you want to leave after that, I won't stop you. I don't want to have to try to stop you. But if you'll - if you'll trust me -"
He was possessed by a demon.
Lions and tigers and bears, oh my, he thought as he guided his truck down the long ribbon of McDonald Drive, barely aware of the country club, or of Centennial Park rolling past as McDonald turned into Iowa Street, or of El Mezcal, the Mexican restaurant, or of the new Domino's Pizza he passed just before he made the left onto West Ninth.
He could map this place in his sleep, but it seemed like a place he'd wandered through in some other life.
No place like home...
He stopped the truck a few blocks before he reached the house, pulling it into a vacant parking spot at the curb outside the elementary school both his boys had attended. The school was closed for the holiday, its windows dark, its small parking lot empty except for a dozen splayed-out, wet sheets of newspaper that must have blown there out of someone's trash.
He'd brought Dean here by himself, the September after Mary left, Dean's small hand clasped in his, the squirming, warm bundle that was Sam clamped to his side, Sam's chubby legs wrapped viselike around his waist.
"I don' wanna," Dean told him when they reached the door of the kindergarten classroom.
That small face had broadcast what the boy was thinking: Don't leave me.
Don't.
It was Dean who'd first picked up Mary's journals, the summer after he turned ten. He wanted to understand, he said. He wanted to learn what it was that had lured his mother away, because the only thing he was willing to accept (at least, try to) was that she had been running toward something, and not away from something else.
Specifically, away from them. From him.
He'd come to John the summer before that, a few weeks before Sam was scheduled to follow his brother's footsteps and start going to school.
"I saw," he told John in a whisper.
"You…saw what?"
"That man."
"Man?"
"The one Mom killed. The man in the coat. I saw him, before she shot him."
John's gut did a slow but determined roll, like an old dog turning away from too much heat.
"Is the boogeyman a real thing?" Dean asked.
"I - no."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes." John laid that out there, like setting a package down on a table. Laid it right out there, plain and direct, with no space available in it that would allow for a misunderstanding. It wouldn't have blipped the needle on a polygraph. Pure truth, no lie, no hedging.
Dean blinked at him. "Dad. I saw it."
"You were only four years old."
"Almost five."
"It was the middle of the night."
"You can argue with me if you want," Dean said. "But I saw it. It looked like a man, but it wasn't. It wanted to do something bad to Sam, but Mom killed it. If she hadn't've killed it, it might've killed Sam."
The boy was as poker-faced as a judge. "You had a dream," John told him. "It was the middle of the night."
"She knew it was coming, didn't she?"
I don't think I want to do that, Mary.
She'd had no choice but to ask him for help; she wasn't strong enough to lift the corpse on her own, carry it out of the house, and wrestle it into the big, deep trunk of the old Impala - the car a stranger had convinced him to buy, the one he hadn't argued against buying because it seemed to say to him, we belong together. I'm a part of your life, and you know that already. She had no choice but to ask, and he had no choice but to agree, and together they carried the body of what looked like a man out of Sam's nursery, down the stairs, and out to the curb. Together they drove a dozen miles out of town, to a place Mary seemed to know was right, and together they dug a deep, anonymous grave.
She salted and burned the body all on her own.
"There was like…lightning," Dean said. "Coming out of its eyes and nose and mouth and stuff, after she shot it. Come on, Dad. That wasn't a person."
How much had he seen, John wondered. How much had he glimpsed, how much had he overheard and tried to make sense of?
How much had he made sense of?
Nine years old.
He was half inclined to ask Dean whether he'd been carrying on some sort of secret correspondence with his mother over the years, whether they talked now and then, or maybe more often than that - whether they exchanged letters, or met in secret, somewhere in town. At the school, maybe, or…
But Dean's expression didn't allow for that.
"It needed to be killed," John said.
"Because it would have hurt Sam," Dean offered with a nod, in a tone that said, Okay, we agree on that.
"Have you said anything about this to your brother?"
Dean's eyes narrowed.
"He's five years old, Dad," he said.
And you just told me you were almost five. As if that was old enough. As if that made you capable of understanding.
She had left the two of them with an infant to care for.
She had simply, and efficiently, disappeared. Left no note, made no phone call. She left behind nearly all of her belongings, both the everyday items and the ones her parents had involuntarily bequeathed to her, and the implication was not so much I don't need any of this as You're going to need it. Someday, if not now.
"It'd be good if you told me the truth," Dean said.
The truth.
First from Mary's lips, then from a succession of worn-looking, humorless people, most of them dressed in denim and flannel. Most of them wearing the look that said hard liquor was more familiar to them than water, or sunlight.
"Why?" he asked her.
Why tell me this?
Her parents were not quite three weeks dead. Not buried; the moment the coroner's office released them, they were claimed by someone Mary said was an uncle. There was no funeral, no site at the local cemetery they could visit on Sundays to pay their respects. "My uncle took them home," she told the few people who asked. "There's a family plot." She smiled at them, accepted their condolences (some given grudgingly, some awkwardly, some with a bit of genuine regret) and their gifts of casseroles and pie, and wore black, though whether that was to fulfill anyone's expectations of her or she was simply unwilling to carry any brighter color around, John was unable to decide.
Mostly, people seemed glad that Sam Campbell was dead. If they mourned anyone, even for a moment, it was Mary's mother.
"It's only fair," she told John. "I can't lie to you."
"It's crazy. It's - insane."
"It's the truth."
She told him the truth about everything, except where she was going, and why. Whether she would ever be back.
He sat in the truck staring at the school his children had attended, where they'd taken their first steps away from him into the rest of the world, watching the wet sheets of newspaper flutter and flop across the parking lot. It wasn't just the school that was dark and silent; the entire neighborhood seemed to be that way. The whole town, for that matter. Pretty much everything was closed for the holiday, and the day was too cold, too bleak, for anyone to be lured outdoors.
No place like home.
He thought of Deacon, of the way they'd spent the last couple of Thanksgivings: sharing Chinese food at Mama Chang's, then holing up at Deac's place for football, beer, reminiscences of times and places long past.
Funny that you could look on a war as being something worth reminiscing about.
The house Mary's parents had left to her, and she to him - it wasn't his any more, not really. His name was still on the deed, but he'd turned it over to Missouri Mosely a few years back. His repeated offers of sale were all turned down with a gentle, "You know that's not really what you want, John Winchester"; instead, she paid him rent every month, for the right to sleep under the Campbell family's roof and perform her psychic readings (some of them honest, most of them complete and utter bullshit) in their living room. That house was Missouri's home now, not his.
And yet…
He'd intended to go to Arkansas, to Deacon and Mama Chang's. Then he'd intended to go to Ohio, to find Dean.
Somehow, he'd ended up here.
In his mind, You know that's not really what you want became You know that's really what you want.
Home.
This place. The town he was born in, grew up in. The place he'd found Mary, the place where his boys were born.
He was fifty-seven years old. In spite of all the truths he'd been told, of all he'd seen and done, heard and witnessed, he wasn't about to let himself be persuaded that something had called him here - something other than nostalgia, liberally seasoned with loneliness and exhaustion. He had no home, not any more, not in that house with its untended flower beds and its uneven floors and its aging, knocking plumbing. Like Missouri, he'd received offers to make things permanent - from Sam, from Deacon, from a number of people he barely knew - but these past few years, the road had been his home, like it was Dean's.
The road that had led him back here.
He saw them coming long before they reached the truck: his boys, walking side-by-side down the middle of the street, the old black Impala visible behind them, parked smack alongside a fire hydrant a block or so away from the school. He had the window rolled down by the time they got close enough to hear him, and he said to Dean, "Testing your luck?"
"You figure they give out tickets on Thanksgiving?"
That barrier of steel and glass stood between them for a minute, then John pushed the door open and climbed out.
"Boys," he said.
They smelled of fast food french fries and of being cooped up in an overheated car. Or maybe that was just Dean. John reached for Sam first, hugged him fiercely and swiftly, then let him go, let him step back so John could get at Dean.
"Thought you were headed for Defiance," he said.
Dean's cheek muscles twitched. There was serious fatigue in his eyes, and something else, something John couldn't remember seeing anytime recently. He tugged the boy into his arms and held him there, held him long past the point where Dean should have pulled back, asking whether John thought he was a girl, or whether John was a girl, dusting himself off as if the embrace had liberally coated him with something objectionable. Floral-scented talcum powder, maybe.
"Dad," Dean said into John's shoulder.
Then he did step back. Looked deep into John's eyes and set his jaw in a way that made him look four years old again.
"Somebody call you?" John asked. "Tell you to come here?"
Dean shook his head. Glanced over at Sam, and Sam shook his head too.
Not somebody, then. Something.
"All right," John said. "Let's go find out what the hell's going on."
* * * * *