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Kevin lets her out of the birdcage thing, sometimes. Mary isn’t sure if it’s because he feels bad for her or if because Michael is playing some sort of good cop/bad cop long game on her. Either way, she’s not about to look a gift horse in the mouth. Especially when that gift horse happens to have—
“Whiskey?”
He sets the bottle down on the cracking floorboards and hurries over, the key clutched in his fist. Mary almost wants to cry when he places it in the lock and opens the cage. It takes all she has not to just fall out in a heap on the ground.
“Don’t get too excited,” Kevin warns. “I’m worried about you getting infected. If you die, Michael is going to kill me.”
Mary lowers herself to the ground gingerly, hissing through clenched teeth when the skin on her back stretches, tearing several of the wounds open. She’s been trying as hard as she can not to aggravate them, but it’s not working.
“It’s not like those old Westerns,” Mary informs him. “You can’t pour it directly on the wound.”
Kevin just stares at her. “What’s a Western?” Then, “You know what, it doesn’t matter. I’ve dressed wounds with less, trust me. I know what I’m doing.”
Mary wonders if there’s another Kevin Tran walking around in her world, perfectly happy and normal. She hopes so. He walks around behind her and slowly gets to cleaning the area. Mary bites down on the inside of her cheek.
“Kevin,” she says, in a desperate attempt to distract herself, “how long have I been here? How many days?”
Kevin blots away some of the blood with a cloth he’d pulled out of somewhere. “Um. Like a month, maybe? Thirty-two days.”
Eyes clenched tightly shut, Mary tries counting forward thirty-two days from the date she’d shoved Lucifer into this universe.
“Christmas Eve?” she says after a moment rechecking her work. “Is it?”
Kevin shrugs. “I guess. Weird. I haven’t thought about that in years.”
In the end, after feeding her a container of canned peaches, he has to lock her back up.
The next morning, a young man lands at her feet.
“Mary Winchester?” he says, staring up at her with a smile. “I’m here to rescue you!”
Huh. Merry Christmas indeed.
Dean is so not in shape enough for this.
Panting heavily, he speeds up enough so that Sam won’t tease him about this later, assuming that they survive this. Which is definitely not a given.
“Dinosaurs?” he shouts after Sam.
Sam doesn’t look back. “You know what? I’ve officially reached the point in my life where that doesn’t even faze me anymore.”
Dean’s not entirely sure where they’re running, but anything has to be better than behind them. Sam dodges sideways into the roots of a particularly large oak and yanks Dean after them. The two of them tumble into a small outcropping, hopefully hidden from whatever it is that’s behind them.
“How long do you think we’ve been down here?” Sam asks.
Dean shrugs. “Um. A couple days?”
“How many days are a couple?”
“Four?”
Sam counts on his fingers. Dean shakes his head to himself. He should have known Sam would be a humanities kid a long time ago.
“Hey, Dean. It’s Christmas.”
Dean blinks at him. What with all of the nonsense with Mom and Cas and Jack and the freaking Colonel Sanders—what was his name again?—he hadn’t exactly been thinking about which month it was.
“This is the last way I wanted to spend Christmas,” Dean grumbles.
“What?” Sam says. “Really? I always wanted to spend my Christmas hiding from a dinosaur under a tree with you.”
Dean shoves his shoulder.
To his utter disbelief, Sam smiles. “Mom’s alive. That’s the best Christmas gift I could have ever hoped for.”
Dean doesn’t say that they’re still trapped in a parallel universe with no dreamwalkers and a ridiculous amount of really big lizards. Nor does he say that Mom is alive but being tortured. Instead, he just smiles.
“Me too.”
“Hey, Cassie. Guess what day it is?”
Cas shifts in his cell at the sound of Lucifer’s voice, frowning. He can’t stand the sound of him now any more than he could when they’d been sharing a head. Lucifer smiles at him. Cas’s voice is creaky with disuse.
“Wednesday?”
Lucifer rolls his eyes. “It’s not even Wednesday. You’re losing your touch.”
Cas hasn’t bothered keeping track of the days. He supposes he ought to be ashamed of himself for losing hope so quickly, but neither brother seems to have realized that Asmodeus is impersonating him. He can feel the same sort of dull nothing settling over him like an old friend. And it’s so hard to fight.
“It’s December 22, Cassie. Almost Christmas.”
Cas arches an eyebrow and tries for some sarcasm. “Wasn’t Jesus a little after your time?”
Lucifer just shakes his head. “Honestly. He goes and tells us not to have Nephilim and then look at that! I don’t think my kid is going to start any religions any time soon. Thoughts?”
“His name,” Cas grinds out, “is Jack. And he is not your child.”
Thankfully, this particular line of conversation, which has been the most common theme of the last few weeks, dies out when Asmodeous wanders in, Cas’s phone held out in front of him like it’s the most disgusting thing in the world.
“Your boy is wondering whether you’ll be attending Christmas dinner,” he says, as if the very thought of such a thing makes him physically ill.
Cas tries for defiant. “Well. You should tell him I can’t make it, unless you’re planning on letting me go.”
Something sinks in his chest despite himself. He can’t help but think of a full table in the bunker’s kitchen—Mary sitting shoulder to shoulder with Claire and Jody, Sam on the other side of the table, laughing. And Dean in the kitchen with whatever he deems fit for dinner.
His throat closes over, but this time, he manages to push past it with an unfamiliar wave of determination.
Next Christmas. He’ll make sure of it.