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Once the door closes behind their sons—their sons, not just his sons, John hasn’t gotten the chance to think that in twenty years—Mary’s smile fades.
“It’s strange,” she says, “seeing them so old, isn’t it?”
It’s not what he expected her to say, but then again, this entire experience has been one unexpected event after another. He supposes, right now, that’s their greatest similarity. They’re Dean and Sammy’s parents, out of time.
“Last time I saw Sammy, he was about a half foot shorter and half as broad.”
And the last time he saw Sammy, the kid was practically spitting as he yelled, loud enough for the motel manager to pull John aside the next morning and inform him that they wouldn’t be welcomed back. This Sam doesn’t look like he could quite pull off that same self-righteous rage. He just looks…tired.
John doesn’t want to think about what could have possibly happened between then and now to sap that ability from him.
“I didn’t recognize him,” Mary says mildly.
Of course she wouldn’t have. John lets out a breath at the reminder. With Mary sitting in front of him, virtually unchanged from the moment she died, it’s easy to forget how much she missed. While John searches for words that he knows perfectly well won’t ease that ache, she continues.
“I was so angry.”
Her left hand balls into a fist. The right twists the chain of her wedding ring around and around between her fingers.
“They’ve told me things about how they grew up. I think they’ve been trying to keep the worst of it from me, but sometimes, it slips out.”
John flinches. He’s been thinking about those days a lot since Sammy left. The drills, the orders, the fights. The weeks where a hunt took him longer to finish than he’d thought and he’d come home to find the food gone. The times the boys would come along and get hurt.
“And that’s the part that gets me,” Mary continues, her voice shaking. “I don’t think they realize sometimes just how messed-up it was.”
Messed-up. That’s a word for it. It’s easier to see that with distance.
“Mary—”
He doesn’t know what he’s going to say. Doesn’t think that there’s anything to say.
“And yeah, I was angry at you. But I was mostly angry at myself.”
He shakes his head. “Mary. I don’t blame you. They don’t blame you. Not for dying. You didn’t choose to leave us.”
Mary smiles, but it’s the look of someone who knows something you don’t. John’s heart, which has been hanging somewhere around his throat for the entirety of the conversation, plunges toward his shoes.
“Samuel and Deanna Campbell were hunters, John.”
He stares. Of course, he’s heard about a Campbell family in the hunting community, but he’d always assumed it was a weird coincidence. One more cosmic joke, the universe taking the opportunity to laugh at him.
“You died. A demon killed you. And I couldn’t stand it, so I—I made a choice.”
It’s all beginning to take a shape that John wishes desperately that he couldn’t see.
“The yellow-eyed demon,” he says softly.
She nods. “Ten years later, he came to collect.”
She bites back tears. John reaches out to comfort her, but she takes a half step back, shaking her head.
“I didn’t sell my soul. I sold our family. The chance we had at a normal life.”
How could he possibly react to that?
“So that time that I took you to a shooting range—”
Finally, the corner of Mary’s mouth twitches and the woman that he fell in love with a lifetime ago steals back into her eyes. John had always loved that about her—there’s a bit of mischief about Mary Winchester that he sees—saw?—reflected in his boys sometimes.
He’s always been more by the book, himself.
“This kickback sure is super strong!” Mary mimics in a falsetto, batting her eyelashes. Then, she grins. “I think I would have scared you if I’d gone in there and hit the bullseye a dozen times in a row.”
It makes him think of all the times that he would jolt upright in bed, a picture from Vietnam playing all too clearly in his head. Mary somehow always knew the best way to calm him down and ease him back to sleep. Now, he wonders just how many shell-shocked hunters she’d grown up with. If she’d gotten the same crash course in dealing with her parents’ crap as Dean had.
“I wish I’d told you,” Mary says at last, grin fading. “This life—I knew that it never really lets you go, but I wanted to think that I could get out.”
“And I wish I’d done better by our boys.”
Now that Mary’s in front of him, the entire revenge mission seems more like a fool’s errand than it ever did while he was on it.
He reaches out and takes her hand. She grips back, tight, like she’s afraid that he’s going to melt away into thin air. It feels more right than anything in the last two decades has.
“I missed you,” she says.
John thinks that it’s her way of saying that, whatever mistakes they’ve made, they brought them here. And right now, that has to be enough.
He squeezes back. “Me too. More than you could ever know.”
Sam lets out a sigh of relief at the sight of light streaming out from underneath Jack’s door. In the craziness of the last few hours, there hadn’t been a lot of opportunity to worry about Jack’s existence—or lack of existence, really—in the alternate timeline.
He alerts Jack to his presence with a soft knock at the door before he pokes his head inside. Jack pulls earbuds out of his ears and sets his laptop aside. He’s watching Friends again, Sam notes with a smile. It’s his second time through, but Jack seems to revel in the normalcy of it.
“Everything okay?”
There must still be tear tracks on his face, because Jack sits bolt upright, alarm evident in every line of his features. Sam nods, quick to reassure.
“Everything’s fine. Mom’s here. You should go see her before she heads back to Donna’s.”
Mary hasn’t said for sure that she’s leaving, but Sam suspects that she’s going to need some time before she feels normal again. Seeing Dad was like hitting a reset button, putting her all the way back into1983 all over again.
Jack narrows his eyes. “Why’s she leaving so quick?”
He can’t get a thing past this kid. Sam supposes he should be proud of him for that—you can’t miss much if you want to be a hunter.
So Sam sits down on the edge of his bed and tells him the whole story, starting with Sarah Good’s skull and ending with holding Mary while she cried for about an hour after Dad was gone. Jack takes the news of his own, brief non-existence pretty calmly.
“Do you remember what you said to me the day you were born?” Sam asks, curious.
To his surprise, Jack nods. “I remember. I asked if you were my father. Is that what you’re talking about?”
Knowing who Jack’s father was, that question had chilled Sam to the bone the first time that he’d heard it. Now, it makes him smile.
“Yeah, it was,” Sam says.
He surprises himself by pulling Jack into a one-armed hug.
“You know I’m proud of you, right?”
Jack smiles, then, and Sam knows that they’ve picked the right timeline. “Really?”
“Really,” Sam replies. “Mind if I watch with you?”
Jack nods. “I’ve got to catch you up, first. So, Ross and Rachel are fighting.”
They’re only a third of the way through a bottle of whiskey, which ordinarily wouldn’t be nearly enough for Dean to be having these kinds of thoughts. But there’s one that’s been weighing on his mind for the past three hours, and he thinks he’s going to burst if he doesn’t express it.
“Hey, Cas?”
He nudges Cas’s foot with his own. Cas looks up once he’s finished refilling both of their glasses.
“Yes?”
“You know I love you, right?”
To his surprise, Cas nods, as if someone had just told him the meteorologist had called for rain while he was standing in the middle of a downpour.
“Of course.”
Okay, so Dean’s a little blindsided, sure, but it’s nice to know that he’s not going to have to explain it. Admittedly, though, a part of him had kind of been hoping that Cas would just do that angelic head-tilt thing and blink at him uncomprehendingly. Then he’d get the chance to talk it out and really figure all of it out for himself, too.
“I don’t mean like I love Sam.”
And, wow, okay, that’s more times than he’s said the L-word in his life.
Again, Cas nods. “Yes.”
Okay. Dean lets out a breath.
“Does that mean that you—that you, uh—”
“Yes.”
It’s a good thing Cas is being so damn calm about this, because Dean thinks he’d probably be freaking out if he wasn’t.
“Right,” Dean says faintly.
He feels a little dizzy. Is this supposed to make him dizzy? Cas stares at him, eyes wide and concerned.
“I just—” Dean waves his free hand like he thinks he’s going to be able to summon the right words into his palm. “Dad used to say it all the time. To Mom, I mean. And to Sammy and me, I guess, but I don’t really remember that as well.”
Cas takes a thoughtful sip of his drink, still eyeing Dean carefully over the rim of his glass.
“And when she died, he stopped. I thought for a long time when I was a kid that if I was useful enough, helpful enough, he’d do it again, you know? That he’d find whatever piece of him had left with Mom.”
At that, Cas reaches out and grips his shoulder. It’s a small comfort, but it’s enough to make Dean keep going.
“And then I started thinking that I’d lost that piece of me, too. That part that knows how to—how to love.”
Cas inclines his head. “Right after I betrayed Heaven’s orders for the first time and brought you to Sam in that nunnery, I thought the same thing. That I didn’t know how to love.”
Dean opens his mouth, but Cas holds up his hand and he falls silent.
“I learned. You taught me. And how could you teach something you didn’t already know yourself?”
Despite himself, Dean’s tearing up for like the hundredth time today. He finishes off his glass while he tries to compose himself, but Cas doesn’t fill it again.
“What do we do with this?” Dean asks at last.
Cas smiles. “Whatever we want. You taught me that, too.”