Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

When Dean Winchester is ten years old, he takes his little brother’s hand and walks out the door.

He has a backpack filled with food and whatever weapons could possibly fit, and Sammy has a backpack filled with books and his free hand holds the stuffed rabbit Dean won him at a claw machine the week before. Dean leaves the keys on the kitchen table.

Dean Winchester, ten years old, walks out the door of a motel in Wisconsin with his six-year-old little brother in his hand, and looks back only once, but he can’t change his mind now, so he walks.

They walk. And walk, and walk.

John Winchester comes back the following week. Dean and Sam Winchester are already gone.

~

In a way, he would’ve seen the world as far more terrifying than it actually is, had he not already been left behind for the past six years, to take care of a person he’d only known for six months. Dean loves his brother, and he always will, but he didn’t really know him then, when Dad left them alone for the first time and Dean barely reached the kitchen counter to warm Sammy’s milk in the microwave. 

He barely knew enough to cut the crusts off his own sandwiches without cutting his thumbs, so he started to eat the crusts anyway, even if they tasted gross. He drank spoiled milk, because he gave the better one to Sammy, because Sammy needed it to grow and the formula Dad had bought had already run out.

Had he not been left alone with his brother so early in his life, Dean would’ve found the world an even more terrifying place than he did the first few times they walked it without the knowledge that Dad would, in some capacity, come back. If Dad didn’t come back when he said, then he was at least going to call. Or show up, unannounced, a few days or weeks later.

Dean stopped questioning it, eventually. Take care of Sammy. That was all that ever really mattered. As he got older, Dean forgot his mother’s face, because Dad stopped having her picture up around them. Sammy didn’t know her face at all. 

Dad was grieving, Dean knew that. But, Dean also knew that you didn’t leave four-year-olds to care for their little brothers who had colic. And, Dean was also grieving. He was always sad, these days, especially so when Sammy wasn’t looking. 

Even if Dean didn’t know many other people who had lost their moms and then been forced to take care of their little brothers all alone, he knew that if you lost someone, then you grieved together. Nothing good ever came from being sad alone. 

So, Dean walks away from his father, who always has a raincloud over his head and doesn’t smile at his little boys, even when Sammy draws him a picture to take with him in the car, or when Dean does half-decent at school. Sammy grows up, and Dean thinks he starts to look like Mom, even when he can’t remember her. Maybe, that was why Dad couldn’t look at him.

Dean couldn’t even remember the last time he had hugged his Dad. 

Sammy had asked half a question, and when Dean was still sad, he stopped asking why they left Daddy. Dean said it was better, but he had had a sad little tilt to his mouth, and his eyebrows had been angry, so Sammy stopped asking, because he couldn’t remember the last time Daddy hugged him either.

Dean has money he’d been given from a nice old lady in Wisconsin, because for once he didn’t have to scam someone, and she’d just taken pity on them, and they rode the bus to nowhere, and Sammy would wonder if Daddy were looking for them, but maybe not. Half the time, Daddy tried to care. The other half of the time, he’d stare at nothing and leave them alone again.

Sammy hugs the rabbit to his chest and sleeps on Dean’s shoulder. It is better this way, he thinks to himself. It is easier this way. 

~

Dean buys him a cassette tape for his seventh birthday, and Sammy tries not to think about how much money he has left for food, but Dean still tries to make him smile, so Sammy takes it and puts it into the walkman they’d found in a dumpster and that Dean had repaired, and he hums and smiles back.

Dean tries to calm his gnawing stomach. 

It is better this way.

~

They live in a junkyard when Dean turns thirteen, and Sam steals books from the corner shop while Dean plays bumper cars while trying to learn how to drive. Sam stopped wondering if Dad was still looking for them, sometime before Christmas the year before, even when Dean still takes newspapers from garbage cans to see if maybe Dad had decided to turn their disappearance into a charity case. He hasn’t, as far as they can see.

Dean pretends he doesn’t care. Sam thinks he isn’t very good at lying.

~

They’re still living in the junkyard when someone drops off an old RV. It’s really old and smells funny, but Dean has learned a lot about old cars in the two years they’ve been living there, that he doesn’t mind the grease or the smell or the way the exhaust turns black when he tries to get the engine to do other things than cough and wheeze like the chainsmoking old man with the dog down by the church.

Sam still reads his books, and he still has his dreams, but Dean is far too busy to dream, so he fixes an old RV with bits and pieces from old Chevvies and Mercedes and one piece from an old lawnmower, and it runs with a black exhaust and a cracked windshield, but it’s warm and comforting and motheaten and kind of ugly. 

But, it becomes home.

Sam paints and writes on the ceiling when he can’t sleep and Dean pretends not to look at him from underneath the covers when the nights turn cold and damp. He wants to preserve the wonder that he sees in his little brother’s eyes. 

He wants to run away to a warm place where his brother is never hungry, but if he’ll have to do with damp places and stars in cracked ceilings of old RVs, then he’ll do it. He'll do anything if it meant his brother still smiled with wonder.

~

The town has a second-hand store they frequent as often as they can when money allows. Dean mows grass in the summers and shovels driveways in the winter, and Sammy reads as much as he can, and when he can’t then he babysits and walks dogs with Dean. 

The little town is kind to them. They get nothing for free, but they work hard and as often as they can with their young ages, and the people, eventually, stops asking them about their parents. Sammy says, once, that Mom is dead, and people grow quiet. Dean says, once, that Dad is a bastard, and people pity them.

Dean finds an old leather jacket at half the already halved price, and Sam finds books on how to make your own paint with things you already have. Sam finds an old necklace on a leather band, and Dean finds cassette tapes with stories and books about laws and trees and animals. Sam finds books about monsters and old newspapers. 

The newspapers write about his birth. Mom’s death. He stuffs the newspapers in the back of their box. The monsters too. Dean has enough nightmares, even when he says he has none.

~

The old ladies who give out food after church on Sundays talk in hushed voices and to anyone who’ll listen about the handsome gentleman who came from out of state to handle one of the missing people’s cases in the neighbouring town.

Dean freezes with his bowl of soup and bread in his hands, and Sam takes a step back, because even if it has been six years, it hasn’t been enough years and Dean hasn’t yet gotten a fake driver’s license so that he could possibly drive their RV out of town at first notice.

The old ladies notices, of course, because they’re old ladies and nosy and they care while they smell like dust and lily soap and love to pinch their cheeks. They ask them questions, and they say that they cannot be sure that it is their Dad. The old ladies say nothing. 

No one in the town tells the handsome young man about the boys that live in the junkyard. It slips out, of course. But no one knows who told him.

~

Dean spots him first. 

Sam reads outside the RV in a patched sunchair and has a vast collection of flowers and jars by his feet. His latest color, that still smears his fingers and nose, is lavender purple, and it stains the pages of his book.

“Sammy, get inside,” Dean says, and Sammy looks up with pinched brows and a slight pout, but then he sees Dean’s wild eyes and hears the crack in his voice, and he stands fast enough to almost tip the chair and paints his shoes purple when he stumbles over the jars.

He has barely closed the door when he comes around the corner, and Dean’s back is to him and staring at the closing door. His old leather jacket fell victim to Sammy’s obsession with painting: blue and yellow and red and green flowers and grass. The arms are the sun.

“Dean?” Asks the voice Dean never wanted to hear again, and he bites his lip and turns around and spreads his arms wide. 

He says nothing.

John Winchester almost laughs. Dean stares. 

At sixteen, he’s almost as tall as his Dad. At twelve, Sammy is as tall as Dean. Dean doesn’t want to compare Sammy to Dad, ever.

“Is this where you’ve been? Do you know -?”

“What do you want?” Dean cuts him off, and John stares at him like a fish on dry land, gaping at him. Dean knows Sammy’s peaking out from behind the curtains. John’s eyes flicker between them.

“ What . Do you. Want?” 

“Why did you leave like that? No note, no phone call. Nothing. Not even Bobby knew where you were, and you’ve been here ? Hiding in a junkyard ?” And, it does hurt when he mentions Bobby, and Dean already knew that John would look there, but betraying Bobby felt far worse than ever betraying John. 

“I thought Yellow Eyes had gotten you.”

And, it always had to be a monster. Not a human element. Not a kidnapping. Not running away. Not CPS.

Always a fucking monster.

“Why the fuck do you think, John ?” Dean says, because his anger is both young and old and it rarely shows its face, and he has always had a growing rage for his father. Contempt, would be one word for it.

Disgust, is another.

“You left us alone, for years. All because of a fucking monster that might not even be real.”

“It is real, Dean. Your Mom wasn’t the only one.”

“I don’t fucking care. I don’t. I did my best with what you gave me back then, and I’m doing my best right now, and it has got to be enough.”

“You took Sam.”

“If you’d given a shit, at all, then you wouldn’t have left us in the first place.” He’s shouting now, but he doesn’t care. 

Dean points back toward the RV: “ my brother, my responsibility.”

The door creaks open behind him. Sam’s purple fingers clasp around the door. 

Dean had asked him once, and Sam has close to no memories of their Dad. Not enough for anything to last.

“ You left us . We didn’t leave you.” Dean says, and John looks at Sam’s wide eyes. Sam steps down, carefully. 

“You should go,” he says, and John clenches his jaw. 

“You’re still my kids,” John says.

“That doesn’t mean shit, and you know it.” Dean spits. John backs up.

“There’s a werewolf in the area. Be careful, boys.”

He walks away. Dean feels close to crying.

~

They read about the werewolf in the paper the next week. 

Dean uses it as kindling.

~

They’re on edge for the next few weeks after John’s appearance, but he doesn’t come back, and Sam, soon enough, starts painting again. He’s started using a new shade of red when a car rumbles up the driveway to the junkyard’s abandoned gate and stops, and Dean stands on the RV’s roof to see who it might be. Sam stares at him from below, fingers now stained red and knees green from kneeling on dewy grass.

Dean swallows hard when the figure in the baseball cap steps out of the car and inspects the gate. Padlocked and rusted. No one ever comes there anymore.

Bobby, however, sees their little trail leading to the gap in the fence. Sees Sam’s little gifts hanging in the trees with ribbons and fingerpaint and torn newspapers.

He trails his fingers along them, fondly, because they were made by his boys, and his boys have been the reason for his ire against John for years now, and will perhaps always be, because how you lose the brightest spots of your life, Bobby will never understand.

He walks their way. Dean’s heart is heavy. Sam doesn’t remember Bobby.

Dean sits down on the roof and dangles his long legs over the edge, tapping his heels gently against the wall, and Sam kneels back down on the ground, because if Dean is calm, then so is he, and he swipes red into his dark hair and it glimmers in the sun.

Bobby comes into view, and Dean wants to pretend that he doesn’t care, but he can’t. Sam looks at him, curiously. Washes his fingers by wiping them on the wet grass.

Bobby stops and just stares at them for a moment, hands at his hips and a sniffle in his nose. There’s a soft little smile on his face.

“Hey, boys,” he says, and he sounds breathless. Sam frowns a little.

“Hey, Bobby,” Dean says, and his voice cracks a little. Sam looks up at him. Dean hops off the RV. They stop a bit away from each other, wary and scared and sad, and Sam stands up now, because it is a strange exchange and not at all what he’d thought the day would be like.

“You’re Bobby?” He asks, wiping excess paint on his pants, and walks until he’s level with Dean, and Bobby’s eyebrows shoot up and his eyes grow even sadder.

“Yeah, kid. That’s me.” He nods.

“I’m sorry I don’t remember you.” He says, because he doesn’t remember Dad that well either, but Dean seems sadder about this, so he feels better about this moment than the glances he got from Dad so many weeks before. 

“It’s okay. I’m just real glad to see you both, is all,” Bobby says, and his voice cracks now too, and Sam thinks that love must sound like this and not the heated words between Dean and Dad.

Dean takes a step forward. Sam lags behind. 

Dean and Bobby throw their arms around one another. 

Sam will remember Dean’s hugs for the rest of his life and know the feel of his brother’s presence and the shape he holds in his life, but hugging Bobby feels like hugging a father should feel like.

Chapter Text

The headaches start a couple of months after Sam’s twenty-second birthday.

Sam isn’t the one to tell Dean, blaming the headaches on college hangovers and the vomiting on the terrible food from the new food joint three streets over. Sam doesn’t tell Dean, even when he bites his tongue bloody and chips his teeth on the floor. He doesn’t tell Dean about the ache in his joint, or the deep-seated desperation eating away at his bones.

Sam tells Dean nothing. Sam never wants Dean to worry.

Sam groans and wipes blood from his nose and bile from his mouth when he hangs over the toilet bowl and Jess calls Dean because it has gone on long enough. Next, she calls an ambulance, because Sam’s knees keep locking and his skin is pale and clammy and he mumbles things she can’t do anything about because Dean is three states away and can only get there so fast.

She puts Dean on speaker. She can’t decide who hurts more.

~

Dean is ten years old when he tells his brother to pack a bag filled with whatever he wants. Dean packs the essentials, while Sam packs his books and stuffed rabbit, and hides Dean’s comic books at the back of the bag because Dean looks at them and then puts them down, instead taking all the food from the kitchen. 

Dean is sixteen years old when he meets his father again. Sam doesn’t remember the man. Sam remembers the way Dean’s spine locked and his chin raised. Sam remembers the way Dean spoke through clenched teeth. 

(sammy doesn’t remember dean’s broken arm,)

John Winchester walks away. He doesn’t suffer any loss from it.

~

When Dean signs his name and puts down a deposit on an apartment, he almost cries right then and there in front of the kind of shady landlord. Instead, he plasters on a smile, shakes his hand and fumbles with the keys the whole way back to the RV.

Sam, fifteen, draws in the margins of second-hand textbooks. Dean wiggles the keys in the air.

Sam’s smile is enough to brighten the whole world. 

Dean calls Bobby. He pretends he knows the feeling of fatherhood. Dean doesn’t tell Bobby where they live. 

Bobby doesn’t ask.

John Winchester dies on the job, half a year later.

(he comes back, half a year after that,

bobby doesn’t tell them,)

~

On the first, official, day of school for Sam, Dean presents himself at the head office, a little after nine in the morning. 

Bobby taught him the basics about fake papers. He’ll only fake them as long as it doesn’t endanger Sam. 

(it did, 

once,

once, was more than enough,)

Dean Winchester is nineteen years old. Sam Winchester is fifteen. Not technically orphaned. It’s them against the world, for the rest of time.

Dean Campbell is twenty-three. Sam Campbell is still fifteen. Orphaned when Sam was twelve. It’s been them against the world ever since.

~

Dean finds a job at an auto shop and Sam falls in love with a girl.

Sam hits puberty and shoots off like a tree, and it distresses Dean for altogether different reasons than the most obvious ones, and Sam thinks he’s solved the issue when he shows Dean how he has to stuff newspapers in his shoes because they still won’t fit.

Dean has gotten pretty good at lying.

Sam grows up. It scares the shit out of Dean. 

Little Sam, he can protect without too much trouble. He’s good at running away, he can hotwire a car in record time and he knows how to shoot a gun.

Big, growing up, Sam? Dean doesn’t really know what to do, anymore.

So, he uses old lessons: he pours lines of salt on each threshold, draws runes beneath the rugs and uses savings to buy proper silver kitchenware. On Sam’s next birthday, Dean buys him a pendant, smelted and carved on off hours and with whatever kitchenware he could spare.

Sam beams. 

Dean is terrified.

~

“I applied for college,” Sam says on a Saturday in May, weeks after his birthday, but years after an, according to Dean, significant one. The weather isn’t too warm and it isn’t too cold, so they’re outside in the park that’s kind of close by, and Sam has, for once, put down his book.

His hair is too long, falling across his eyes, even when he’s lying on his back and the sun warms the exposed skin where the pendant lies, askew, against his throat. 

“Yeah? Which ones?” Dean asks. He’s trying to catch up on his high school degree, but biology is confusing where math is simple and history sounds all made up when he’s taken a peek behind the curtain.

Sam takes a minute to answer. Dean looks over at him. Sam is scratching at his forehead.

“The usual ones,” he says. Dean blinks at him. 

“Dude, normal-speak,” Dean says because there are too many colleges for him to remember and Sam has always been the one of them most interested in school way beyond high school level.

Sam squints his eyes at him.

“Harvard. Yale. MIT.” He falters. Dean pretends not to catch it.

“Those the normal ones?”

“Sure.”

“What’s the last one?”

Dean makes the mistake of taking a sip of coffee.

“Stanford.” 

Dean almost chokes.

Sam is sitting up by the time Dean stops sputtering, wiping tears from his eyes. He’s still tapping his breastbone when he looks at Sam.

“Are you kidding me? Tell me you’re kidding.” He says, not really a question. Sam picks at his nails.

“I don’t even know if I get into any of them.” And, he does that little nervous thing that he picked up at five years of age and never dropped, even after they left; he looks anywhere but at Dean. Swallows with a dry throat. Fidgets, barely enough for it to be noticeable. Makes himself as small as possible, even at 6’4.

“So long as you don’t get into Stanford, I’m happy for you. Hell, even community college would make me fucking ecstatic for you.”

Sam smiles. Dean, mentally, puts together a list.

Sam, of course, gets into Stanford.

Dean is equally happy as he is sad. Anger never makes an appearance.

~

Bobby picks up the phone on the third ring, breathless and blood-soaked.

Dean doesn’t say anything, right away. Jess is a bundle of nerves beside him, picking at her blonde hair and twisting Dean’s too-big jacket between her fingers. Doctors and nurses wander in and out, and it’s a Friday evening-going-into-night, and there are way too many people in a too-small space.

“Hello?” Bobby echoes, a plea into the void that is Dean’s throat. 

“I-,” he swallows because he doesn’t want to say it. He wants to say nothing. He wants everything to be okay. He wants aspirin to solve the problem. Save the day. He wants to drink himself into blissful forgetfulness, even when it scares the shit out of him after watching John one too many times.

“Dean? Kiddo, what’s wrong?”  

Sam had seen nothing but Dean the moment he had entered the ER, even in the many hours after Jess had called him and he had tried his best to calm Sam down via speaker phone in the back of an ambulance. Sam’s eyes, usually full of wonder and delight, and been nothing but painful fear and the haunted spaces between flesh and bone. 

Dean had held him until he could be properly sedated.

That had been an hour ago.

“It’s Sam.” And, Jess sobs into her hands beside him, and he puts a hand on her shoulder and she tucks herself into his chest, the same way Sam had done until he turned thirteen.

“What’s Sam? Dean,” Bobby says, and Dean has to force the words out, past the lump in his throat. 

“I need to talk to John,” he whispers into Jess’ hair, staring at the wall. He doesn’t know that John is there, waiting. Summoned, by the brief mention of his name.

“Dean?” He asks, and Dean wants to shut up. He hasn’t wanted a father for almost sixteen years. He wants to shut up. Shut down. 

He grew up to not expect his father to pick up the phone. It was a fucking miracle when he did.

“You gotta know something. About Sam.”

John does. Of course, he does. 

They’re still in the hospital when the dorm burns down. 

Sam is still haunted. 

The doctor has yellow eyes.

~

Sam finishes college with an acceptable degree. Jess takes a sabbatical. Dean puts down a mortgage on a house.

Sam moves to an apartment, barely a ten-minute drive away from Dean, and Jess stays there for a month while preparing for her around-the-world trip. She invites Sam because he’s Sam, and she invites Dean out of courtesy, but she seems almost half-glad that they both decline. 

Dean Campbell is almost thirty when he applies to be a foster parent while working part-time at the high school and part-time at the auto shop. His boss calls him over-ambitious. 

Dean just wants to make up for everything. 

Dean Winchester is barely twenty-seven. He almost misses the RV whenever he gets a message or a call from Sam about a headache or a dream he had. 

It felt so much simpler back then.

~

The headaches and the dreams stop almost two years after they begin.

Jess moves back in with Sam.

~

Dean remodels a house and carves runes into floorboards beneath the carpets and ashwood into the threshold, and cooks food with too much salt in it when the kids he fosters bring home friends he doesn’t know or the social workers come by and he offers them a cup of coffee or tea brewed on holy water. Each of his kids gets something silver in remembrance.

Sam passes the bar in New York and follows Dean’s lists to the letter when he builds his own home, and he paints what he remembers from old nightmares and they sell far too well on low-budget auction houses. Jess kisses him giddily when he proposes in Central Park.

Dean adopts a dog and weaves silver into its collar.

It’s almost peaceful.

It’s almost easy.

~

Jess calls him in a panic when he ushers the kids out the door to the bus on the curb, and it’s been long enough now that Dean can tell between her “this is really fucking bad” voice, and her “this is a major inconvenience” voice. 

He almost wants to scold her for using her former voice to describe something of the latter’s magnitude, even if it is about her wedding dress.

~

Petey is still running laps around him when the door creaks open, and he’s raised his voice enough to drown out both the door and Jess’ frantic voice. He’s almost gotten her calm enough to talk to her Maid of Honor about the issue instead of him, because, sure, he can sew, but not on the level that a wedding dress will require.

He’s gotten her calm enough that he almost jumps out of his skin when Petey barks and darts off, white teeth gleaming in the early morning light.

“Hey, Petey! Shut that!” He calls, but the dog disappears around the corner anyway. “I’ll call you back, Jess.” He sighs, pocketing the phone to follow the irate dog.

He never barks at the kids. Never at Jess or Sam. Bobby still doesn’t know where either of them lives. 

He turns, slowly, around the corner.

Petey growls, low in the throat.

There’s a woman, standing with raised hands at the end of the corridor. 

Dean doesn’t keep his guns in the house. He’d like to think of himself as no less dangerous without them than he is with them.

The woman looks tired. Dishelved. Not very scared.

“Back up,” he says. Petey shifts his ears, but not his gaze.

“I ain’t talking to the dog, lady.” The woman looks up at him, almost in surprise. 

“You made it through the door. You’re not going any further.” 

Almost to his surprise, because her eyes are quite steely, she does back up. She tips her feet on the threshold. 

“Who are you? Why’re you in here?”

She stares.

“Get out.”

She just fucking stares.

“Pete,” he says, almost in warning, even when the dog isn’t trained to attack. The dog is just nervous. Curious. 

The woman is almost familiar. 

“Look, I can point you in the direction of the motel, but nothing more than-,”

“Were they all yours? Those kids?” She asks, interrupting him. There’s something breathless about her speech. 

“Wha-? No,” he says, too put off by the question to have any other response. She looks almost disappointed.

Petey backs up now when the conversation is picking up, sniffing the space around her before retreating behind Dean’s legs. His phone buzzes in his hand.

Sammy

Are you okay?

Debatable, he thinks. The woman still hasn’t given him a straight answer.

“I foster.” He doesn’t tell her that he took Emma in two months ago. It’s irrelevant to anyone besides them.

“Oh,” she says, in lieu of any other answer.  

“I was told there might be another hunter in town,” she says, matter-of-factly, and Dean doesn’t believe her for a second.

“No, you weren’t,” he says, and she raises her chin. A change in posture doesn’t change the meaning.

There’s a silent standoff. 

“No, I wasn’t,” she says.

“How.” It’s not a question.

“Accident.”

“Bull. Shit.”

“You’re Dean, right? I’m not barging into a stranger’s house?”

“Yes. You’re still in a stranger’s house.”

“Dean Winchester?”

“No.”

“No?” An almost smile.

“No. Campbell.” A full smile.

It’s the damned smile that does it. It’s the same damned smile, and it feels as if all the air’s left him, leaving him gasping on dry land. Petey tucks himself into his knees. 

It’s the same damned smile he’s fought for for over twenty years. The same slant to the mouth, the same gap between the lips, the same crinkling at the corners of the eyes.

He almost laughs. He would’ve, properly, if he’d had any air left.

“The bastard finally did it then?” He asks. His phone buzzes again.

Sammy

Dean?

Mary Winchester cocks her head to the side. 

“John finally brought you back,” he says, and Mary almost sighs. Dean smiles, neither happy nor sad.

“Looks like he really didn’t need us after all, even after all his complaining.” Mary looks at him sharply. 

“You left him,” she says, hands on her hips. Dean raises his eyebrows.

“He left us long before it got to that point. But, I’m guessing he told you differently.” Mary doesn’t respond right away, before inhaling through her nose and nodding, stiffly.

“He lost your kids, and now you’re not on good terms, is that it? I can’t help you with that. I’m already dealing with mostly shitty parents.”

They’re silent for a moment.

“He told me almost nothing.”

“Because he knows nothing. Even when he found us he didn’t bother reaching out. I lost contact with Bobby. That’d be my only regret.”

They're silent again.

“Sam was barely a year. If John wasn’t gone physically, he was gone figuratively. He didn’t give a shit about us.”

“How is Sam?” She asks, quietly. 

“Lawyer. Engaged.” He pauses. She looks almost misty-eyed. 

“I’m not gonna tell you where he is unless he wants me to.” She nods. There’s a half-smile on her face.

“You know he doesn’t remember you, right? We have no pictures. I barely remember. John had all of that and more.”

She’s nodding at his every word, tears welling in her eyes, mouth breathing words she puts no voice to.

He does tell her about Sam. He tells her about himself. He tells her about Emma, and how he changed the birth certificate from unknown to Dean Campbell. He tells her about everything, because she asks, and because she’s Mom. 

For a moment, she’s Mom.

He doesn’t ask her how she came back. He doesn’t ask her, and she doesn’t tell him. 

He texts Sam an assurance. Mary gives him her number. She needs time. 

It almost imploded. 

It’ll come back alright.