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The minute John Winchester walked into their lives, Carlos knew the clock on the end of Mary Campbell’s had started. He just knew, best friends always did.
There was just something about him that Carlos didn’t trust, something that set him on edge and made the acid in his stomach curdle. John obviously struggled with Battle fatigue and boiling uncontrollable, unchecked rage that constantly bubbled under his skin. Even Millie, his mother had mentioned it on occasion and if a man’s mother could see it then it had to hold some truth to it.
There never seems to be time to discuss his worries with Mary though, they’re either two seconds away from losing one of them in a fight against a monster, or celebrating the fact that they scrapped by with a win. And after a win, Mary will look so happy with John that it makes Carlos second guess everything. Maybe he’s reading too much into it and projecting his own trauma onto his best friend’s happy ending.
Less than a year after meeting John and three days after losing her parents, Mary drags them to Vegas. Carlos should have fought her on it, should have locked her in a motel room until she came to her senses. Hindsight really is something. Instead of doing what he should do, he lets Mary guide him through a hole in the wall thrift shop and helps her select a gauzy white dress, if she’s going to ruin her life he’ll at least make sure she looks good doing it.
Carlos stands to the side with Latika as they witness the couple’s marriage in the cramped chapel with dust covered carpets and peeling, smoke-stained wallpaper.
After the wedding, they hunt together for a little while longer but Mary wants a house and a baby and John wants a real and respectable job. Carlos reluctantly lets her go and he hears later that they returned to Lawrence and bought a house to settle down and raise a family. He can’t be mad really, this is what Mary has wanted for longer than he’s known her.
Once Mary is gone their contact is sporadic. He hears from her every week, then every other week and soon it turns to every few months. She got out, she survived so Carlos should respect her wishes and just let go but he can’t shake the feeling of wrongness that surrounds the now elusive Mary Campbell.
Every call or bit of contact seems to carry bad news with it. Her and John are fighting again, she finally got pregnant only for it to end in loss like the ones before it. What an incredibly heartbreaking thing to watch from afar. Then, one cold day in the first month of 1979, after not hearing from Mary in over a year, Carlos gets a message asking that he please come and meet his new, first and only nephew.
Walking into the hospital room and seeing Mary for the first time in so long gives him pause. His best friend does not look like herself. Her skin is gray and bloodless, her lips thin and so chapped that they’re cracked and scabbed over. What the hell happened to his beautiful Mary.
“Carlos, come and meet the baby” Mary says in way of greeting, struggling to push herself into a seated position and reaching to pull the metal crib closer to the bed.
Carlos obeys the order and goes to his friend’s side. He moves the crib closer to Mary’s bed and then reaches in and ever so carefully lifts the baby out, handing him over to his mother.
“Where’s John?” He asks conversationally, both surprised and not in the least surprised that the man isn’t anywhere to be seen.
“Work, couldn’t get the time off” Mary said as she finally looked away from her son and gestured for Carlos to sit in the chair next to the bed.
“Carlos, this is Dean” Mary introduced as she passed the swaddled baby over to her friend.
“Ah..Um okay…Hello Dean” Carlos says as he takes the baby that’s being all but shoved at him.
“Jimmy, Janice, Jim Morrison” Carlos recites from memory as he moves the baby’s fist in the sign of the cross.
He watches the baby’s face scrunch in confusion and then turns a mock scathing look on his friend. “Mary Campbell, you haven’t taught this baby a thing, must I be both favorite uncle and music educator?” He questioned teasingly.
“Carlos, he’s less than twenty four hours old” Mary protested with a laugh that quickly turned into a coughing fit.
He sits with them all afternoon, holding Dean in his arms and pretending for just a bit longer that the lies he’s telling are the truth. Pretending that he is in fact going to be the favorite uncle, that he’s going to teach Dean about music and how to play guitar. Pretending that there’ll be christmases and birthdays.
The sky turns orange and purple and Carlos knows it’s time for him to go. He settles Dean back in his mother’s arms and then stretches to press a kiss to Mary’s forehead. Stepping back, he tries to take a mental imprint of the scene before him, his friend with her miracle baby.
One cold day in the first month of 1979, is the very last time Carlos sees Mary Campbell alive.
Almost five years later, in the eleventh month of 1983, Mary Campbell is dead.
He is back in Lawrence for the first time in a while and drinking a cup of bad diner coffee when he sees it. Mary’s death is a headline “Young Mother Dies in House Fire” but, in actuality the paper has very little to say about her. His Mary Cambell is reduced to just “Wife” and “Mother”.
The house or what was once Mary’s house is just a burned out shell sitting atop scorched earth. There is nothing left, apparently since there was no body her husband saw no need for a funeral and left town less than forty eight hours after her death. Could you get any more guilty than that?
Carlos wants nothing more than to track down John Winchester and take those boys, Mary’s boys, away from him. Maybe John didn’t kill her himself but he's the reason she’s dead. How can he as her best friend stand by and watch her babies be raised in the exact way she didn’t want.
In the end, he doesn’t go after them because, as wrong as he knows John is, Carlos can’t bring himself to potentially make the kids' life any worse. They’ve already lost their mother after all, how could he take them away from the only other parent they have.
Carlos stays in town a few extra days, even though there is nothing left for him in Lawrence. He buries an empty casket and buys a headstone for Mary. It’s a fruitless venture, there is nothing to bury after all but, her kids should have a place to visit her one day. He wants a place to visit her.
Over the years Carlos loses touch with everyone, Lata is gone. Not dead, just gone off galavanting across the globe gathering any and all kinds of research , Carlos can’t remember where she is on any given day for the life of him. His contact with other hunters is sporadic and he tries to avoid John Winchester like the plague. It works out well because John hates working with other hunters and for the most part, other hunters hate working with John.
It’s a day in the early 90s when Carlos sees John for the first time since 1973. Carlos is passing through the Roadhouse, hanging out with a hunter named Ellen and her daughter Joanna or “Jojo” as Carlos affectionately calls her. He has Joanna on his lap and the little girl is dutifully cracking open a bowl of peanuts when John stumbles in, covered in blood and muck. Bill, Ellen’s husband who was supposed to be working the case with John is nowhere to be seen.
“Is my Daddy home, Uncle ‘Losy?” Joanna asks when she finally picks up on the extra sound in the bar.
“Do you think he brings me another knife?” She questioned, looking up from the peanuts she was cracking.
“I don’t know Jojo, why don’t you go play with your toys a bit and I’ll check things out” Carlos said finally, fighting to keep his voice even so he doesn’t scare the little girl.
Carlos watches Joanna scamper off upstairs before he gets up and strides over to where Ellen is standing with John. Ellen is standing frozen and looking horrified and Carlos just knows, he doesn’t need John to say it, doesn’t want him to say it he just knows. In a swift movement he has John up against the wall and a knife to his throat. It would be so goddamn easy.
“Nice to see you again too Carlos, been a long time” John offers easily and Carlos has to resist the urge to stick the pointed edge of his blade into the man’s throat.
“You’re not going to kill me Carlos, think about the boys..what do you think will happen to them if I don’t come back, they’re in a motel somewhere and you’d never find them” John taunts and Carlos can smell the whiskey and rot on his breath.
And just like that, Carlos steps back. Though he hates to admit it, John is correct. Hurting him would be hurting Mary, he can’t bring himself to do that. It’s what he knows he should do but, he just can’t.
They let John go and the man disappears, it will turn out to be the last time Carlos will see him.
Carlos meets Dean again when the kid is twenty two, or close to it. Light brown hair, a bit golden in the right light, his mother’s green eyes and leather jacket that is much too big on him.
It’s an accident really, they’d ended up in the same town, checking out the same case. The kid, Mary’s baby, is a good hunter. Too good for how young he is.
Carlos doesn’t tell Dean who he is, in the moment it seems like a needless complication.
After the first hunt they end up hunting together quite often. Sometimes it’s on purpose and sometimes it’s by accident not that Carlos really cares. He’ll jump at any chance to spend time with his nephew and the last remnants of his best friend.
It’s months and several hunts later when Carlos finally explains himself. A mother and her two toddlers left absolutely torn apart by a werewolf. Dean seems incredibly shaken by the experience, it’s the first time Carlos has seen the kid hesitate.
“You look just like your mother when you do that” Carlos said without thinking as he watches Dean make a face at the mug of tea he just put in his hands.
“What?” Dean asked, looking up at Carlos with surprise.
“You knew my mother…She was a hunter?” He asks.
Carlos raised an eyebrow, shocked at the fact that the boy didn’t know. “She was one of the best and one of my best friends” he said, crawling into the front seat of the van to retrieve something.
“That’s me, Mary and our friend Lata” he explained, passing the photo over to Dean.
“She looks happy” Dean says softly as he stares intently at the younger version of Mary.
“We were, happiest time of my life was when the three of us were hunting together,” Carlos muses with a wistful smile.
“Only ever time I saw her happier was the day you were born” he added, shaking his head.
He watches Dean go quiet for a few minutes, as if he’s thinking something over. And then, a small voice asking a tentative question.
“Do you have any more pictures?” Dean asks hopefully.
Carlos roots around in the van again and unearths a small collection of Polaroids that he hands over so Dean can look through them. The boy seems to be absolutely entranced by them, staring for minutes at a time at each picture of Mary.
“Did…did you know about us, that she got married and had kids?” Dean asks after a while.
“Of course, visited her in the hospital and brought you this really ugly blue bunny,” Carlos recalled.
Dean screwed up his face in thought before finally protesting, “Bun was not ugly”
“Wait, who’s this?” Dean asked as he thrust the picture he was looking at back into Carlos’s hands.
The photo in question is a group shot of all of them, it’s Christmas and they’re all squished into Millie Winchester’s living room. Carlos opens his mouth to tease his nephew about not recognizing his own grandmother until he realizes with horror that that is in fact the truth. His jaw tightens and he shoves the photographs back into their envelope before crawling into the front seat of the van. He’s taking Dean home.
They’ve all been looking for Mary’s kids to a certain degree but it seems that Mille may be the one who was looking the hardest. It’s odd, Carlos had assumed that John had at the very least kept in contact with his mother but, apparently he can’t be counted on to do even that. Actually, it’s not odd, it’s enraging.
Carlos drives all night, more often than but he tries his best to avoid Lawrence and Kansas altogether; there are too many painful memories. He stops by a few times a year, checking in on Millie who’s older now and losing her memory, thankfully she has Ada who watches over and takes care of her.
Carlos knocks on the front door before opening and ushering Dean inside. He hangs up their coats on the hooks on the wall and then drops his keys into an empty dish. They walk through the house, making their way to the small living room.
“It’s a good day” Ada informs him with a warm smile as she stands, then her eyes shift over to Dean.
“Millie, I brought someone to see you” Carlos says as he bent to kiss the older woman’s cheek.
“This is…” Carlos begins to introduce only to be cut off by a scathing look as Millie stood up.
“You think I don’t know my own grandson?” Millie questions as she fixes her eyes on Dean and walks toward him.
“So much like Mary” Millie offers softly as she reaches out to lay a hand against Dean’s cheek and the boy leans into the small bit of affection.
Carlos leaves Dean with Ada and Millie, promising he’ll be back in an hour or so for lunch. He walks down Main Street and stops at the small flower shop on the corner, buying a bouquet of bright yellow sunflowers. It’s a bit harder to walk into the cemetery to see her. Even all these years later, all the time that’s past Carlos still finds it difficult to really believe that Mary is gone. He sits in the grass and rests the bouquet against the headstone with a sigh.
“It’s okay Mare, Dean’s okay…I…I’ve got him” he promises, laying a hand against the cold slab of marble.