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He watched God and his sister ascend into the sky and now he’s staring at his mother, a strange kind of hysteria rising within him as he realizes what Amara meant when she said what you need most.
The moment he steps forward, Mom has him on the ground, and it’s eerily reminiscient of when he met her younger self through time travel. That’s the moment he found out she used to be a hunter. That’s the moment he began to question every memory he had of her.
“Who are you?” she demands, tough as nails just like then, which looks so out of place when she’s still dressed like this, wearing the white nightgown she died in.
“It’s Dean,” he grits out, like it’s supposed to mean something to her. He has to swallow a lump in his throat. “I’m your son.”
“I only have one son,” she says, voice firm, “and he’s six months old, and his name is not Dean.”
Of course not, he thinks, blinking furiously so that he doesn’t cry. Of course not. What did he think, that he’d say his name and she’d suddenly just know? That’s fairytale shit. That’s not his life. Fact of the matter is, when she was alive, she thought he was a girl.
Dean used to dream about this conversation. Used to picture her smile, the one thing he remembered with the most clarity. With that wide and loving smile, in his daydreams, she expressed her acceptance and offered comfort. When she hugged him she always smelled like her vanilla and roses; he never forgot that.
Reality isn’t as kind.
In reality, there’s a thirty year gap in her mind that he can’t possibly hope to fill for her. Sam might’ve been able to, Sam she might’ve believed, but she got Dean instead and he’s being realistic here. He’s rattling off facts about her life because it’s the only thing he can think of, until she is finally willing to hear him out.
She asks again—who he is.
“Look, I’m your kid, okay? Your oldest.” He thinks maybe he should say the name she used to call him, but when he tries, it sticks in his throat. Nothing comes out, like she’s dead and he’s mute all over again.
“But... You’re...” She stares at him with wide, flickering eyes, and doesn’t finish the sentence.
“Yeah, well.” He manages a chuckle, somehow. “A lot’s changed since you were gone.”
They sit and talk until sunrise. Dean fills her in on the basics.
She asks how she could be back—he says God’s sister resurrected her (he can hear Amara’s voice in his mind, what you need most, like a taunt).
She asks after John—who died to save Dean (there’s so many more things about John that he could say, that some dark part of him wants to say just to see the look on her face, which startles him; of course he doesn’t want that, and besides, it wouldn’t be fair).
And she asks after Sam—he glosses over a lot of it, says there were a few bumps on the road but he’s doing well now (he raised Sam more than she ever did but that’s a strange, territorial thought and he tamps it down, she’s here and alive and he’s happy).
And, finally, she says,
“I wasn’t expecting...”
A quiet breeze is blowing her hair forward. The hazy white sky still blurs pink at the edges.
“I’m still me,” Dean says immediately, hating the way his voice catches, willing her to believe it. He searches her eyes for any indication on what she’s thinking, but they’re unreadable.
He remembers Heaven. All those old memories played back for him and Sam both. One of them, the oldest one, had Mom in it. Making sandwiches and cutting the crusts off them. All the faded edges of the old memory were startingly clear in Heaven: the blue of her eyes, the sunlight catching her golden hair through the window, the love in her voice as she called him by the wrong name.
All that time, he’d managed to keep that name from Sam, until that moment, until they watched that memory. Not like Sam didn’t take it in stride; he never even repeated the name. Sam was too young when it changed, when Dad agreed to call Dean by that name and by different pronouns. Sam has had a brother for as long as he can remember.
Mom never got to see any of that, Dean reasoned after Heaven. She’d be so understanding if she had lived. If she knew.
“Are you happy this way?” she asks him, blue eyes wide and uncertain.
His green eyes aren’t from her, and his hair’s only that golden if he lets it grow long which he hasn’t done in a very long time. Still, everyone who had known her used to tell him how much he looked like her. It was always more about the shape of his face than anything else. Looking at his mother’s face in real life instead of a photograph feels different. It’s vivid now. The shape of her face. The texture of her skin. The way her hair darkens at the root.
Forgotten memories rise to the surface like bile. She used to make him wear dresses in the mornings.
Come on, little angel, work with me here. Her voice echoes in his mind, soft but peppered with frustration, and it makes him shiver.
“Yeah. I am.” His voice comes out hoarse.
He’s not the only one thinking of those old mornings. She dreams about it.
She dreams about the house that seemed like a dream come true after always having to move throughout her childhood. Salt was reserved for dishes that she pretended to have cooked herself to the other moms. Women who didn’t know what it was like to rend through flesh with a machete. She’d have lunches with them, she attended their baby showers, she even took a couple of fucking aerobics classes. Pretending she wasn’t so fit that she could kill them all in their sleep if she wanted.
Normal.
Odd, that it haunts her now. She had a daughter, and little girls were supposed to wear pretty dresses; that was normal. Mary herself skipped that phase because dresses were so impractical for training and princesses in their ivory towers didn’t save lives, hunters did. She ignored the tantrums because someone so young couldn’t possibly understand the gory alternative.
She dreams about John, who just...rolled with it. The dresses caused tantrums, so no more dresses meant no more tantrums. Problem solved. It bothered her, back then, seeing her daughter in t-shirts and plaid. It made her feel like a failure. But John clearly knew what he was doing. Looking at Dean now...
“He was such a good father,” she says to Dean the next morning. He doesn’t reply.
She tries to settle into life in the bunker. Re-learning the world. Re-learning her children (strangers, really, but she can’t admit that aloud). Reading John’s account of monsters and parenting.
What Mary did, the way she tried to give normalcy to her children, it didn’t matter a thing because Dean ended up firing a gun for the first time at six years old. Raised into the life, like Mary was—though Samuel senior did wait until Mary was twelve before letting her shoot.
Technology is different. With it, she finds out attitudes are different than they were thirty years ago, though still not as good as it should be. Sometimes it’s only a distant thing in the back of her head, but sometimes she’s looking at him and suddenly forcibly reminded that Dean the grown man used to be Mary’s little girl.
But John writes about putting a gun in a little boy’s hands. And looking at Dean now, you could never tell that John used to call him Princess. It feels like it never even happened at all. That somehow Mary dreamed all those memories up.
Filled with a strange sense of urgency, she searches for any old family photo she can find. They’re all after they stopped with the dresses, after the haircut incident. She hadn’t been completely oblivious. She’d talked with John about the Deanna problem, they discussed several possibilities, and then she died.
“Hey, Sam?” she asks in the treshold of Sam’s room. I made you, she used to tell him, voice tinged with wonder, only to giggle as his tiny baby hand reached up and touched her nose.
“Hey, Mom.” Sam’s face lights up at the sight of her. “What’s up?”
His name was the last thing to leave her lips before she died. The reminder shocks through her system, but she ignores it.
“Are there more family photos? From before the fire? I’ve seen the ones Dean has already. But I just wondered...”
Sam is silent for a long while. Something about his face makes her wait impatiently for what he has to say. Not that it shows. She’s always been good at pretending.
“There is one more,” Sam says, before clearing his throat. “Uh, Dean doesn’t like looking at it, that’s why it’s not with the others. But it’s still a picture with you in it so of course we kept it.”
She smiles at that, at her boy; she smiles even when she feels like screaming. They lived their whole lives without her.
“Where is it?”
“It’s in Dad’s journal, actually. Inside the cover.”
She goes and gets it, and Sam goes with her; carefully taking the old picture, square and glossy, out of the cover. She accepts it with shaking hands.
Mary and Deanna, captured in a loving embrace. Deanna grins right at the camera. Long blonde curls. Ruffled dress. Green eyes caught in the sunlight, with long lashes casting stark shadows. Countless little freckles.
Mary traces her finger over the face of her child, remembers tracing the freckles, remembers feeling so much love.
It’s like looking at a demon. It sounds cruel, but their skin isn’t their own. Is that how it felt? Even back then?
She tries to picture this child feeling loved enough to tell her he knows he’s a boy; pictures tracing his freckles and telling him he’s perfect the way he is. He’d want a different name, of course, and he’d feel content to let his mom pick a new one for him.
But that never happened. And he’s in his thirties now, not three.
“Mom?”
She wrenches her eyes away from the picture to look at Sam. There’s a strange look in his eyes, beneath the bunker’s warm yellow light.
“I know, coming back, it’s been difficult.” His chuckle sounds forced. “And I know difficult is an understatement. But... Please tell me that you’re okay with Dean being...well, Dean.”
A gentle reprimand. Like he’s the parent. He’s her baby, but they’re the same age. None of this is right. None of it feels right.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m okay,” she hurries to assure, with her best motherly smile. It feels like it’s been on her for too long; her face hurts with it. “I’m just adjusting.”
‘Adjusting’ takes her away from the bunker and from her children. It’s too hard to look at them. She can barely look at herself in the mirror. It’s easier, with her haircut, and the practical clothes she hasn’t worn in too long; no longer concerned with keeping herself pretty for her husband.
It’s strange, hunting again. It’s what she ran away from. It’s what she’s good at. Not homemade apple pie and bedtime stories. But her kids, she never wanted them to know what the scent of a burning corpse in a grave is like. Mary hurled after her first salt and burn; she remembers Deanna senior making her soup afterwards, tucking Mary’s hair behind her ears and telling her that it would get easier.
Once again, Mary finds herself wanting to give her children a life separated from all of this, but this time, she’s not doing it by pretending none of it exists at all. They won’t have to hunt any monsters if she kills them in their stead. Of course, there will always be one more monster.
Returning to Lawrence feels even stranger than plunging a knife into that British woman, what should have been Mary’s first kill since John woke up gasping in her arms.
Walking the streets she used to walk with a stroller, it all feels eerie and hazy. Like a dream. She passes the playground, thinks back to sunny afternoons spent on that wooden bench, watching Deanna play. Her eyes linger on the spot where he fell and scraped his knees once. It’d been so easy, because the skin was bare, because Mary made him wear a dress that morning. It got dirty in the fall.
Sam let her embrace him when she left, but Dean had flinched away from her touch. The memory of it, coming to her unbidden, makes her flinch as well. She doesn’t want to think about that. About them, the grown-up versions of her children. Not when she’s here in Lawrence, the tomb of their childhoods and all of her aspirations.
The sun is setting. The lawns she passes are tidy, like beautiful pictures in magazines about gardens. In one of them, a woman is watering plants with a steel watering can, white and red and yellow roses. The golden sunset blazes along the roofs of the parked cars.
Mary stops in front of the diner where she used to come with John all the time, before they started fighting so much. She always loved the pancakes.
So she goes in, and she orders the pancakes, extra syrup. She should have cut that yellow-eyed monstrosity down where it stood in Sammy’s nursery. If she hadn’t let herself get rusty... If she hadn’t thrown herself into the concept of normal...
The pancakes are just as good as she remembers them. She closes her eyes as the syrup melts in her mouth.
“Mary?”
She turns to see a woman gaping at her; brunette, sixties like Mary’s supposed to be, vaguely familiar. Mary could slap herself. Going back to all her old places, she should have known she might run into someone who used to know her.
“No, no, no,” she’s quick to assure. The lie comes to her easy: “I’m Mary’s younger sister. Much younger, I never knew her.”
The woman breathes a sigh of relief at her sanity being in-tact. It’s one of the moms Mary used to be friends with. They used to have lunches, she thinks, but she can’t for the life of her remember what they used to talk about, or even the woman’s name.
“My goodness, you look just like her when she was young.” The woman sits down in the seat across from Mary, who bites her tongue on a sarcastic comment regarding any lack of invitation to do so. Because the old Mary, the one this woman must see when she looks at this Mary, would never. “Gosh, it’s been thirty years now, give or take. She was my best friend, you know?”
Mary smiles pleasantly. “Was she?”
“Oh, yes,” the woman assures. “What brings you to Mary’s hometown?”
Hometown. Such a foreign concept when she was growing up, until she finally decided to go live her own life. She remembers the smell of nail polish. Guests and food and presents, little children to spoil.
“I, uh. Like I said, I didn’t know her, but... I recently found out, and so I came here.” She lowers her eyes, voice softening. “To reconstruct her life, I guess.”
“Of course,” the woman soothes. It seems a little too patronizing to Mary, too staged, or is that just her imagination? Surely she wouldn’t have befriended this woman if every interaction felt like this. “Such a tragedy, what happened to her. That fire...”
Through the window, Mary can see a streetlight flickering up the street.
“I heard,” she grits out with an unfaltering smile.
“And those kids...”
“What about her kids?” she asks sharply.
The woman leans forward, eager to share her gossip. Mary finally remembers the woman’s name.
“Well, she had two. Her baby boy and her beautiful little girl. But when Mary died, John clearly wasn’t taking proper care of them anymore. I mean, I couldn’t believe my eyes when I caught a glimpse of poor Deanna; it looked like she hadn’t eaten in a week when I dropped by the motel with a casserole.”
At first, all Mary feels is discomfort at the wrong name and the wrong pronouns as she once again thinks about Dean, flinching away from her touch. But then the actual words register, and her stomach drops down to her feet.
“And he’d leave them alone, for hours at a time. Imagine that! A four-year-old girl taking care of a baby. Having to be a mother so soon after losing her own. I never even heard her speak a word after the fire, and she used to be so chatty, you know. Well, we decided enough was enough, something had to be done. But John must have seen it coming, or maybe he was chasing something else. Either way... I remember the police calling it the Winchester disappearance. John had taken his kids, skipped town, and that was that.”
Mary forces herself to swallow the lump in her throat, unfinished pancakes in front of her, no longer hungry.
That was that.
She named her children for her parents, but it occurs to her neither of them are going by the names she gave them. Deanna and Samuel. Sam and Dean.
Remembering her parents always fills her with guilt. They died while she was running away from them. John never questioned any of it. Mary always loved him for that. He’d been earnest, and hardworking, and seemingly perfect for her.
Things changed when they had their—well, their son, but they didn’t know that yet at the time. As John pulled extra shifts to support his family, she felt like he didn’t appreciate the equally hard work of being a stay-at-home mom. They’d fight, right in front of Dean, and suddenly normal didn’t feel so welcoming anymore. She’d needed a break.
So when an old case popped up again, she’d jumped at the chance to engage with the real world, instead of shutting herself from it. Instead of keeping herself pretty, she wore convenient denim, with her hair in two long braids like she’d braided Deanna’s that morning. The freedom felt almost weightless.
She killed the monster, saved Asa Fox, and now Asa is dead. And once again, Mary’s relation with her family is strained.
“I was just trying to fill in the blanks,” she defends her trip to Lawrence, but Dean says,
“You could have just asked me.”
She can’t be what they want her to be—what Dean, especially, wants her to be. After all, between him and Sam, Dean is the one who remembers. Looking back, remembering Asa, she wonders how she was ever able to do it.
The two of them in front of their house. The sensitive and nurturing mother holding her daughter close, both wearing their dresses. Dolls in front of their dollhouse, arranged into conformity.
She lowers the picture. Everything looks exactly the same. The house didn’t fully burn down. But the people who used to live in it are gone.
She gets her lighter out of her pocket, flicks it, sets fire to the picture. She lets it drop to the ground and watches while listening to the grumble of a car’s engine starting. It falls on the sidewalk, where wildflowers are struggling through the cracks.
Mary’s manicured hands are the first to crumble, wrapped around Deanna, and then Deanna. Daddy’s little princess and Mommy’s little angel. Ruffled dress, blonde curls, it all gets caught in the embers.
Flames lick at Mary’s face, they catch her dress, they flay her skin. It bubbles and melts until there’s nothing left.
Stomping on the ruined photograph with her shoe, Mary puts out the fire. They can take new pictures now.
That first day, sitting on that bench, Dean told her he met her through time travel. Twice. And that it had been wiped from her memory. Apparently, angels were after her the second time, to kill her. One possessed John, with the intention of possessing Dean. When it was done, she didn’t remember a thing. But that’s when she began to tell Dean that angels were watching over him.
She was never even religious. She could never put her finger on what possessed her to say it. A cruel, cosmic joke.
She sits in the diner where she used to sit with John, and she drinks the coffee that he used to like. It’s warm and it’s comforting. That’s when Castiel calls her to say the boys are missing.
After they’re back and she’s visiting the bunker but not staying, never staying, she joins Dean in the kitchen, where he cooks dinner. It smells good. She tamps down the flash of surprised hurt flickering in his green eyes when she told him she didn’t cook. It turns out, there is an angel watching over them; Castiel killed that reaper so they would live.
Dean greets her casually, and then asks in the same tone, “You staying for dinner?”
She wants to say yes. The months her sons were gone had her sick with worry and guilt. Getting to know them better would be easier if she stayed. One thing about Dean is already clear to her, though. He puts up walls and tries to hide his emotions but he never succeeds. Every flicker of his eyes and every twitch of his jaw is a tell. His heart is laid out in front of him, in the cooling bread on the kitchen island and the soup simmering on the stove.
She wants to say yes, but Mick is fast and already has a job for her. She’ll spend her evening clearing out a vamp nest and eating take-out for dinner. It’s for the best, really. One less hunt for her children to concern themselves with.
There’s disappointment in Dean’s eyes, easy to read. Mary’s been silent for too long. He shrugs, turns his attention back to the soup, pretends it doesn’t bother him. It’s for the best, though. It is.
This is the first quiet moment she’s had with him since she heard what she did in Lawrence. It comes to her like an ambush. A reminder, like a kick.
It’s still hard to reconcile the man he is now with the child she remembers. She tries to picture that child hungry, she tries to connect it to the Dean standing in front of her here, but the pit in her stomach makes her stop.
It was just after the fire. It can’t have been like that all the time. It’s clear Dean’s muteness cleared up, so maybe none of it was constant.
She still can’t let go of John as he was, and deep down she can admit that it’s selfish. She clings to the memories of John crying as he held his children for the first time; to the knowledge of how he let Dean be comfortable in his own skin. But if she were to ask about...
She doesn’t ask.
She looks at the man in front of her now. Angular jaw, high cheekbones. Green eyes, long lashes. Hair that’s dark when it’s so short, just like Mary’s own would be. His chest is flat, and it occurs to her that puberty must have been hell on him. She imagines a teenage boy going through unwanted changes, imagines helping him through it, but she discards the fantasy quickly.
“I like your new name,” Mary says. “Dean. It suits you.”
The way that his eyes widen make her feel a pang of guilt. There’s been a lot of those, lately. But not when she’s hunting. That’s when she’s free. That’s when she’s freeing her children.
“Thanks,” he says quietly. He didn’t speak a word after she burned to death.
She’s smiling. “Did you pick it out yourself?”
“Yeah, I did.” He licks his lips. “I knew that you named me and I didn’t want to change it too much.”
Of course he didn’t. A pedestal for a woman who never should have existed, someone soft and loving without any edges except to defend her housework as important to her husband. If she hadn’t gotten caught up in the fantasy, she might have lived. The life he could have had, then.
“That’s nice of you, sweetheart.”
“Well, not about this illusion of you that you hold on to,” says the British woman of the organisation that Mary never should have put her trust in.
Lady Bevell pokes and prods at old wounds like she has any right; like she knows more about Mary’s life than Mary does herself.
“The perfect life. Loving husband and kids. But it never really was perfect, was it? All those secrets you kept from your beloved John. That you were a hunter. That you invited Azazel to visit when he spared John’s life.”
The memory of kissing her dead father’s meatsuit fills her, as always, with revulsion. But the moment that came after... John, alive and well in her arms, and no one stop her from being with him anymore. She remembers holding him underneath the midnight sky, sick with guilt and dizzy with freedom.
“How do you...”
“I have sources, Mary. Everywhere. After you died, your beloved John was a man slowly going mad, searching for revenge.”
Something on Mary’s face must betray the way her entire being seems to have filled up with ice, because Lady Bevell cocks her head, and takes away the illusion. The wedding ring Mary still wears like a necklace feels like a chain, choking her.
“What? Your boys didn’t tell you? The drunken rages. The weeks of abandonment. Child abuse, really. It’s no wonder they’re...damaged. So, enough with the fairytale. We are returning you to a more pure version of yourself. Mary Campbell, natural born killer.”
Mary remembers Heaven. All those old memories played back for her three decades long. One of them was an old one, and it had Deanna in it; Mary’s mother. In Heaven, the details of the faded memory were once again clear. They were in a clothing store. Everything was neatly sectioned off, of course, but even though Mary was a girl they were in the boys’ section. Deanna bought her practical clothes, with proper pockets and no frills. Mary hadn’t minded, except beyond the memory, when Mary went to school in whatever town they happened to be staying in at the time, she’d get teased.
All that time, as Mary’s boys were growing up without her, Mary was there, watching things long past.
She never got to see them grow up, she knew after Heaven. And the truth of it was too heavy for her to bear.
Dean doesn’t know what to expect when his mind get linked to his brainwashed mom’s, but the sight of his old home is still a surprise, somehow.
He used to daydream about this place, when he was little and the memory of it was still raw. Before he swore to himself never to return, he used to picture returning and finding everything exactly as it had been, Mom included. Home. Full of warmth and light and the smell of delicious food. Nothing she made herself, he knows that now.
He hasn’t thought of this place as home in a long while. The bunker holds the title now, which makes the invasion of it that much more intrusive. Nearly a tomb, like this place was for Mary. The lamps, the pictures on the walls, fruit in a bowl.
He hears a baby crying and goes to investigate. Approaching the crib, what he sees is familiar, nostalgic and painful. How many times did he rock this baby to sleep? How many times did he soothe these wails? Sing soft lullabies?
“Sam,” he says quietly, watching that innocent face, clear of the horrors that will befall him in the future. All the ways that Dean failed him are nowhere to be seen.
And then there she is, there’s Mom, but not the one he’s gotten to know recently. Not the one that cut her hair, wears denim and flannel, who doesn’t play nice, distant and rough around the edges even as she tried to find the remnants of the woman he now sees before him. Who wears a dress, has long golden hair, and smiles lovingly like it’s easy, embracing Sammy and pressing a kiss to his little forehead.
This is the mother Dean remembers. But it’s not real, he realizes with a start, coming back to himself in a moment of clarity. She makes breakfast, sandwiches with the crusts cut off, and there’s his past self, sitting down at the table.
This is the place Mary retreated to in her mind, their perfect life. Her perfect daughter and ever-disappointing son eats his sandwich, oblivious. With bangs like Mary has them now, the rest of his long hair worn in two braids, but surprisingly no dress that she would have put on him.
“I know I got angry when I caught you with the scissors,” Mom says, voice warm and pleasant, a tone he used to remember fondly even as it hurt, but now it just hurts. “But I was just worried you’d hurt yourself. You don’t have to be sorry, let Mommy cut your hair if you don’t like it long. Why don’t we do it now and then we can take Sammy to the park. What do you think?”
It takes a moment for the words to register, even as he watches his younger self nod eagerly. It leaves him reeling.
This never happened. She doesn’t get to hide away and rewrite history like this.
“I only want good things for you, Dean,” she says, crouching down to be at eye-level. Her smile is sweet. Better than Heaven. “I’ll never let anything bad happen to you.”
She raises a hand, tracing his freckles with her fingertips. Was he ever really this small?
He can’t picture putting a baby—putting that baby from the crib, the one so good and innocent and in need of protection—into this child’s hands.
He’s been responsible for Sam for almost as long as he can remember. Those early memories, taking care of Sammy, he can’t have looked like this.
A part of him never stopped being Daddy’s blunt little instrument, but usually he can keep a handle on that part. Now, though, that boy with his beloved hand-me-downs and bruises and the perpetually empty stomach is all he can think about. The boy who had to pretend to be a girl at school sometimes, who had to shut up and take whatever harassment he got and not fight back, who listened to his father when he said they couldn’t risk anyone asking too many questions about their life. The boy who had to be the man of the house when John was away, but during all the times that John was drunk he had to endure being Mary’s stand-in. That boy never had to exist, but Mary made sure that he did.
“I hate you,” he says, finally, to her back, which remains turned toward him.
“I hate you,” he whispers again, after throwing it all at her feet and willing her to realize it: the way he had to be a parent to Sam and the way that he failed. All of it because of her. His voice isn’t the only thing that’s breaking. “I hate you. And I love you.”
He feels tears roll down his face, but doesn’t do anything about them. For a brief moment, he watches her eyes close.
”’Cause I can’t... I can’t help it.” He looks down. “You’re my mom.”
Mary, in her pretty blue dress and with her silver heart necklace, standing by Sammy’s crib. The crib is in front of a window, with two white curtains. Sunlight comes in through the window, but it’s muffled. Muted.
“And I understand,” he tells her, licking his lips and biting down on them, ”‘cause I have made deals to save the ones I love. More than once.”
He spares a glance at Sam in the crib, and is for a moment transported somewhere else; somewhere dark and grimy, mud on his knees and blood on his hands as he holds his brother’s dead body for the first time. Baby Sammy gurgles, blanketed by the muted sunlight, cheeks rosy.
“I forgive you.” He chuckles softly, realizing it as he speaks. Was there really ever going to be any question about it? He thinks about every single bad thing that happened; that he cherished his mother’s memory through. Because she would have wanted him to be brave.
He looks past her for a moment, back at the dining room table, where Dean still sits. Legs too short to reach the floor. Come on, little angel, work with me here.
“I forgive you. For all of it. Everything,” he says. “On the other side of this, we can start over, okay? You, me, Sam. We can get it right this time. But I need you to fight. Right now I need you to fight. I need you...”
He trails off, still talking to her back, to her long golden hair that looks out of place on her, now.
“I need you to look at me, Mom,” he says firmly. “I need you to really look at me and see me.”
It doesn’t feel like he’s trying to break the mind control anymore, not fully. They feel like everything that four-year-old sitting at the table could never manage to convey. They feel like they’ve been waiting beneath the surfaces for three decades, finally spilling out.
“Mom, I need you to see me.” His voice softens. “Please.”
For a moment, nothing happens. But then she does, sunlight hitting her face as she turns, eyes widening.
“Dean?”
He smiles. “Mom.”
They’re all exhausted when Sam gets back and the dust settles and the Brits are gone. They get the bodies out of the bunker and then have a quiet evening.
After collapsing on his bed, it takes Dean less longer than usual to fall asleep. It’s not a deep sleep, though, and he wakes quickly at the sound of his door opening. Only to relax as he recognizes Mom in the low light.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you,” she says softly.
“What’s going on?” he asks, voice hoarse from sleep.
“I just...”
Mom doesn’t finish the sentence. Dean turns on a lamp to see her better. She looks understandably tired, after everything she went through. But he doesn’t get why she’s standing in front of his room in the middle of the night.
When the light comes on, she steps inside the room, closes the door behind her. “Just checking to see if you’re okay,” she finally says.
“I’m good,” Dean says, hesitantly. “Are you?”
“I...” She blows out a breath, and admits: “No.”
That makes him sit up, get out from under the covers, and move to stand until she holds up a hand. He stops. Watches her walk over, and sit down on the bed next to him. They sit for a while. He waits for her to say what’s on her mind, patient and a little scared.
“You said,” she starts, takes a breath, continues, “You said that you would fill in the blanks for me. If I wanted that. And I don’t... I don’t want it, exactly. I want... I wish I could have been there for you.”
His brow furrows. “I meant it when I said we can start over. You don’t have to know everything for a fresh start, right?”
“No, I do.” She sighs. “Maybe not everything, but there are things I’ve been ignoring. I’ve always... At first it was the perfect life, which wasn’t actually so perfect, which didn’t last very long. And then, coming back thirty years later... I mean, from the jump, I knew that John raised you boys as hunters. And I never... I never wanted to picture what that was like, even though I know it well, because it’s what it was like for me.”
He’s unsure what to say as she gives a completely humorless smile.
“But you didn’t grow up like I did, did you? I mean, sure, you had to learn all the lore and lay out salt lines and all the basic hunter stuff, but you... John...”
The words finally come to him, leaving his mouth soft and pained and ripped out of him.
“Don’t do this to yourself.”
Her eyes snap to meet his, then, blue and wide and intense. “Don’t do this to myself?” she repeats. “Sweetheart. I can’t believe I—”
He breathes, “Mom, what...”
Unexpectedly, she pulls him close, her hands resting on his back. She smells of the bunker’s laundry detergent. Of course he wraps his arms around her in turn.
“You said to me that you were never a child, and I... I never even... I’m so sorry,” she finally manages, voice heavy and thick with grief.
His heart pounds, remembering their fight. I’m not just a mom, and you’re not a child, she’d said, and he’d replied I never was in a wave of bitterness he couldn’t hold back.
“Forget I said that,” Dean says, wanting to go back and kick his past self in the teeth. “Forget all of it. Okay?”
Having her alive and well is enough. It should be enough. This will only cause her pain.
“I can’t,” she insists, and his heart drops.
Mom pulls back to look at his face. She’s really looking at him now, he thinks with a small amount of irony, she’s seeing him for what he is. He swallows.
“I can’t do that,” she says, so stubborn. “I can’t forget that you apparently raised my child. I can’t let you let me get away with it. I won’t.”
“It’s okay, Mom,” Dean tries again, only for his eyes to widen in horror as that makes her cry.
Tears roll down her face, but she doesn’t do anything about them.
“You used to say that to me when you were little,” she says, her smile unsettling to look at. “I let you get away with it, then, too. I let you comfort me. But I... I’m the mom.”
“You’re human,” he counters. “Look, if you want to know about something you missed, you just have to ask. And I’ll tell you, I will. But you really don’t need to.”
She’s still smiling as her tears fall down. She talks like she didn’t hear him.
“Coming back, I kept having a hard time reconciling you and Sam as you used to be with who you are now. I’d look at Sam and think, that’s my baby boy, and it would feel so wrong. I missed it all. First word, first steps. But then I thought about John, and I drew comfort knowing that... That he did get to see all of it. That he experienced it for the both of us. But he didn’t, did he? It was you. It was all you.”
Dean doesn’t answer, because she already knows. There’s no point.
He thinks about getting electrocuted and dealing with a weak heart after. Being cold and short of breath and dying. Not even worth picking up the phone over. He’ll say that John did his best until he’s blue in the face, but deep down he knows the truth.
“What was it?” she whispers like they’re in the dark instead of the soft orange glow of his bedside lamp. “Sam’s first word?”
And Dean doesn’t want to tell her, but he already has; he told her the moment he said he had to be a parent.
“It was my name,” he says simply. Sam himself doesn’t even know that; he was too young to ever remember it. Dean certainly never told him.
“It was your name,” she says like her heart is breaking. This is why he shouldn’t have let her know any of this. But there’s a petty part of him that finds solace in it, and he hates himself for it.
“Dad told me to kill him,” Dean blurts without meaning to. “Sammy, I mean. They were his last words to me before he...”
He remembers being so blisteringly angry in the aftermath that he took a crowbar and brought it down on the Impala—the most beloved hand-me-down of all of them. Again. And again. I made you grow up too fast, Dad said first, before he leaned in and delivered the final blow.
Mom pulls him close again in one swift movement, whispering apologies like he hasn’t forgiven her for all of it.
“He was trying his best,” he insists to her, like he always does. But she ignores it, mumbling fuzzy promises; that everything will be okay. Too little and too late, like Sam’s sudden defense of their dad’s choices right after the man died, but he doesn’t say that, because she is trying her best.
So he buries his face in the crook of her neck, and he waits her grief out. The apologies and the promises fizzle away eventually, and then they’re just sitting in silence, her hand stroking his hair, until she starts humming.
It doesn’t take long for him to recognize the song. When he does, his throat gets tight. The song seems so old and fragile.
He doesn’t know how long they stay like that, sitting on his bed, wrapped in an embrace as she hums Hey Jude in his ear. If you told his past self that in the future he would get to this moment right here, he’d be over the fucking moon. And he is, kind of, but it’s more complicated than that.
Tomorrow they’ll have a fresh start like he said they would; they’ll be a new kind of family since perfect is overrated, anyway. It never existed, not even back then; the pedestal he used to put her on is long gone. But right now, they’re both remembering that just ’cause it wasn’t perfect doesn’t mean it was all bad. There was this.
When the lullaby was done, she would always kiss his forehead, and she does the same now even though he’s so much bigger than he was then. They say their goodnights and he watches her leave, with her eyes red but her smile bright. He’ll see her again tomorrow.