Archive of Our Own ^beta

In another life, this would have been the perfect moment: curled up next to the window on a sunny afternoon with a book and a steaming mug of tea, the radio chattering softly in another room, the staccato sound of a knife working through onions and carrots and celery. Footsteps, creaking floorboards, a burst of laughter from somewhere deeper in the house. She can almost imagine that it’s John in the kitchen, Sam and Dean playing upstairs, four o’clock on a Saturday in late fall, all of them home, all of them happy. All of them together.

It's Sam in the kitchen, though, and Dean and his partner in the garage. She’s read the same page of Gone Girl five times. The tea is going cold with the sunset.

She’s alive. Her sons are okay. Breathe in, breathe out. She’s alive. Sam and Dean are okay.

It’s not fair.

Everything was – good, at first glance. Not what she had imagined for them, but good. John raised two wonderful boys in her absence, and she’s thankful for that. For baby Sam, not so little anymore, considerate and smart and witty; for Dean, equally sharp, intuitive, determined, just how she remembered him. They came to her with wide, disbelieving eyes, like she was some figure out of legend, the real and immaculate Mary, a miracle.

And maybe she was – a miracle, at least. Be not afraid, said Gabriel, and took her hand, and led her down a long flight of stairs. He told her strange and delightful stories she didn’t quite understand, and made her laugh; and opening the door at the bottom was perfectly painless, until: Mom?

Mom, is that you?

She gathered her children into her arms and realized that she had spent so long up there that she had almost forgotten how to cry.

In Heaven, they’re not men, yet. In Heaven, Dean is just a boy, and Sam’s still in the cradle, barely six months old. In Heaven, she knows exactly who she is.

And now – the first thing she does is check them over, like children, like hunters, to make sure they’re all in one piece. Is that what a mother does? Or is that what her mother did? Her boys are whole, ten fingers and ten toes. A kiss on the cheek, wiping away their tears: she remembers that. What else?

In Heaven, there are joyrides, tall trees, stolen kisses. No tortuous obligations, no hunts, no darkness waiting at the end of the road. Just like she’d always imagined.

In Heaven, John is alive.

Sam tells her about a house in a small town, a fixer-upper, his eyes alight with possibility. They’re in a car that has John’s fingerprints all over it, and Dean is playing his music, cracking the kind of jokes his father would have liked. She misses her husband like one of her own limbs. A phantom sensation: there should be something there, but there isn’t. There never will be.

“Dad’s dead.” Dean’s words. He doesn’t look back from the driver’s seat. Then, almost like an afterthought, “We buried him in Lawrence. I’m sorry.”

She doesn’t understand; she understands all too well. A hole opens up in the bottom of her stomach. The signs are there, if she wants to read them, in the way that her boys walk and talk, their quick, abbreviated cadence; in the way they dress, military surplus and flannel. She doesn’t need to see the knife tucked into Sam’s belt or the holster at Dean’s side to connect the dots. No one called a priest after the demon split her open. No one moved on. John taught them this language, this swagger, this life. It’s all his.

Mary does not curl up and cry in the backseat of her sons’ car, even if she is within her rights. Mary does not shake their shoulders and demand to know what happened, what happened, what happened. She is the same age as Sam and four years younger than Dean. It has been more than three decades since she died.

She says, “I wish I could have been there to see you grow up.” Says, “I’m glad I get to be a part of your lives now.” And she’s rewarded by Dean’s quick smile in the rear view mirror, just like his father’s.

Sam describes the garage, teases Dean, apologizes for setting her up in the guest room but insists that it’s nice, queen bed, view of the woods. She watches his hands as he draws pictures in the air, notices that there’s no wedding band; same for Dean. What she feels isn’t disappointment, exactly. Is this what you wanted? Does this make you happy?

The car turns down a sun-dappled dirt road, lined on either side by oak trees thick with underbrush and blackberry vines. Dean says something about groceries, calling off work tomorrow. Mary rolls down the window to breathe in the loamy scent of the woods, feel the breeze against her face. Nothing matches up to the real deal. She smiles all the way to the house.

It’s just like Sam described it: small, in need of repairs, but sturdy, with a detached garage. She notes the well-tended vegetable patch out front, the porch that cradles the front door. When she steps out of the car, she relishes the crunch of loose gravel underfoot, the cabbage moth that plays in the patch of grass growing in the drainage ditch, the trill of a thrush nearby. Everything feels new. The nausea slides away like a wave. Dean points out the first green tomatoes growing under black mesh canopies, the trellis covered with curling pea shoots. Curses at a hornworm, then glances at her guiltily and apologizes for his language. She laughs. He’s older than her. She tells him to mind his fucking language, and Sam piles on him, too, until he can hardly keep a straight face while he rolls his eyes and opens the front door.

And then, suddenly, there’s another boy. Tall, blond, blue-eyed, no older than his early twenties. He’s coming down the stairs with loud, thumping footsteps, some kind of computer open in one hand, eyes still on the screen as he says, “Hey, guys, I found something you’re gonna want to see on that werewolf case.”

Then he looks up and stops dead in his tracks.

Sam fumbles his words, like it’s a great embarrassment: “I forgot, I didn’t think,” spilling half-sentences all over the space between them.

Dean places a gentle hand on her back, comforting, supportive, and says, “Adam, this is Mary, our mom. Mom, this is Adam. He’s our half-brother.”

She feels like someone poured a pitcher of ice water over her head.

Adam seems just as shocked as she is. She should – do something, greet him, offer a hug like mothers do, but all she can think is, When?

He recovers first, closes his computer like a book, then walks forward and offers his hand with a smile, says, “It’s nice to meet you, Mrs. Winchester,” like Dean’s teachers used to do at parent teacher conferences.

She awakens from her daze, remembers what to do: return his smile, take his hand, shake it. “Hi, Adam. It’s nice to meet you, too.”

And she wants to mean it, she does, but she – can’t. It comes out pinched and awkward. Adam steps back, clears his throat, his eyes flicking between Sam and Dean and Mary, his computer clasped over his stomach like a shield.

“Dean, why don’t you show Mom around the house? I’ll make some coffee and catch up with Adam.” Sam slings an arm casually around his – younger brother, and Mary wonders if she panicked over nothing, if it matters anymore now that John’s not here. Feels a little stupid, because Adam looks half their age, and obviously the when doesn’t matter, if it was fifteen or twenty years after she died. Not her business anymore.

It’s just that all of it says, You died, you died, you died. He had other children, a whole life without her, and she’ll never – be able to comfort him, confront him, scold him. He hurt her sons. She will never have another chance to hold him.

Dean shows her the dining room, everything covered in old, dusty tomes and spiral-bound notebooks, a whiteboard propped up on two chairs. The living room is somewhat neater. She wonders who insisted on having throw pillows for the sofa, framed photos on the mantelpiece above the fireplace. She sees Dean next to a man with a striped tie and a serious expression, the boys with an older man in a wheelchair and a blonde woman and her daughter. A younger Sam hunched over a chessboard while an older boy with a mullet yawns in the chair across from him, chair tipped back dangerously on two legs. An Asian boy in a baseball cap holding up a small trout uncertainly, sandwiched between Adam and a girl with brown skin and long, curly hair, grinning and pointing at the fish like they caught it themselves.

Dean brags, though a bit shy, about the deck out back, unpainted but well-constructed. His handiwork. She jumps to test the boards, and they don’t bend or shake.

Upstairs: four bedrooms. Sam’s is first on the left, neat and tidy, a map of the town pinned up on the wall opposite the bed, a desk with a computer, binders of looseleaf paper, a coffee mug full of pens and stubby pencils. Striped brown duvet and matching pillows. Two bookcases, a dresser drawer under the window, a forgotten glass of water on the nightstand. Reading glasses. It’s bookish in here, quiet. Something squeezes her heart.

“They all look like this,” Dean insists, but Mary raises her eyebrows, and he gives up instantly. Second door, largest room. It’s not the disaster she thought she would find, because Dean is almost ruthlessly organized, just with a fuller trash can and automotive repair manuals instead of the diaries of eighteenth-century occultists. There’s a shirt thrown over a chair, a striped tie. A guitar, a violin case.

“You play the violin now?”

He looks at the case, back to her, says, “No.”

She looks closer, sees a little more clearly. House slippers half kicked under the bed, two pairs. The second chair at the desk. The tie, again, and she recognizes it from the man in the picture downstairs this time.

No ring on her baby’s left hand, but maybe that’s one thing the world hasn’t moved on from, or maybe something he doesn’t want. If he’s a hunter, he hasn’t seen a lot of successful marriages in his life. God knows she never saw any herself.

She cups his cheek, asks, “Are you happy, Dean?”

There are crow’s feet around his eyes as he smiles, doesn’t smile. Smiles again. Can’t quite believe what’s happening. “Think so.”

“Can I meet him?”

“Of course, Mom.”

He’s not the type to give up the whole story at once, so she doesn’t pry, just hugs him close and asks when he’ll be home. Dean says it’ll be a day or two, that Cas is away visiting friends, helping them on a hunt. A hunt – that still hurts to hear, a sharp kind of pain that starts in her bones. Not now. Later, when things aren’t so new, when the different parts of the world are less unmoored, one from another.

Sam’s not seeing anyone. She thinks about asking why, but doesn’t. Dean explains anyway that he’d rather let Sam speak for himself, which means there’s some kind of story there, maybe funny, but probably sad.

Mary wanders back into the hallway, looks into the bathroom, which is in a state of organized chaos, with border wars and everything. Dean tries to defend the household’s hygiene uselessly, but it’s more theatrical this time. He’s relaxing into her presence. She’s glad.

The third room must be – Adam’s. Not her business, so she doesn’t do more than glance around. He’s the messiest of them, but that doesn’t mean much. His bed isn’t made, clothes overflowing from a hamper in front of the closet. She’s seen worse. Rows of sticky notes are lined up like soldiers on the wall behind his desk. Lots of old books, like Sam. Two posters over the bed: Birds of Indiana, and an anatomical diagram of the human body. His window is open.

“It’s just a guest room right now, but we can fix it up however you like,” Dean says, opening the last door. The room’s not as small as she thought it would be. Guest room, certainly, empty desk and no computer, cardboard boxes stacked up against the closet, a musty smell. But light bluish walls that remind her of robins’ eggs. Two windows, facing east toward the sun. When morning breaks, she’ll be able to see it through the treetops.

She tries to imagine her life, here, where things can be new every day, where she can hurt and be hurt again. Her thoughts chase their own tails. No more fights with John. No more late nights turning into early mornings while she tries to soothe a colicky baby. No decades ahead full of responsibility that had seemed like such a reprieve from the hunt, before she got married and had children.

There are no college diplomas in any of the rooms in this house, and she knows somehow that it’s not because they’re gathering dust in the attic.

“It’s home,” she says.

Dean smiles, puts his arm around her shoulders. She tries to smile back.

The days pass slowly, with effort, like riding a bike with a rusted chain. Eventually, with great reluctance, Dean goes back to work – some under-the-table arrangement he has with a someone’s brother, a private investigation service – and she’s alone, most mornings and afternoons, with Sam, whose main hobby seems to be lingering in doorways, and Adam, who doesn’t quite know what to make of her yet. The eager sincerity she saw on his face that first day has yet to return.

They’re all unsure of what to do. Mary’s habit is to brew coffee, make breakfast, pack lunch; she thinks her sons are allowing her to do this, sandwiches and pasta dinners, because they don’t have the heart to tell her that they don’t need that kind of care anymore. They’re up at odd hours, and coffee is usually done by the time she comes downstairs. Sam’s a vegetarian. Adam reads research articles on nutrition science and apparently understands them. She cuts apples in the kitchen and wonders if she’d still be doing this for them if they hadn’t lost each other all those years ago.

Sam works from home with the help of his computer, and that’s really the thing that convinces her that she’s in the future. They have wireless phones now, and electronic mail. They can talk to people halfway around the world with the press of a button. She spends a few hours in Sam’s room learning how to use a cell phone, how to send messages and make calls and even take pictures just by tapping on the small glass screen. She feels like she’s in Star Trek.

One day, Dean returns from work with the serious man in the picture. Castiel. An angel, just like Gabriel. He’s handsome, perfectly polite, sharp-eyed, and he greets her like she’s a senator, clasping both of her hands in his.

“I’m glad to see you are well,” he says with all sincerity. “My father forbade you from long life. I hope you enjoy this one.”

In Castiel there are none of the pretensions of blood, no expectations or even knowledge of who she is or should be. She’s just another human who escaped a great injustice. The house is full of them. But Castiel also slips back into his family with the practiced experience of years. As a peer, as a lover, as a brother-in-arms, a friend. He is a good person. She doesn’t resent him, except for when she does – unfairly, she knows, but she’d thought, on nights when she couldn’t sleep because of the restless baby in her womb, that she would be her sons’ closest confidant, their most staunch supporter. Things her own parents never bothered to be. Things that her sons found, scattered, in other people.

Dean loves, and even loves her, but she is still learning him, noting his changes, the way he is careful with her, as if she’ll vanish at any moment if he’s not paying attention.

She is afraid of the opposite – that the next hunt will kill them all, and she will be alone again.

At this point, she knows there is nothing she can say that would dissuade them from life as it is. She could ask; they could try; and then, inevitably, it would end in tragedy. She’s not going to try again, especially when she sees that the way they run things is – different. Not lonely, not grim. Negotiable. Compromising. Flexible. There is discussion, dialogue. Care.

The only thing Mary has left to teach them is how to kill better, faster. Knowledge passed down from generation to generation. She sits at their table on “debrief nights” and issues gentle corrections. Sam compliments her roasted potatoes and then asks her to elaborate on how his grandfather used colloidal silver hydrosols to burn out werewolves’ eyes and lungs. They crack jokes, reminisce on past hunts, talk about their other work, pass the plate.

It's not the normal she’d hoped for, but it’s not the nightmare she tried to defend them from, either.

They fall into routine. Everyone works during the day, except for Mary, who is still learning to live in the world. She takes her time, cooking, weeding the garden, reading news from the last thirty years. In the afternoon, Sam will drift into her eyeline with tea or coffee, sit with her, talk. Sometimes about the news, about technology, about themselves. Sam offers up a wealth of information about certain things: Twitter, Amazon, Ronald Reagan, Facebook, eighties movies, the local HOA. He asks her countless questions about herself, if she likes cats or dogs, coffee or tea, rain or sunshine.

Then, inevitably, with something almost like timidity, he asks what John was like, before.

She wants to say he was loving, doting, supportive; that he was troubled, because of the time he spent in the war, but he was never cruel; that he was gentle and good-natured without being a pushover. She wants to tell him that she is happy when she hears them play the music he liked, or make the kind of joke he would, or when they smile and the corners of their eyes crinkle like his, the way they’ve inherited his confidence, because it’s like he isn’t completely gone. But she thinks, maybe, that all this would hurt him to hear, and that half of it is a lie, and the other half is fast becoming a lie, and it hurts her, too.

She says, “He was complicated.” Says, “He loved me, but he was angry at the world.” Says, “People got married younger back then, and I don’t know if we were ready.” Tells Sam that she sees the best parts of him in them, even though she’s only been back in their lives for a few weeks.

He smiles, lopsided, and she twines her fingers with his.

He says, “I wish I’d known him, before. It took me a long time to understand.” Says, “I think I’m still angry at him. I don’t know.” Says, “I’m sorry.”

Mary knows, on some level, that Sam is scared of her. Maybe not Mary Winchester, the person, but the ghost of her that they’ve built up over the years. Who might still reject him, might turn out to be someone who hates him, or someone he can’t stand.

It’s not an unfounded fear. They barely know each other. But it still makes her deeply sad, because he’s an adult, and it’s nobody’s fault that children grow up, that the babies who reach for their mothers from the safety of a crib stop doing that when she’s no longer there.

Don’t you know that a mother’s love is unconditional? she wants to ask, but he doesn’t. He’s never had a mother, and she’s not sure her own love is so unconditional, either.

“You don’t have to apologize for anything,” she tells him, the truest thing she can say. “I loved my father. He was a good man, and he loved me, too. But he wanted me to hunt with him, and in his mind, there was no other possibility for where my life would go. And he could be a tyrant, sometimes.” She shrugs. “I was miserable. It was his fault. But then he died, and that was worse.”

A dozen emotions pass over Sam’s face, so quickly that she can’t catch them all. Guilt, she thinks, but relief, too.

Then, because she has to know, but softly: “Sam, how did your father die?”

His face turns, and it’s guilt, all guilt. “We got into an accident. He… made a deal. With a crossroads demon, to save Dean’s life. It was – I don’t think he suffered, until after.”

Her hand is cold and numb in Sam’s. John Winchester, dying in the hunt. He would have accepted it – already understood, she knows, because of the nightmares he’d wake up from, the one-too-many drinks, the insurmountable distance. He brought the war back with him. She was a fool to think it would ever leave.

They don’t tell her everything at once. She asks, now and then, like she’s picking at the loosened edges of a scab, and they answer sincerely. The demon that killed her is dead; it killed a lot of other mothers, too, and young women. Sam’s college girlfriend. He doesn’t have pictures. Doesn’t even have his degree. Had to get back on the road to look for John, missed the LSAT, never rescheduled. It must have looked like he vanished off the face of the earth.

Every new bit of information seems to branch off into a dozen sad stories. Sam gives her John’s journal, and when she can bring herself to read it, the contours of his life are old, familiar. She remembers losing friends, losing family. Being pulled back, over and over, into the sucking tar pit of her father’s life. Her boys look at her with such weight on their shoulders, such sadness in the lines of their faces. What is she supposed to feel except guilt? You left them, even if you didn’t mean to. Especially Dean, who was old enough to know her, to feel the loss of her like the sun going out. It was like that when her own parents died.

Now she imagines the dry plot intended for her in Greenville, John’s dog tags the only thing in the earth below. How it wasn’t a lie, really, until two weeks ago. How typical it is, for hunters, not even leaving a grave behind for her to visit.

What right did she have to start a family when all she had to give them was sorrow?

But then Dean leads her out to the deck, and the feeling of his hand in hers is the same, even though hers is the smaller one, now. Talks about his plans for the house, tells her gently, Mom, this is your house, too, you know, you can do whatever you want with the place.

She doesn’t know what she wants. Smiles, reaches up to put her arm around his shoulders, says, You’ve already made it such a beautiful home. I don’t know what to add.

Something flickers across his face, but he threads his arm under hers, rests it on her shoulders. That’s okay. Just promise me you’ll think about it.

Really, the only things in the house that are hers are her clothes, the nightgown hanging in her closet that she can never wear because – well, because it was there when it all ended, or started, or something. It’s like a funeral shroud. It’s the only piece of clothing she has left from when she was married, besides her wedding ring. So how is she supposed to make this place hers?

She weeds the garden. Usually Adam does it on Thursdays, but he has errands to run in town with Dean, so she volunteers, hungry for something to do other than hunt and cook and read about what the last five presidents have done to the world since she died. She used to tend the garden around the house, so she’s a studied hand at identifying unwanted growths, careful not to yank any vegetable sprouts out of the ground.

They’ve planted cucumbers, string beans, onions, two kinds of tomatoes, lettuce, herbs – what John used to call rabbit food – a new plot of sweet potatoes, and a trellis that’s supposed to hold grapes this year. She works her way slowly from bed to bed, evicting weeds into a pile that she tosses in the compost bin behind the garage. It’s nice to feel the sun on her back, the warm earth between her fingers when she takes off her gloves. Reminds her that she’s actually alive again, instead of a happy ghost.

When she finishes watering the garden, she sits on the deck with a glass of water, and Sam comes out to keep her company.

“It looks good,” he says. “Whatever the opposite of a green thumb is, I think I have that. Guess I didn’t get that from you.”

“I’ve only been working on it for one day.”

He’s stubborn about it. “Looks good for one day.”

“Who came up with the idea of starting your own garden? Or was it all of you together?”

“Oh, well.” Sam looks a little embarrassed. “After we got the house, I wanted us to start eating better. You know, organic, free-range, farmer’s market, all that bullshit. And Dean’ll eat anything as long as it hasn’t been on the floor too long. But after, like, a month, Adam looked at the grocery bill and asked why we weren’t growing half of this stuff.”

The subject of Sam’s younger brother is still – foreign, to her. “He did all of this by himself?”

“No, no. Me and Dean helped out with the construction, Cas asked one of his friends to bless the whole lot, and we take turns watering and stuff when the plants get bigger. This is going to be our third harvest.”

He sounds so proud. She can’t help but pat him on the back. “You boys did a wonderful job. I’m just happy you’re not…” It’s hard to choose the words. “I didn’t want you to grow up like I did. I’m sorry you had to.” And, “I’m glad you didn’t take after your grandparents.”

Sam gives her a searching look. “What were they like?”

It’s strange. They made her who she is and she can only remember them as unresponsive corpses. The only picture she can give her son is faded with time, stained with bitterness, death. Samuel was controlling and gruff and not prone to displays of affection, even in private, even with his own wife, but he taught his only child to drive and drink and never to do both at the same time. Deanna was more doting, more loving in the ways mothers should be, but she came from a generation of women that stood firmly by their husbands’ sides, regardless of what he’d done or what had been done to him.

Her son takes it all in studiously, even her excuses – she’s endlessly sad that he never finished the degree he worked so hard for, knows he would have been wonderful at whatever he put his mind to – and scratches his chin, thinking, while she finishes her glass of water.

He ends up saying, simply, “Dad never told us about them. I didn’t know you were a hunter for a really long time. I’m… well, I met some of your family, years ago. We didn’t get along. But I could put you in touch, probably.”

Every cell in her body rebels against the idea, and Sam can tell, so he’s already shaking his head by the time she says, firmly, “No, thank you. I don’t need any of them knowing I’m alive.”

“I won’t,” he reassures her, then bites his lip, squints at something in the opposite direction. “He – came back, for a little while. We hunted together. It was years ago.”

Despite herself, she stands up as her skin ripples with goosebumps. Samuel Campbell – alive; Deanna Campbell – dead; John Winchester – dead. Her father walking around like nothing happened. Her father, his temper, his paranoia, around her sons.

But John got to them first.

It’s not fair.

Sam stands up, alarmed, his hands hovering hesitantly in the space between them, and it’s only then that she realizes her cheeks are wet. Feels like she’s been sliced open and everything is pouring out.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have told you. He’s – not alive. Anymore.”

And that’s another blow. She doesn’t know what to say, and her throat is so tight that she couldn’t even say anything if she wanted to. Doesn’t reach out and hold him, comfort him, tell him that she’ll protect him from his own family, that it doesn’t matter as long as he’s safe now. All of that feels meaningless. She didn’t. She couldn’t. She was dead.

Her vision blurs. Not dead, no, but alive in the aftermath of the nightmare she’d spent her brief adulthood trying to prevent. An apocalypse for children.

When her head stops spinning, she’s alone, and Sam is nowhere to be seen.

Not much of a mother at all.

Whatever she learns about them only serves to push them further apart.

She wishes John was here. Misses slow-dancing with him in the kitchen, putting her head on his chest to listen to his steady heartbeat. Misses him in her bed. Love you. She has no anchor. Everything is free-floating. She turns the pages in his journal, reads the utilitarian notes, runs her fingers over his tarnished medals, presses her face to the cover in a fit of emotion. Imagines she can feel his hand on her cheek, the calluses, the reassuring weight. The way his thumb used to travel across her skin, reverently. The gentleness of his love.

But she can’t find herself in his writing except as an implication. He had trouble, especially after he came home, talking about what went on inside his head. He wouldn’t have put the words down where someone else could have seen them.

He’d said, once, that he was trying to protect her with his silence, but she’d angrily spit back, From what? Two murdered parents? A life one half-step from death? What’s a little horror in the face of a great love? He hadn’t known how deep her own darkness went, even after he’d found her ripped open on the ceiling over Sam’s crib. But he hadn’t told her about his time in Da Nang, even deep in the bottle with tears on his face, and she hadn’t told him about the world that killed Deanna and Samuel Campbell, so she figures they both helped each other fall apart, in the end.

It’s John’s ghost between them all, really. The John she knew didn’t last a day after her death. The John who raised her sons has been dead for something like a decade. She doesn’t understand how they can be the same person, knows without a doubt that they are. Dean’s memories of the man who was her husband are faint and worn. Mary grieves alone among the tomato plants.

At four in the morning, she tosses and turns until she admits defeat and pads downstairs in her pajamas to start coffee. To her surprise, Adam is already there, scooping grounds into the filter. He eyes her, then puts another scoop in, fills the reservoir with water, and presses a couple of buttons. The machine hums to life.

“Can’t sleep?” she says, crossing her arms and leaning back against the counter.

“Something like that.” He looks tired, a little grumpy.

“It’s early, but I was going to make some oatmeal, if you want some.”

“Sure.”

They have their oatmeal and coffee standing in the kitchen. Smells like coffee, cinnamon, nutmeg. She slices strawberries into their bowls. Almost feels normal. Adam is careful not to touch her as she hands him the oatmeal, mutters his thank you into his coffee mug and doesn’t say anything else until he finishes the entire bowl and washes it in the sink.

She’s still not sure what to make of him. He doesn’t look much like John. She can tell his mother was blonde, open-faced. He resembles Mary more than her own sons. She hates that.

“How long have you all been living together?”

He startles a little, looks at her over his shoulder. “Around three years, I guess. Why?”

“You’re alike,” she says. “It must have been strange to grow up with brothers twice your age.”

Adam is very quick to correct her. “I didn’t grow up with those losers. No offense,” he adds. “We met when I was, like, nineteen. They picked me up after some trouble.”

“Hunting trouble?”

“Sure.”

She frowns, turns that over in her head. “Did you ever meet John, then? You must have met Sam and Dean after he died.”

The way he stiffens means he does not want to talk about this, at least not with her, but he must feel some kind of obligation to answer her question, because he shrugs and says, “A couple of times. He didn’t really give a shit about who I was. Just wanted there to be one kid he didn’t fuck up.”

His words are jagged. They stick in her chest like splinters, one after the other, in a neat row. She doesn’t know what she expected him to say. Did John become incapable of any sort of kindness after she left?

She wants to be kinder than he was, but she just wants to go back upstairs and hide in her bed. Just wants Adam to understand, the one who knew him least, that there was something in her husband to love. That she didn’t marry a monster. But there are no words she can find that don’t sound like begging.

Adam studies her, guarded. Then something changes in his face, a quirk of an eyebrow, almost flippant. “You should talk to Sam. He’s in some kind of mood lately.”

Then he pours himself another cup of coffee and disappears into his room, leaving her alone and unsettled with her half-bowl of oatmeal, stained pink with the juice of the strawberries.

Mary feels like a stone skipping across the surface of her children’s lives. Dean shows her paint chips, helps her tape her favorites to the wall of her room to see what they’ll look like as the day falls into night. She remembers doing that for his room, when she was still pregnant with him. Her selection of colors is haphazard, muted greens and yellows, peach pink, sky blue. In the end, she chooses one at random, just to have something to do.

“I haven’t had my own room since Sam was born,” Dean says, pushing the paint roller through Beach Vacation. “I guess it’s Cas’s room, too, but mostly mine.”

Castiel drops in and out. A busy time of year, apparently. But Dean always looks at him like he’s some new entrancing thing, no matter if he’s been away for a week or an hour.

She runs the roller over the primed wall, shoes crinkling the tarp they’ve spread over the carpet. “I always wanted to share a room with a sister, when I was a little girl. I thought it would be like a sleepover that never ended.”

“Sam’s a decent roommate now. He always took too long in the bathroom. Used up all the hot water.” He cocks an eyebrow. “Claimed he was taking care of his hair.”

“Funny, he says the same thing about you.”

He wrinkles his nose. “Ew, Mom.”

“You’re the one who brought it up!” She flicks her paintbrush at him, and a splat of Beach Vacation lands on the plastic tarp halfway between them.

“Let’s talk about something else, please,” Dean begs.

She wants to ask him a lot of things – about his relationship with Castiel, with John, with his brother. Or brothers. What Adam meant by one kid he didn’t fuck up. But she’s been putting the picture together herself, from stray words and strange silences, and she thinks that asking too much about some things might be a cruelty.

It’s hard to know how much pain she’s allowed to cause them, if the whole point of an angel giving her this second life was to reward her sons for – for saving the world, or something. If she’s no longer the purpose of her own life.

Dean keeps things light, and so does she, and before the sun goes down, the walls glow a gentle, sandy yellow, same as her childhood bedroom.

One complication of her resurrection is that the guest room is no longer a guest room, and the boys have frequent guests.

Kevin and Linda arrive unannounced after sundown on a Thursday, their shoes crunching on the gravel as they walk up to the front door. She hears the cadence of muffled banter, then a galloping knock, Sam thumping down the stairs, and a chorus of greetings as they come in.

Her heart drops, sort of, when she realizes that these are more hunters, but the murky feelings of guilt and disappointment twist in a confusing way when she sees exactly who they are.

Kevin is young and green but also quietly intellectual, and he shakes Sam’s hand, only lets a moment of surprise cross his face before he shakes Mary’s, as well. He sticks closely to his mother’s side as they move through the house and drop their things off in the living room, which is where Kevin says he usually sleeps, but this time Linda’s taking the couch, and her son is being exiled to an air mattress. Mary watches the boys mess with fitted sheets for a minute before rolling her eyes and saying, “Give it here.”

“Maybe now that you’ve got your mom back, you boys won’t be such a pack of wolves,” Linda says, folding her arms with a smile. “Wouldn’t that be nice?”

Linda is everything she wishes she was: a magnetic presence, well-versed in single motherhood, an acrobatic problem-solver, a hunter who didn’t let this life sour the relationships she chose to keep. Close with her son. With Mary’s sons. And maybe she shouldn’t be jealous, because they’ve technically known Linda longer than they knew her, but she is, anyway.

The jealousy is mostly contained by the fact that Linda is darkly funny in a way she’s only seen in well-adjusted military vets before, and therefore excellent company in the kitchen. They get along like a house on fire, ripping jokes that make their sons collectively blanch and huddle in the corner in confusion. It’s great fun, and for the first time since she came back from the dead, she feels like herself, instead of a ghost who can’t decide whether to stay or go.

They sit out on the finished deck together, beers in hand, and they swap stories about their sons as babies, their absent husbands, discuss the hunting life in grave tones, say, “I’m glad I met you. Makes everything a little less weird.”

“What was it like?” Mary asks. “Was it just you and Kevin from the start?”

“Not from the very start. But… pretty much. Me and my husband planned this whole life together, and I was the only one who got to live it out.” She purses her lips. “Wasn’t really fair of him to leave me with all these dreams to fulfill by myself, but shit happens, you know?”

“What kind of dreams?”

“Normal kind, owning a house, having kids. Sending the kids to an Ivy. Traveling the world, retiring, seeing all of our favorite bands in concert. Nothing that out of reach. We were pretty realistic. I was pretty realistic, up until all this unreal bullcrap happened to us. What about you? They told me you died when they were really young.”

The sympathy in Linda’s voice stings a little bit. “Yeah. Sam wasn’t even a year old yet. I… don’t really want to talk about that. If that’s okay.”

“Sure,” she says, nodding. “We can talk about something else. Oh… well, how are you, you know, adjusting?”

It’s so overwhelming to think about. “I don’t know. Really slowly. I’ve been here for two, three months? And I was in Heaven for something like thirty years. It’s hard to get used to… things being different every day.”

“And your sons are being supportive?”

“Yes, definitely.” The wave of unidentifiable emotions crests and crashes against her chest. “I just… I didn’t get to see them grow up,” she whispers. “I don’t know who these people are. We’re strangers. And I’m a shit mom, I know I am. I was supposed to have all those years to learn how to be a good one. How am I going to do that now?”

Linda pats her hand. “I don’t know. That’s up to you. Do you want to be their mom? Do they want you to be their mom? What does that mean to them? You have to ask questions, or you’re just going to be stuck in limbo.”

Mary squeezes Linda’s hand. “I always thought moms would magically know what to do. That went out the window after Dean’s first hospital scare.”

“Oh, don’t I know it. Kevin was sick every other month for, like, two years. He’s lucky we could afford his hospital bills and pay the mortgage.”

She grimaces in sympathy and they tap their beer bottles together, toasting fear at midnight. “At least I can drink again. I thought I wasn’t going to have the time.”

“That’s the other thing. Hey, maybe you’re not a mom in the way you wanted to be. Whatever. What else do you want, Mary?” Linda points at her encouragingly. “Didn’t you ever have dreams outside of a picket fence and two-and-a-half kids?”

“Having a normal family was my escape from hunting. I never really thought about anything else. I mean, it was the seventies, you know, in small-town Kansas. If you weren’t married with kids by twenty-five, you might as well have tossed your soul to the devil. It was either babies, or damnation.”

“Maybe that’s the gift. You get to figure it out now, how to be you, instead of just someone who’s alive.”

The thought curls up in her heart, strange and fragile. “I didn’t think I’d have to start all over again at this age.”

Linda grabs her hand. “Mary,” she says, looking her directly in the eyes. “You’re twenty-nine. I know back in the sixties you were supposed to be pumping out babies and apple pies by now, and I know you’re a mom, but you’re not old. At your age, you should be having, I don’t know, horrific raunchy sex with strangers, or spending an inadvisable amount of money on vacations in Spain. Being thirty isn’t a death sentence. It’s when life starts, for a lot of people.”

“Is that supposed to be comforting?”

“I’m not saying you have to have to get in touch with your wild side, girlfriend, but you could do anything. I mean, what’s something that your mom would never have let you do as a kid?”

She snorts into her beer. “I don’t know. She taught me how to shoot a gun when I was twelve.”

“Yeah, but I’m guessing she wouldn’t have wanted you to get teenage pregnant. There has to be something.”

Mary hasn’t thought about what Deanna Campbell would have wanted for a very, very long time. The fights, the scoldings, the sad conversations – they’re all faded with time. When she flips through them like old postcards, she finds it hard to remember what exactly they were about, except the thread that ties them all together: that she wanted out of the death and misery and violence, and her mother knew that she’d never make it on her own.

But she touches her hair, which has almost never changed, and says, “She really liked my long hair.”

While their sons are watching Star Wars one room away, she watches blonde tufts fall to the floor as Linda goes to work with the scissors. When they’re done, she shakes her head, and it feels unnaturally light.

Sam’s the first one to see, double-taking on his way to the pantry for more chips.

“How’s it look?” Linda takes the last clip out and fluffs Mary’s hair. “I’ve been cutting mine and Kevin’s for the last two years.”

It’s a little embarrassing to be caught in an act of teenaged rebellion by your adult son, but Sam shrugs it off. “Looks great. Awesome job, Linda.”

“Did you hear that? Awesome job. I’m such a badass.” She preens, then sends Mary off to the bathroom to look for herself.

The last time she had her hair this short, she thinks, was first grade, after another kid brought lice to school. Mom tutted and frowned like the cut was something worse than lice. She turns her head one way, then the other, then back again, enjoying the way it bounces, the way it falls. A little choppy, but hers. Something she chose.

She wonders if Dean would care if she repainted the bedroom a second time.

//

Kevin and Linda drive off after a few days, and the house is quiet again. Research for hunts, working and studying and gardening, cooking, cleaning – it’s rhythmic, helps the days pass. Her hair dries so quickly after showering that she keeps patting it for the entire afternoon, thinking that there must be some kind of a mistake.

The boys take it upon themselves to educate her in all things 80s pop culture, since her experience of it was suddenly cut off in 1983. Movie nights become The Breakfast Club, The Goonies, Back to the Future, the first Star Wars trilogy. She enjoys The Princess Bride, Sixteen Candles, Dirty Dancing; doesn’t care much for Full Metal Jacket, Conan the Barbarian.

At some point, she switches from the armchair to the couch, next to Sam and Dean. It feels strange, but good, she thinks. To share their childhood with them again, as it should have been, in a kind of shadow-play, their silhouettes lit by a flickering television screen.

Adam is very meticulous with the garden. He examines the leaves and vines and fruits, takes notes on aphids and ladybugs, and waters the beds at the crack of dawn, hose in one hand and coffee mug in the other, hair still mussed from sleep. Talks to each plant, too. Mary watches him, sometimes, distantly curious, as he moves back and forth across the grid of sprouting vegetables.

The conversations she’s overheard between Sam and Castiel give her the impression that it’s his way of dealing with something, but she doesn’t know what. She doesn’t want to pry, necessarily, but the thought that they’d keep secrets from her – well, they’re grown men, but it’s not how she envisioned a relationship with her children playing out.

Sometimes – not often, but sometimes – she wakes up in the middle of the night to a door opening, footsteps in the hallway, another door. It’s almost always Sam or Adam. Tonight, it’s Adam, and she hears him shake his half-brother awake from a nightmare.

“Wake up, asshole, you’re not in the Bad Place anymore.”

Bleary, confused noises, then apologetic ones.

“It’s fine, dude.” Then Adam’s voice lowers, too, and their conversation drops to a muffled hum.

Mary closes her eyes again. Wonders what exactly they’ve been through that they seem to know when the other is having a particular nightmare. She can sort of tell, too, after a few months: stray bursts of sound, a yelp through the wall. A distant stare, a touch to the elbow. The way John used to get, the way she used to bring him back. What kind of war did they fight?

“Could you be any less annoying about this?”

“Keep your voice down, twerp.”

“Oh, come on. Mary’s sleeping like a baby.”

She raises her eyebrows in the privacy of her own room.

Silence, for a moment. “What’s your problem with her, anyway?”

“Nothing. She’s the one who has a problem with me.”

Sam’s voice drops a half-tone from devastation. “What? What makes you think that?”

“Dude, she doesn’t like me. She doesn’t even like looking at me.” An exasperated pause. “You seriously can’t tell?”

She can hear Sam’s silent dismay. “But… I didn’t know you guys weren’t getting along.”

“Well, Sam, her deadbeat husband went and put a bastard in some other woman. What’s she supposed to do, adopt it?”

“Jesus, Adam.”

“What? Am I wrong?”

“You’re family,” Sam says firmly. “She’s family, too. It’s not – none of this is easy. Not for me, or for you. And not for her, either. Just give it time. Okay?”

She can’t hear Adam’s reply, if he gives one.

What is she supposed to do? She knows Adam doesn’t like her, exactly. He has expressed exactly zero interest in being mothered or learning anything about her, and she’s kind of relieved about that, because even though she knows she’s a coward about this and hates it, she’s already mourning the John she knew. She doesn’t want to think about him mourning her, transforming into something unrecognizable because of his grief – and if Adam’s blond hair means anything, unable to stop thinking of her. That would mean something like – it was her death, her absence, that made them all like this.

And she doesn’t want to think about – the other woman, either.

What he said to her, after late nights out, stumbling over the doorstep, his breath smelling like wheat and solvent, Mary, baby, how could you think that, you know it’s you and me forever. It’s easy to say, oh, hyperbole, or forever’s not fair to anyone, but he said you and me forever and someday, when they’re in college, and I would never let anything happen to our sons.

How many lies can one man possibly tell?

But it’s her fault, in the end. She didn’t tell him, after, about the world that lives in the dark. If she had, they’d still be…

And Adam wouldn’t exist.

She buries her face in her pillow and remembers that, once upon a time, she would have smelled his aftershave.

Mary can sense, sometimes, that Castiel looks at her and sees a lost girl, but he almost never says anything. She’s thankful for that, most days. He’s a good person, takes care of Dean, mediates arguments, lets himself be mediated. Other days, she wonders if he doesn’t know what to do with her, a soul returned from his home, a mother-in-law, a woman who is in no small part a ghost. She doesn’t want to demand anything from him, but she’s not sure what he’d give her if she did.

Hesitantly, at mid-morning, when the boys are working or gardening or running errands, she asks questions. Small, at first: the things you might ask when meeting someone’s new boyfriend. His answers are always entertaining. Food tastes like molecules. He met Dean in a barn. He’s been around since shortly after the creation of the universe. He wears the body of a man named Jimmy Novak. He doesn’t have to shave; he just leaves his stubble like that. He’s very good at hiding his dry sense of humor.

Their tentative friendship starts with questions and becomes more like – well, she’s not sure. She finds him walking around the garden, and he complains about modern vegetation; she humors him for a while, and after his next sojourn she finds fresh ferns in water on the kitchen island. She arranges them, clumsily, with a slender pine branch, long stems of bluegrass.

“Plants don’t grow in Heaven,” she says.

He shakes his head, not unkindly. Lifts the bow to the violin. “Nothing does.”

When they resume their hunt, she tries not to let the devastation show, the sense of utter failure; advises them, supplements their scrapbook of knowledge with an encyclopedia of time-tested strategies built over generations of Campbells. She reasons that she’s keeping them safe, but they return wounded, more often than not, and she spends too much time with iodine and saline flush in her hands.

All of their friends are in the hunt, too, which she should have expected. Garth and Jack, Jody and James and Kaia and Patience, Alex and Claire, Charlie, Eileen. More often than not, one of the boys goes with them, and they always return alive, together, in good spirits. She should be comforted. The only thing she feels, though, is the dark dread nudging at her back, wondering if this time will be the last time.

It’s strange, with their half-brother. Adam takes care of himself. She feels, uneasily, that she should take care of him, too, but he’s impatient, hates it when he thinks he’s being babied. She wonders how much of his reluctance to sit still under her hands is left over from his brothers’ hovering in their vague early days, and how much of it is just her.

She tries to respect it, whatever it is that he wants, even though she’s not sure what it is, exactly, to be left alone or just not to be near her.

Still, she feels his eyes on her from across the room as she dabs a cut on Dean’s forearm with iodine, carefully, gently.

There are perfect moments, perfect days – curled up with books, with a hot cup of tea, no monsters even in the back of her mind, and the smell of food, the sound of laughter. All the time in the world, passing slowly like deep rivers, with all regularity, mornings and evenings. Ones that she doesn’t remember, which are new, spread wide over things that grow and die and grow again.

It’s not fair that she’s seen fewer than her sons have, that she prepared for the work only to find it done. Linda suggested that maybe she wasn’t in the game for the right reasons, that escape and a blank start only worked for people whose pasts weren’t also things with their own minds and intentions. That she’d look for perfect days and 1983 would show up at the door as – just a whisper, a thought, a sudden smell, a flash in the corner of her eye. The end.

If it was his ghost, she’s sure the boys would know. But she can’t help it, the flash of hope, the spark of fear and anger, the love. Maybe she’ll still be able to find him, shake him, what did you do, why did you do that, because the four-year-old boy who reached for her and laughed is now a man who cleans guns at the kitchen table. The baby in the crib is now an adult and a stranger. What is she here for? Nostalgia?

But then she’ll catch herself in the middle of laughter, because her kids are funny little assholes, and clever, and strong, and kind, and they care so deeply about her, and she concludes that even if they weren’t her children, even if she’d never known them at all, she would be proud to know them, and she’d love them anyway. They found their way into their own futures, and there is a bittersweetness to it, that it happened without her, that they did it before she could find her own. That she has to do it without John.

They have time, though. Maybe that’s Gabriel’s gift: it’s not fair, but it is hers, this life. Not the Campbells’, not her children’s, not her husband’s, not the world’s, but her own, full of haircuts and weird plants and books she hasn’t read yet, dreams she has yet to build. There are smartphones to master, the internet to figure out.

Still, wounds have to heal. Still, the time has to pass. To carve a path through the new world is hard and tearful work. So she reads, and studies, and tends the garden, and looks at job postings in town, and builds her story carefully.

“You’re officially our cousin, on paper,” Sam says, putting her newly-minted driver’s license and Social Security card on the counter. They’ve gotten good – she can’t tell that they’re fakes and probably wouldn’t be able to without a magnifying lens and some proprietary equipment. “We got you a new birthday—”

Mary double-takes at her license. “1996?”

“—and your new last name. Would’ve gone with Campbell, but I figured you probably want to stay off our extended family’s radar.”

She picks up the license, stares at it, studies it. Her unsmiling face staring at the camera, her signature copied in miniature. Her mother’s maiden name appended to her own. Mary Sandra Jones. DOB: 12/05/1996. Blue eyes, blonde hair, no glasses. And some flattering numbers about her height and weight.

“Thank you,” she manages. “Sorry, it’s just – strange.” To be born after her children, an aunt instead of a mother. Her life, shifted to the left, an extra step on the staircase.

“If it helps, his new birthday is in 2002, so you’re still not the youngest,” Sam says, inclining his head toward Adam in the breakfast nook, who flips him off without looking up from his gardening magazine.

“90’s kids remember,” Adam intones, and apparently this means something because Sam rolls his eyes.

“Anyway. You can take my car, uh… buy beer, get a job, if you want—”

“Visit the dispensary,” she adds, just to see the look on his face.

“Um,” Sam says, pained.

“I’m looking forward to getting a job, actually. I think it’s time for some routine.”

“That’s – that’s great, Mom. Just let us know if you need help with your CV or whatever. And, um, they do drug tests sometimes. So.”

“Honey, your father and I were fifteen during Woodstock. I wasn’t that sheltered. And it’s legal here.”

“Mom.”

“Relax, Sam.” She pats his arm. “I’ll be all right.” The words leave her mouth and she realizes that half the household is still holding their breaths, waiting for a night to come when they find her pinned to the ceiling, fire and blood. Maybe that’s why Sam doesn’t believe her, not all the way, even though he trusts her implicitly.

How long is it going to take for them to believe they’re all here to stay?

As much as she feels older than all of the people around her, she still looks like a twenty-nine-year-old woman, so she gets all sorts of reactions at the local library (“You should sign up for a computer class,” Dean says in a way that means You are going to sign up for a computer class so you don’t ask me how to open your email again). The older folks, grandmothers and grandfathers and elderly singletons hunt-and-pecking away at their keyboards, initially assume she’s one of the librarians, and then are sheepishly relieved when she reveals she’s a youngin who’s also technologically illiterate. The librarians seem mildly concerned that she’s fresh out of a cult or something, but it just means they’re gentler and pointedly non-judgmental.

She makes friends – Mrs. Galloway, seventy-six and a widow, too, somehow able to sense it even if she doesn’t know exactly what happened; Mr. Browne, who brings her a cutting from his lilac bush when she says during introductions that she likes gardening; Rita, the short-haired assistant librarian with lots of colorful pins on her sweater vest, always making big, spirited gestures at the projector screen. On Sunday afternoons, they cluster around the computer stations and take turns clicking and typing until Google and Wikipedia and emails and word processors don’t seem so crazy anymore. It’s almost her favorite time of the week, because her classmates are as out of time and out of place as she is, still catching up, still wondering where the time went.

And it doesn’t hurt that she knows all of the movies and songs from their childhoods, either, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Funny Girl, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks. It takes a mighty effort on her part not to reminisce about the tide changes of the sixties and seventies like she was there with the rest of them. She asks them to tell her stories about Elvis and disco nights and the days of big hair and giving peace a chance, and receives that and more: small joys and sadnesses that echo larger ones, marches and funerals and medicines and weddings. Mary knows that the world is broader than this, crueler than this, has more over and under and inside it, but she’s starting to think that if they knew what she knew, they’d tell her the same thing. The world is bigger than your life.

Which is what she’d hoped for the whole time, but it feels different. Gentler, less raw and bright. Less like looking into the sun and more like looking down into a sudden green valley.

“It’s just different, you know?” she says one day, frustrated with the endless boxes and the clumsiness of her fingers. “I thought everything was going to be one way, and I’m glad it’s not, but… it’s just new, and I didn’t know that would be so hard.”

Rita nods with big, understanding brown eyes, and says, “I know. It’s hard, but it’s worth it, don’t you think?” And then, “Can I give you a hug?”

That night, in the privacy of the shower, she cries her heart out, but for once it’s not a downpour of grief; it’s a strange, fizzy mixture of happiness and relief and confusion and love.

John, she thinks. I think I’m ready.

But for what, she still doesn’t know.

Eventually, Rita conscripts Mary into working at the library, mostly organizing shelves and pointing people to the appropriate rooms for classes and events. It’s part-time and doesn’t pay incredibly well, but it’s something to put on her résumé, and she gets to see her work friends. On Sundays, she’ll drive herself from work to Mrs. Galloway’s house for dinner, where most of the folks from Beginner Computer Skills gather to share their latest tech tips and life updates.

Life acquires a more fluid rhythm, flowing and ebbing around flower beds and library cards and light bulbs. They don’t have a lot of money – Mary puts in what she can, but it’s not enough to make them rich, especially because what they really do, if you look at it a certain way, is hunt. Everything they earn returns, in some way, to hunting.

And the further they get into this werewolf case, the more she thinks she may have to join them.

Not totally, not on every hunt – they probably wouldn’t want that even if she offered, because they’ve already lost her once – but definitely for this one, at least to show them how to reduce the risk of contracting lycanthropy and, well, dying.

So between shifts, between shared household duties, she shows them the consecrated colloidal silver spray, how to set up misting traps, the subtler signs of lycanthropy. Reads John’s journal, makes mental notes about the things he didn’t seem to know, runs her fingers over the faint depressions in the page where his pen pressed lines into the paper, swallows down nausea.

When she says she’s going to join them, it’s over dinner, sweet potatoes and zucchini and pasta, roast chicken. Somehow no one objects; there’s just a momentary silence, and then Dean says, Okay, Mom, and nods gravely. And Sam gives her a quick half-smile, like he doesn’t know whether to commit to it or not, just wants her to know he’s not going to argue. And Adam just asks Sam to pass the salt. She lets out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding when they start bickering over how Dean is dividing up the dark meat (Sam, you’re a vegetarian, your opinion doesn’t count).

It’s terrifying how easy it still is to prepare. She used to run, used to do push-ups, but she’s had two kids and is only just starting to recover from what feels like a bone-charring burn on her soul, so she doesn’t quite do that, but she sets up empty beer cans in the yard and a wireless speaker to blast Twisted Sister, fires toward the woods, remembers how to brace her wrist and shoulder. It takes practice, but it comes back, naturally, like riding a bike.

Making explosives, though, she leaves entirely up to Sam and Dean. They’ve had more time to practice that skillset than she has, and she’s not about to show up to her job covered in silver dust if it blows up in their faces.

The night of the full moon comes much too quickly for her liking. Before she knows it, they’re packing the trunk of the Chevy with guns and contraptions and backup plans, and she’s in the back seat next to Adam driving across state lines to a derelict when dusk falls.

They discussed the plan again before heading out: scoping out the house, setting off a diversion nearby to draw the werewolf out of its home if need be, setting the traps, waiting for it to return, then leading it on a merry chase through deadly mist so they can get a shot. It’s not foolproof, but with monsters that are closer to their human natures, no plan really is.

The werewolf isn’t home, and Sam breathes a sigh of relief before they start setting up their tripwire-activated bombs. Adam said friction-actuated explosive and then basically an overpowered party popper, and then At most you’d burn your hand pretty badly. Which isn’t the worst risk she’s ever taken.

Once they’re done setting up the traps, all they really have to do is wait, and they’re crouched in strategic positions to lead it across as many tripwires as possible before booking it for the front door. Sam reckons the smell of concentrated human blood will lure the monster back to its haunt sooner rather than later, so he leaves to take up his watch post, and the rest is waiting. And even Adam is an old hat at waiting, so she ends up listening to him and Dean shoot the shit about the episodes of their science fiction show that they watched last night, whether the woman with the tattoos should have told the main character about her mysterious past in the violent space resistance, what they would have done with the weird blue alien goo weapon.

There’s almost no warning when the werewolf appears. They did their best to set up proximity alerts; Sam is outside with the walkie, monitoring the property from literally up in a tree, a duty they tried to foist onto her initially but reconsidered when she outshot everyone but Dean in the backyard. A burst of static from the walkie in Dean’s hand, and Sam’s frantic voice, and then the back door slams open with a bestial roar.

She hears the werewolf first. Dean’s closest to the back door, so she hears him yell and fire off two shots before the thumping steps of something much larger and heavier are interrupted by a series of loud POPs. The werewolf howls in agony as the traps spray it with silver mist that settles into its eyes and nose and mouth, and it almost makes her feel horrible about using the traps, but then again, it has to answer for two dead children in the neighboring town.

Dean bellows “Go, go, go!” and she hears Adam yell something insulting and barely coherent at the werewolf before ducking around the corner where she’s hiding. POP-POP-POP and the beast howls again. When she leans forward to look, her eyes widen. It’s easily seven feet tall and a half-ton of muscle mass, spraying blood and saliva everywhere as it writhes and claws at its own face in the cloud of silver. She can see its soft tissue bubbling and melting and smell the stench of burning hair.

But that lasts all of a moment before it catches their scent again and roars, charging out of the hallway with such force that it bowls the half-rotted sofa into the wall. Mary stands up as it gets its bearings again, and Adam covers her from the doorway to the foyer as she lines up her shot and takes it.

The silver bullet rips into the werewolf’s side. She tried to get an entry point sideways through the ribcage to the heart, but it’s in pain and moving unpredictably, so she just dodges through the tripwires and screams, “Come and get it, asshole!”

It charges straight through the four remaining traps, setting off four bursts of silver that sink into matted fur and burn through gums and eyes and open wounds like acid. But it’s learned, and instead of stopping to nurse its wounds, it swings blindly forward, limbs swiping the width of the hallway with enough force to snap her spine if it hit her.

Dean pops up behind it and dodges the tail, sending two shots into the ceiling and one into its shoulder as he tries to hit the head. It whirls around and lunges at him, knocking him to the floor. Behind them, she can hear Sam barreling into the foyer.

Between heartbeats, before she can get a real sight down the barrel of her gun, Adam disappears from her side and reappears in front of the werewolf, parrying what would have been a deadly swipe of its claws with the butt of his rifle. Dean rolls away while the beast is distracted. It fails to land one hit, then another, Adam ducking under its swinging arms with millimeters to spare. Then luck runs out. It spins and lunges again, and he catches its claws on the barrel of the rifle just in time, but the inhuman force of the blow twists it out of his hands as he slams backward into the wall.

Dean’s off the ground by then, and Adam is clear, so when the beast whirls around, one silver bullet punches a hole in its heart, and another tears through its open mouth and through the back of its skull. Black blood splatters onto the ceiling. It falls to the floor in an enormous heap of patchy fur.

He kicks it once, twice, to make sure it doesn’t move, then rushes to the other, smaller heap of Adam in the corner.

“Hey. Are you okay? Can you get up?”

The heap sits up, clutching his arm. His face is pale. “I’m good. I’m – I think my arm is broken.”

Dean looks, then grimaces. “Shit. Sam, can you call Dr. Chaney?”

“It’s that bad?”

“Yes,” Adam yells, voice strained. “Not good. Very bad. Quote me on that.”

“All right, ankle-biter. Up and at ’em.” He ushers Adam out of the house and into the car. Mary follows close behind, picking up Adam’s abandoned rifle and shutting the door behind them. As she passes them, she gets a good eyeful of the injury. The arm is very slightly wrong. He favors it, tucked close to his stomach, breathing purposefully through his nose.

Mary pops the trunk, unloads the rifle with a few quick motions, and straps it up in the hidden compartment, thumbing the rounds back into the box. Grabs aspirin from the first aid kit, slams the trunk closed, shakes four out and sticks her open hand through the shotgun window. Adam doesn’t question it, throws all of them back dry, his face white as a sheet. Sam gets off the phone and tucks himself into the back of the car next to Mary, and then Dean is peeling off into the backwoods.

Dr. Chaney is not a medical doctor, she learns. Dr. Chaney is a horse doctor.

“A veterinarian,” Sam says, wearily. “He’s a vet. And he sees most farm animals, not just horses.”

“Has he ever treated a human for broken bones before, Sam?”

“I don’t know, Mom. He has a great track record with sutures, though.”

“You get stitched up by a man who sticks his hand into cow rears for a living?”

He shrugs helplessly. “It’s better than what I was doing before with dental floss, whiskey, and happy thoughts.”

“You did your own sutures with dental floss?”

“It was unwaxed!”

“Shut up back there,” Chaney says from the so-called operating room. “I can’t do my mad science under these conditions.”

Sam unbelievably lowers his voice for the horse doctor. “You’re telling me you never did any shady DIY stuff when you and Granddad were hunting?”

“Shady DIY stuff is what grandmothers do at the county fair. My father made deals with ex-military country doctors who had degrees in human medicine, Sam. And we stocked the first aid box with suture kits that Mom fleeced from the clinic.”

“So stealing from a clinic is somehow better than seeing a trusted vet?”

Maybe this is what being a mom is all about, she thinks wildly. They didn’t know shit about the family business before diving into the deep end. And god only knows what kind of insane frontline guerilla medicine John taught them.

Adam emerges from the OR high out of his mind with a splinted arm, a handwritten note with prescription math on it, and a harried-looking Dean. Chaney is close behind, stripping latex gloves off of his hands and tossing them in the biohazardous waste bin.

“’S alllllll good,” Adam says confidently, waving his arm in a way she’s pretty sure he shouldn’t. “Horse doctor put my arm back on. Yippee.”

“Bring him back in two days so we can fit the cast,” Chaney says. “And, uh, he’ll be back to normal in an hour or two. He’s holding my recommendation for painkillers.”

“Thanks, doc.” Sam hands him a wad of cash, which probably isn’t even enough to cover the x-ray, but Chaney just smiles and stuffs it into the pocket of his white coat. “Adam, don’t touch that.”

Adam stops rotating the horse figurine on the counter and straightens up, indignant. “I’m not.”

Dean whistles. “Jesus. What did you dose him with, and can I get some?”

“Oh, don’t pretend you don’t know where to get nitrous. Now begone. I have to get up in three hours to look at sheep.”

“Thank you,” Adam says loudly as Sam herds him out the door.

The ride back home is harrowing. The youngest brother does not do well with anesthesia, apparently, and uses the opportunity to be an absolute menace.

“Stop.” Dean swats his hands away from the console. “This is off-limits to zooted morons.”

“Haven’ you ever thoughttabout swappin’ the tape deck out for a CD player?” He’s still slurring his words. “Your tapes’re all beat to shit. Makes Axl Rose sound worse’n he already does.”

Dean points a finger at him without taking his eyes off the road. “You take that back right now.”

Adam rolls his eyes. “Hey, I didn’t tell you to put Bluetooth in ’er, did I?”

“That’s obscene.” Dean looks like he’s going to be sick. “You’re a perverted man with perverted thoughts.”

She tries not to laugh and ends up hiding her mouth behind her hand. Sam catches her eye and grins, mouthing the words High as a kite.

Then Adam says, “Sam, when we go back, you should ask him to put your eyes back in.”

The smile slides right off his face. “It’s okay, man. I have my eyes.”

“I’m just sayin’, ’cause sometimes you don’t.”

“I know.” Sam leans forward to put his hand on Adam’s shoulder. “Hey. We’re back, okay? We’re not there anymore.”

Adam brushes him off. “No, I know.”

“Yeah. Tomatoes, remember.”

He shakes his head. “I know, I know. It’s… ugh, anesthesia made me stupid.”

“No, you were stupid the whole time,” Dean says gleefully.

Mary fixes him with a disapproving look. “Be nice.”

“Yes, Mom.”

Adam laughs for a very long time, cranks the window down and turns his face into the wind. There’s something metallic about it.

Sam humors him. “What’s so funny?”

Through the window, she sees his face in the side mirror, the broad smile still plastered onto his face, his eyes fever-bright when they catch the reflected headlights.

“I’m a lucky kid,” he explains. “I never have to listen to my mom ever again.”

Later, she takes Sam by the arm, sits him down, makes him tell her everything, even though he doesn’t want to. He won’t look her in the eyes, keeps glancing in the direction of the stairs, toward Adam’s room.

The story is not kind or fair. It does not have a happy ending. It just peters out at the end into the bottom of Hell, like a stream that slows to a trickle and sinks into the ground, to reappear somewhere far away. Sam blames himself, although he doesn’t say it; she doesn’t know if he’s right to, but she knows it won’t help anything, will only cause him more pain, so she keeps her hands around his, her thumb on his wrist. He’s afraid of what she’ll think of him, after he’s done.

There’s pain, and there always would be, and she doesn’t know why she thought there wouldn’t. Maybe it was just a fantasy. She wipes Sam’s tears from his face, wishes she could have nudged John further from the war before she died. Loved him more, been better. Thinks about how she was such a surprise all those months ago, how her sons had been so eager to love her and be loved in return. Now they’re just a jumble of edges, trying to find the ones that fit together.

And then there’s Adam, who had been promised his mother by an angel, who gave up on waiting for her, who almost gave upon waiting for his brothers. And she understands, now, why he watches, and always shies away. She’s just a walking reminder of betrayals and falls and the Hell he bore for no reason. And she doesn’t know if she could do anything to help him except leave.

She loves Sam, and Dean, and even Castiel, because they let her. She can help them heal; they heal old wounds she didn’t even know she had. But Adam’s wounds are all he has left of his mother, and now that he’s no longer three of a kind with his brothers, he must feel – well, she doesn’t know.

It’s just that this was all supposed to happen somewhere else, and they were all supposed to be…

In the late evening, among the crickets, Mary prays to Gabriel in the backyard, next to the tomato plants. Asks him why it was her, what he wanted to teach them, if he thought of that at all. If he thought about how it would be for her, when he was leading her back down. Bastard.

He doesn’t say anything back.

Sam drives out the first night after the werewolf, burns the corpse and the derelict house. Dean goes over the details with Cas before he leaves again to deal with things in Heaven, sits at the dining table with their research material, fits pieces of information into the case that didn’t make sense before they killed the damn thing. Adam mostly shuffles around the house popping painkillers and complaining about his sling.

When they all debrief together, Adam’s in a cast and Dean’s in a mood, so Mary ends up doing most of the talking. She figures, a few minutes in, that she’s missing something, and during a pause, assesses the situation. Dean with his arms folded, Adam nonchalant, Sam in no-man’s land alongside her.

“I think we should go over strategy again,” Dean says with a sense of finality. “Protocol. Because it seems like we haven’t thought through the consequences of deviating from a plan, and those consequences include hospital bills.”

“Veterinary bills,” Adam mutters under his breath. “Yeah, I get it. Can we move on?”

“We can move on when I’m sure you’re not going to end up in a cast again, or worse.”

He scoffs. “It’s not going to happen again. Spare me the lecture.”

Dean overrides him, furious. “Then when are you going to start paying attention? I’m first in and last out. Once you clear a building, you stay out of it. You know this stuff. What the hell’s gotten into you lately?”

Adam sets his jaw, looks squarely into Dean’s eyes. “Nothing.”

“Bullshit.”

“It’s nothing,” he repeats, shrugging defensively. “I made a mistake. Got the yips, I guess.”

“Then you stay off cases until you’re good. There’s plenty of shit to do around the house. You’ll be off your arm for the next six weeks, anyway.”

Adam looks like he wants to say something awful, but he bites his tongue for a long moment, takes a deep breath. Says, “Fuck you. Fine.” And he gets up and leaves the room, trying to seem unaffected, instantly betrayed by the hunch of his shoulders.

From the other side of the room, Sam sighs and shuts his notebook. “You don’t need to get on his ass for trying to help you, Dean.”

Dean rounds on him. “Yes, I do, especially when it could get him killed for no good reason. I had everything under control.”

“You realize you’re doing exactly what Dad did to us, right? He already knows what he did was risky and stupid. He’s going to make informed decisions that you don’t like. If you want to stop him next time, you have to figure out why he thinks it was worth it.”

“Oh, and you have?”

Sam’s mouth flattens into a thin line. “Just a wild guess, but when there were four of us here, he was fourth priority. Now that there are five, he’s fifth. Maybe he didn’t expect to be in permanent last place for the rest of his life.”

“That’s not true,” Dean says, but even Mary can see that his heart isn’t in it. He crumples at the edges. “Fuck.”

She wonders, distantly, if she should be mediating their arguments yet, if she’s earned the right, become that kind of mother, after only a few months back in their lives.

“I just don’t want him to get hurt because of me. Again.”

But what would she say? She had much more vicious fights with John that nearly destroyed their marriage. The brothers have learned each other over decades without their parents, to make adjustments, concessions. They can talk in ways which were inconceivable for her generation of the family.

“He went back because he loves you, Dean. You didn’t make him. It’s not your fault.”

Her sons are much kinder than she is. Without her, and without John, they were free.

“It was just – close. Really close. I was… I thought, you know… it wouldn’t be the first time he went down ’cause of me.”

To Hell, he means, and she knows Dean won’t talk about – some things, that he keeps some secrets just like his parents kept secrets, but Sam helps him keep them. Castiel helps him keep them.

She thinks of all the times she’s woken up in the middle of the night and heard the faint hum of the TV set, seen light from under the door next to hers at odd hours. The times she and Adam have danced around each other awkwardly in the kitchen in the bruise-blue darkness before sunrise, when neither of them could sleep. She’d thought they had the same problem – nightmares. And all this time he’s seen her as competition for a spot on the couch next to his brothers.

Bizarre, she thinks. She’s the one who doesn’t belong.

Mary leaves her sons in their living room misery, climbing the stairs to the second floor, hand heavy on the railing. Adam’s door is closed, so she knocks twice, calls him softly. “Adam? It’s Mary. Can I come in?”

Silence, for so long that she thinks he’s ignoring her. She’s about to turn away when she hears footsteps, one, two, three, and the door opens. He stares down at her, face unreadable, then rubs his forehead and steps aside.

For the first time since she arrived at the house, she enters Adam’s room. It’s the same, mostly, just different books stacked on the nightstand, the hamper near-empty after laundry day. Birds of Indiana. A beat-up old baseball cap with a TC logo. The Vegetable Gardener’s Handbook. She closes the door behind her and sits down in the desk chair, sideways, her arms folded over the backrest. Watches as he sits on the bed, the mattress springs creaking beneath him.

“Are the painkillers working?”

“Yeah. It’s not as bad as it was.” He shifts his arm, would probably flex it if he could. “Actually, the biggest problem is that it’s so damn itchy.”

“I had a cast on when I was thirteen. They told me to scratch my other arm if it started to bother me. It kinda worked.”

He tries it out. “Huh. Thanks for the tip.”

They sit there in silence for a bit, before Mary asks, “Is he always hard on you?”

“No. I mean, he’s a hardass sometimes, but so is Sam. I’ve had plenty of asshole moments, too. Just a functionally dysfunctional family, I guess.”

The corner of her mouth pulls up. “That’s a good way to put it.”

“Hey, uh… you don’t need to check on me. I’m fine. It’ll all blow over in a day or two.” There he goes again. Walls up. It’s not that she’d never cared before, she just – never knew what to do. So she let him, because who was she to tell him what to do? Not his mother, not his family. Not his friend.

But she’s not going to leave so easily this time. “You’re probably right. But that doesn’t have to mean I don’t check in with you after you fight with your brothers? I might not be your mom, but I’m still a mom. It’s what I do. Supposed to do, anyway.”

The look he gives her is piercing, not quite angry, but somewhere in that neighborhood. “Maybe with your kids. Half the time you look at me like I’m some neighbor brat who got dropped off for the day, and suddenly I’m not their brother anymore. As per fucking usual.”

“Adam—”

He shakes his head. “Look, you’re their mother, not mine. That’s fine by me. It’s probably weird to share your space with your dead husband’s lovechild. It’s weird for me to share my space with someone who looks like my dead mom.” His shoulders creep forward defensively. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s cool that you’re here. I’m sorry I didn’t, like, know John better, or whatever. It’s gotta suck to hear me talk about him like he was just a deadbeat alcoholic who never bothered getting close to any of his kids. But, hey, on the upside, me and him – we weren’t family. I got a day out of his year. My mom got, like, a week out of his whole life. He loved you, and Sam, and Dean. You were his family. Which is how it’s supposed to be, right? So. The obligation isn’t there. You don’t have to act like it is.”

He knows all the right buttons to push. It’s a sign that her maternal instincts aren’t as nonexistent as she thought they were, maybe, when she finds that his words sting and then slide away like raindrops in a gust of wind.

“I’m supposed to be twenty-five years older than Dean,” she says, resting her chin on her arms. “Nothing’s like it should be. But that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Maybe I would have just screwed it up more if I’d been here the whole time. Actually, I think I’m kind of a disappointment to those two already. And to you. Not in terms of being a mom, but, y’know, being a friend. Which is what I should’ve been trying to be, all this time.”

Adam shrugs, drops his eyes, good hand fiddling with the drawstring of his hoodie. Just a kid. She always has to remind herself: just a kid. “It’s okay. You don’t have to force it. I’m an adult. Sometimes people just don’t get along.”

And he might mean it, but she’s seen the way his eyes follow her every move when she’s around her boys, the carefully guarded hunger in his gaze as she tucks Sam’s hair behind his ear, pinches Dean’s cheek to tease him. Adam has never come to her for advice, or a listening ear, or any kind of comfort, and she never offered any, because it was clear he felt that letting her fulfill those needs would be a betrayal of his own mother.

But she knows that he raised those walls because of her hesitation and wariness around him in those first days. He’s been reading the distance that has lingered between them and interpreted it as – disgust.

Probably decided, months ago, She hates me.

She can’t stand that. He’s not her son – he has made that clear, repeatedly – but that doesn’t mean she needs to let John’s ghost stand between them.

So Mary stands up, walks over to the bed, and sits down next to him. “Adam, would you look at me?”

He does. His face is closed, except for the slight apprehension in his eyes. He’s expecting something, bracing for some kind of impact.

Gently, she puts her hand on his shoulder, feather-light. Gently, she says, “I don’t hate you, Adam. I’m still figuring things out. I don’t know if I’m anyone’s mother anymore. I love my husband and I hate what he did to his kids. It’s all… new. And I’m sorry that I pushed you away. I was scared and confused, and I thought that giving us space would help me figure out what we should be to each other. I guess I should have just asked.”

Adam looks at her, assessing, thinking. Drops his gaze again, at the end. “Yeah. I’m sorry. We’re almost the same age, and here I am acting like I’m less of an adult than you are. I could’ve asked, too.”

“Can we start over? Get to know each other, try being friends this time?”

His mouth turns up at the corner, despite himself. “Yeah. I think that’d be cool.”

Mary smiles back at him, squeezes his shoulder, lets go. “Thanks for hearing me out.”

“No problem.” A real smile this time. Then, “Hey,” and he springs from the bed, grabbing a permanent marker from his desk. He hands it to her, shucking the sling so he can offer her his arm, too. “Sign my cast?”

She writes her initials, M.W., near his elbow, then draws a little peace symbol next to it, with flower petals around the circle, like they used to do when she was a kid. Flower power. Adam turns his arm over to see, and smiles again, a tiny thing. Maybe the first time she’s been responsible for a moment of his happiness.

“Sick.”

More signatures appear on his cast over the next six weeks. D.W., S.W., of course, with the AC/DC lightning bolt in between. Castiel insists on drawing a protective sigil instead of signing his name.

Mary is quietly amazed by the volume of visitors that they get, now that there’s a record accumulating on Adam’s arm. Kaia doodles her name inside the thought bubble of a sleeping stick figure, and Patience sneaks her own signature underneath Kaia’s. Her father writes out his own blocky letters nearby. Garth plants his signature on Adam’s thumb next to a crude lump that he claims is a sock. Jody draws a smiley face on the back of his wrist. He even lets some of the Beginner Computer Skills gang write down their well wishes. Mr. Browne gifts him a telescoping pointer that he immediately uses to scratch his immobilized arm.

And there are more. Lots more, covering his cast until it looks like his entire high school class went nuts with a marker. It’s the kind of thing she would have been happy to see on her child as he grew up – the evidence of friendship, that he was out in the world and received with joy. If she could reach into Heaven and give Kate Milligan one image, it would be that arm in a cast, undeniable proof of goodness in her son’s life, of love. It’s almost a tragedy when Chaney takes it off.

But all Adam says is, “Well, that was fucking awful,” and then, “Look at my arm, jesus, I’m going to be stuck in PT for a million years.”

They take him home, and all the way there, he waves his mildly-atrophied limb around like he needs to make sure it’s still attached. In the following weeks, whenever he says he wants to do something, Dean demands that they arm-wrestle for it knowing he can’t, and Adam stalks around the house doing his arm exercises passive-aggressively, as if being told not to lift grocery bags is basically denying him a trip to Disneyland.

“Do you want to go to Disneyland? Because we will fucking go if you shut up,” Dean says after the latest round of cabin-fevered grousing. “I’ll get you the mouse ears and everything. Shove a turkey leg down your throat.”

They don’t end up going to Disney – Mary takes one look at the ticket prices and almost spits out her coffee (“These used to be thirty dollars!”) and Adam reassures her that he’s not a theme park guy anyway – but the stupid mouse ears do appear on his birthday, and he insists on wearing them out to dinner.

There’s something in him that’s relaxed, somehow, like a muscle that’s no longer tensed, or a door that’s come unstuck. His smile comes broader, his retorts sharper. Watching them banter on the couch about the new Star Wars movies, she can tell he’s more like Dean in some ways, more like Sam in others, and unlike either of them in all the rest. And she couldn’t see it before, but they are a set of brothers now, or maybe again.

Which, she realizes, must mean that she’s started to be herself, the new Mary, or the oldest one, and that’s the way they’ll all fit together, in the end.

When all they have left of the harvest are nine huge jars of pasta sauce and pickled cucumbers and kitchen rafters crowded with bundles of dried herbs, it’s late November, and there are rumblings of Christmas in the household.

Mary is most interested in what Castiel has to say, asks him if the Nativity actually happened.

“It happened,” he says, “but the effects didn’t really stick the way our Father wanted them to.”

She mulls this over, then asks, “Well, do you like the elves and the tinsel?”

“The adapted pagan symbols have their charm.” He relents when she frowns. “Many of you take it as a moment of rest before the new year. I can appreciate that. I understand the need for rest.”

He looks exhausted all the time, so she takes him at his word.

Sam is apparently the biggest proponent of the holiday in their household. Dean is a bit of a sourpuss about it, but demands the right to make Christmas dinner (“What even is a fucking Christmas Burger, Dean,” Adam groans), and won’t let anybody know the details of his plans. Sam just rolls his eyes and shoulder-checks people out of the way whenever they get packages delivered so he can get there first and carry secret things up to his room.

Mary helps kids and seniors at the library make holiday crafts, and uses blue tack to stick her versions to the walls of the dining room and living room: painted pasta angels with bowtie wings, paper garlands, coffee filter snowflakes, egg carton snowmen, tissue-paper stained glass in red and green and gold.

“You’d think we had a toddler in the house,” Sam jokes when she tapes another snowflake to the window. “I remember making those in first grade.”

Mary doesn’t tell him that she remembers making them, too. Dean’s first year of school.

She rules that they have to have a tree at least once, a real one, because the one she and John bought for their house from Sears was a foldable metal one with crepe paper needles, and that’s one tradition she can do without. She also orders each of them get an ornament for the tree. (“I can’t believe you’re over thirty years old without a cardboard box of holiday kitsch,” she says, and Sam shrugs sheepishly, says, “We’re still not used to living in one place, I guess,” and she sighs and hugs him.)

It’s not like she had functional Christmases as a kid, but she’d always envisioned better ones for them, and it seems like her role in this little dysfunctionally functional family has been to teach them more ways to leave evidence of life, of permanence, something to say I've been here a while instead of just I’m here.

This time, though, a real tree, chopped down by Sam, who is now preserved in perpetuity in his lumberjack gear via Polaroid. They’re both covered in tinsel as Sam tries his best to distribute their set of Goodwill ornaments evenly among the tree lights.

“I guess this is our first actual Christmas,” he says after shattering a glass ball on the floor. “You can probably tell, huh?”

“It’s different, but Campbell family Christmases were not like the things you’d see in the movies.” She squats down with the brush and pan and hand vacuum, sweeping the shards off of the fake velvet tree liner. “The family would be working on Christmas half the time.”

“Guess that’s an industry-wide tradition.”

“Yeah.” After attacking the floor with the vacuum, she starts helping him with the ornaments, fitting wire hooks into the eyes of icicles and globes. “Does that mean your father wasn’t around for Christmas most years?”

He seems shocked that she’s asking so candidly. “Not usually, no. I don’t think – I mean, I’m just speculating, Dean would probably know better – but he didn’t seem to think there was much to celebrate without you.” He shrugs, standing up with a tray of ornaments in hand so he can dress the top of the tree. “I spent a lot of them with Dean. He was pretty good at making up reasons why Dad wasn’t there. We only stopped when I yelled at him one year – maybe I was fourteen? Fifteen? But pretending just hurt too much. Especially for a moody teenager.”

She mulls that over. Wonders about her sons, stuck in a hotel room on December 24^th, exchanging presents shoplifted from gas stations and dollar stores (“Good times,” Dean had said unironically).

“Sorry,” Sam says, pausing with an icicle in hand. “That was a little – dark.”

“No,” she replies automatically. (Dean just shook his head. “After all these years, he still blames himself first.”) “No, I want to know these kinds of things. They’re part of you.”

“I don’t know. It makes us sound like we were in a freakin’ Dickens novel, or something.”

The words are hard, but necessary, and she’s feeling more brave, these days, to withstand a little pain. “It’s nothing you should be ashamed of. John turned out to be the kind of man who left half of himself in Vietnam. I wish he hadn’t, and I wish you’d had both of us, because I think we were better together. But I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, Sam, and maybe – maybe you could give that to me, let it be my problem? All I know is, it shouldn’t be yours, or Dean’s, or Adam’s.” She opens the box of ceramic candy canes.

“I don’t think we need to. I’ve done a lot of thinking, too, over the past, like, ten or twelve years since he died, and I know I should be the last person on earth who should be saying this, but… shit happens, you know? If destiny exists, we can’t really help it, but if we’re really in control of our lives, like, if free will is real, then we can’t control that very much, either. There’s Heaven and Hell and God and the Devil and we’re damn lucky we were in a position to do anything about that.”

She shifts around to the other side of the tree, four candy canes hanging from her finger. “That makes it sound like our choices don’t actually matter.”

“I think they do, but it’s kind of like throwing a rock into a river. There’s the effect you can see, and a million that you can’t, and somehow they’re all equally important. All we can do is look at the ripples and make our best guess about what happens next.”

Mary, finished with her handful of ornaments, stands up and stretches and stands next to him. He looks up at the ceiling, then down at her, eyes damp, and gives her that smile that says it’s okay rather than I’m okay.

“Well, that’s pretty wise,” she says, patting his back gently. Her hand stays between his shoulders. “Guess you really are more mature than I am.”

“Nah. I think you did a lot more growing up than we did. We’re not too good at learning from our mistakes. Especially where family is involved.” He drops his arm over her shoulders.

They stare at the tree for a while. It looks like it came out of some kind of department store catalogue, down to the star-shaped light-up tree topper.

“It’s weird, right?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I’m ten years younger than you, and I’m your mom, and I’ve been living here for almost a year, but I still don’t know what I’m supposed to do here.”

“Me either.”

She turns and hugs him. “I’m really proud of you two. I hope you know that.”

He takes a deep breath, holds it for a moment, and lets it out, like he’s trying not to cry. “I do, Mom.”

“Are you happy, Sam?”

He smiles again, says, “I think so.”

Dean and Adam are a strange pair when it comes to the holidays. They remember what it was like when they were kids, kind of, but it was so long ago that they’ve lost a lot of the specifics and are prone to just making things up to fill in the gaps. The result is like a Christmas from another dimension: Dean’s Christmas Burger, leaving a hard cider and a cigarette out for Santa (“Guy probably needs a pick-me-up after being chased by all of the world’s dogs,” Adam says), the Rock Socks (she’s still not sure what they are), a continuous soundtrack of awful novelty disco albums.

Still, it’s one of her perfect days, she thinks, curled up on the sofa, tree glittering in the corner, listening to the two of them come nearly to blows over a video game. Sam in the kitchen, following an online recipe for eggnog. Castiel’s promise to play the violin for them on Christmas Day, the piece he’s been practicing for months.

And it’s still not fair – so much injustice, so much pain, and no paradise at the end, not really – but they’re making light, aren’t they? She touches her face throughout the afternoon, finds herself smiling. It’s been a long time since Heaven.

They’ve all hung their ornaments by now. An air freshener from Sam, which Dean will never admit to nearly crying over even though Sam swears it was a joke; a sneering Krampus head from Dean, to frighten off the “anti-Santas,” which he insists is very much not a joke. A scallop shell from Adam, with a hole drilled in the hinge for a loop of thread. He doesn’t explain, and that’s how she knows it must be something his mother would have liked.

With the advice of some of the more craft-minded employees at the library, Mary cobbled together her tree-shaped ornament from balsa wood and paint and rhinestones and construction paper. It’s a tree, with attempts at three-dimensional branches, tiny ornaments and presents of its own. In the center, as if she’d stamped out the middle with a cookie cutter, is a picture of the five of them, taken by Eileen. They’re sitting around the table on the deck, mid-smile, waving at the person behind the camera. The Milligan-Winchester-Jones Family, printed in tiny letters underneath.

And maybe it’s just wishful thinking, but when she sees them walk through the living room and pause to look at the tree, to inspect the new decorations, she thinks they must be starting to see family, too.

“I cannot even begin to imagine serving this to your own family,” Adam says when he receives his Christmas Burger. “You’re a nightmare of a person and I hope you know that.”

“Make your own damn holiday lunch, then.” Dean bites into his own concoction and makes a loud sound of satisfaction. “God, that’s good.”

It’s not bad, it’s just strange, and also a little too much for her, because there are three patties in the burger and apparently the olive slices are supposed to be ornaments, the protruding lettuce ribs are striped with mustard and ketchup tinsel and, well, she’s not sure why there is a pickle spear sticking vertically out of the top. And there’s some kind of sweet and spicy jam packed into the onion rings. She ends up deconstructing it and eating the parts that she likes.

Sam’s patties are grilled portobello mushrooms. He doesn’t seem to object to the ingredients at all. Which is a miracle, because she’d turned into a picky eater when she was pregnant with him, so much so that John had to throw out all of the bruised fruit in the house because even looking at it made her nauseous.

It’s been a strange, stretched-out remnant of motherhood, automatically storing away new information on favorite foods, favorite shows, hobbies, habits. They’ve become attuned to her habits, too – early mornings, dark roast coffee, romantic comedies, the rhythms of work and play and sleeping and waking. Without asking, Sam eats her olives.

Later, in the evening, Dean gets a call from work, and Mary rides along to help him out. They’re just picking something up from Gerald’s office and delivering it to a client (“He’s on some beach in Florida, thanks to my hard work,” Dean had groused while putting his jacket on), a twenty-minute jaunt over frozen roads that leads them through town. Dean, for once, forgoes the cassettes and just lets the radio play quietly as they pass the modest holiday shop displays and front yards strung with twinkling lights. No snow yet, so no white Christmas of her dreams, just the windshield fogging as the heating coil starts up.

Dean keeps it light and casual, leaving the car on while he ducks into the tiny one-floor brick building that Gerald operates out of. He comes back with a thick envelope tucked under his arm. She holds it while he drives out to a gated property where they have to buzz an intercom and Dean has to hold up his license to a tiny camera before they can go up to the door and complete the delivery.

The recipient is a man, graying, maybe in his early seventies and certainly in a bathrobe, who says a lot about his wife being on vacation and such. Dean nods in a macho-yet-sympathetic way that apparently reassures the man that he’ll find all the evidence he needs to confront said wife about – whatever it is that she’s doing with all that money. She’s not paying much attention, to be honest, just trying to get a peek into the foyer to see what rich people keep inside their houses for Christmas.

“God, that was stupid,” Dean sighs as he pulls out of the long driveway. “At least he paid good money to expedite the delivery. I guess she must’ve pulled some suspicious maneuvers on his credit score.”

“I thought your cases were more of the hunter kind. Not, you know, hanky-panky and marital disputes.”

“Oh, I’m usually not involved with this side of operations. Gerald makes his Bermuda money off of cases like these. He’s a real weirdo with a camera. I get called in for ghosts and gravediggers. You know, the family business.” He wiggles the fingers of his right hand for emphasis.

She stays silent for a while, thinking. It’s how she’s made it this far without blowing anything up.

Then, cautiously: “I’m still trying to work out exactly what I’m supposed to be doing. Or who I want to be. So I’m just asking, because you’ve had to think about it longer – is this what you always want to do? Is there something else, or – I don’t know, does it matter to you all that much, what you do?”

Dean, unlike John, will talk about how he feels, but she gets the sense that all of the years spent growing up with a man who couldn’t has left a lasting mark. So she watches as he drums on the steering wheel with his thumbs, uncomfortable, gnaws on the side of his lip, glances over at her once, then again.

“’Course it matters. Me and Sam, we tried to leave all this behind us, tried to settle down and all. But it just… never worked out. Shit just happens to us too much. And doing the Ghostbusters gig, I think that’s the most stable this job’s ever been for us. And with Adam, that’s what we need.”

There’s a tinge of defensiveness to his voice. It creeps up in all of them, and she’s come to see it as a tell that they’re thinking about her as Mom, the ghost John held on to, instead of some random woman they haven’t seen in over thirty years. She still doesn’t really know how to untangle that from the mother she actually feels like: inexperienced, shifted in time, so far behind that she doesn’t know if she’ll ever catch up to the mother she wanted to be.

“As long as you feel right about it,” she says. “That’s all I care about.”

“What about you? You feel right about all this?”

She thinks about it, the library, her friends, the dinners, the movie nights, the bills, the chores. The washing machine in the basement, the sucking sound of the sump pump, the slow chirp of crickets. The smell of rosemary drying in bunches, hanging from a string beneath the kitchen cabinets.

“I think so.”

Dean chews on his lip, nods. “Good.” Taps the wheel. “I don’t know. I just… I’m tired. It’s nice to have someone else around. From before.”

Between words, she hears his meaning. Gratitude for a burden relieved, or at least shared. She’s seen it in the way Sam looks at his brother, carefully, judging, measuring, then relaxing when he doesn’t find what he’s looking for. Like they can finally put their heads down.

“He put a lot on your plate.” They both know she’s talking about John. “I wish I could’ve taken it for you. The responsibility. For being good, growing up.”

“I know.”

“I’m proud of you, Dean. For everything. I always would have been, no matter what, since the day you were born.”

“I know.”

Then, quietly, “I’m proud of you, too.”

What is it about the holidays that makes them all so sentimental? He doesn’t look at her when he says it, still in some sense uncomfortable with his own openness. But he’s calm, sure. He means it, with his whole heart and more. Her vision blurs with tears. When did they both get to be grown up?

When they pull up to the house, she hugs him, kisses his forehead. Wants to stay here forever, where she can keep him safe, loved, in her arms. Knows they have to return, that Sam and Adam and tomorrow Castiel will be waiting, just as beloved, but Dean was her firstborn, and in those early years she still believed in her grand escape.

After what seems like an eternity, they let go. She catches the wetness in his eyes before he dashes it away.

“Come on. Adam’ll give us hell for making him wait to start Die Hard.”

Despite his complaining, Adam actually falls asleep halfway through the movie, toasted off of the extra shot of rum in his eggnog. Sam takes about a million pictures of him sprawled over the arm of the couch with his mouth open, and they try to keep their snickering below the volume of the television. It all feels very Hallmark, in the best way possible: the twinkling of Christmas tree lights, the glow of the television, fog on the windows, warm blankets, the smell of cinnamon. A view of her family, their faces red with tipsy, suppressed laughter.

She dozes off without knowing it, and only wakes up when Sam shakes her shoulder gently. The credits are rolling on the television.

“Up,” he says. “Bedtime. And presents tomorrow morning.”

“You never think about how much your kids will be able to drink when they’re grown,” she mutters, envying his total sobriety. “You didn’t get that from me.”

Dean says, from somewhere else in the room, “He definitely got your sass. Okay, Merry Christmas, you filthy animals. See you in the morning.”

It’s always obvious when Castiel returns. Like a cold wind rushing through an opened door in winter, the air changing, the pages of open books flipping aimlessly.

They’re not so affectionate in front of others, Dean and Castiel, but when she comes downstairs on Christmas morning, they’re holding each other’s smiling faces. Then hands drop to shoulders, and Dean nods at her, says, “Hey, Mom, good morning,” and Castiel says, at the same time, “Good morning, Mary.”

“Good morning,” she replies, and smiles, too. Then, seeing the violin case on the couch, “Are you going to play for us today?”

“Of course. Perhaps after you’ve finished with the gifts. The commercial element.”

“You got that right, Clarence.” Dean claps him on the shoulder. “Sam’s getting breakfast going in the kitchen. No bacon and eggs, but I’m feelin’ brave today.”

It’s banana pancakes, hash browns, coffee, reheated eggnog. Sam’s been trying unsuccessfully to make Christmas shapes with the pancake batter.

“My favorite holiday item,” Adam says at the table, already cutting in with a fork and knife. “Not the Christmas tree or the candy cane. The squoval.”

Sam throws a dish towel at him. “Shut the fuck up and eat your shapes.”

“Eeugh, there’s batter on this thing.”

The pancakes are great; she doesn’t understand how any of them can even look at the nog after getting well and drunk last night, but she has a sneaking suspicion that Adam is drinking off a hangover. Dean splashes some into his coffee before heading back to the living room for the ritual of present-opening. She still has no idea what the Rock Socks are for.

Gifts are the least sentimental part of Christmas so far, to her surprise. A family tradition they’ve built without her: a time to spend savings mostly on practical things, to make the next year a little easier. Textbooks, appliances, tool sets, dumb novelty T-shirts, a paper bag from Dean to Sam that gets a withering look and “In front of Mom? Really?” in return. She can tell it’s full of magazines but busies herself admiring her new gardening apron – which, to be fair, is the one she’s been coveting at the hardware store, with a million pockets and loops for tools.

Castiel, gifted a new cake of rosin, disappears upstairs to warm up for his performance. They can still hear him, albeit muffled, as he sends fragments of music floating down the stairs.

“He brings that thing everywhere,” Dean says, not without fondness. “I think he really wants to impress you.”

“He’s an angel. What does he need to impress me for?”

“Oh, you know.”

“I really don’t.”

Sam decides to intervene. “Well, you are his, um—”

Dean points at him menacingly. “Don’t say it, Sam.”

“—mother-in-law. Kind of.”

“Well, yeah.” She still doesn’t get it.

“Queen of Heaven, star of the sea, untier of knots—”

“Wait, he thinks—”

“Not actually,” Sam reassures her. “But, well, you’re just as important, you know? At least, to him.”

She’s still trying to grapple with the implications when Castiel reemerges and announces that he’s ready. They all sit down on the couch with their drinks as he tucks the violin between his jaw and shoulder, placing the bow against the strings, eyes closed in concentration.

Dean once told her that Castiel was born into soldiering, that he’d served with a garrison for tens if not hundreds of thousands of years. It’s hard for her to picture him that old, but Gabriel was that age, too, an anonymous thirty or forty. When he begins to play, though, having shed the trench coat and rolled the cuffs of his shirt away from his wrists, he seems younger, just a student, someone who would have been called up for the draft in her youth. She almost flinches at the sudden image of John, superimposed, still gentle and open, with the rounded edges of youth.

It washes away beneath the bright, rippling melody that pours out into the living room from Castiel’s violin. The music shifts this way and that as his fingers move up and down the fingerboard, dancing from light into shadow and back again, a single stroke of his bow changing the momentum like a bend in a river. His face is the picture of absolute focus.

And maybe it’s because an angel is playing, or because the last time she saw anyone play the violin was in the high school talent show, but in the music she can feel something passing – the millennia of life that he must have endured, or just the decades of their little human lives, like a gust of wind, a fire for the night. How lucky she is, she thinks, to rejoin them, to slip away in the night and then return before the flames gutter out. Even after all these months, she can feel love, the unconditional love that filled her soul the first time she held Dean in her arms, but she can’t feel grateful.

As the final note fades, the last spark from a dying campfire, they applaud – but before she can tell Castiel how beautifully he played, the air changes, like the moment before lightning strikes, and another pair of hands joins in the clapping. The hands belong to a short man with flippy hair, a twinkle in his eye, and a Snickers bar sticking out of his jacket pocket.

“Well done, Castiel. I’m more of the trumpet type myself. If I didn’t know you better, I’d say we should play a duet sometime.”

“Gabriel,” Castiel says flatly, dropping the bow and violin to his sides. “Merry Christmas.”

Gabriel shrugs, eyes crinkling at the corners as he smiles mischievously. “Just doing my rounds, bro. How are you guys? Hanging in there? Sam, Dean?”

“Hi, Gabriel,” Sam says bracingly. “I guess we weren’t expecting company.”

Gabriel rounds the couch with all the energy of an older brother teasing a younger one. “Well, it’s my holiday, isn’t it? And who’s going to tell me I can’t visit my favorite band of generationally-traumatized dickheads with my vacation time?”

Sam leans in, eyes narrowed. “Remind me, who was it that was doing the traumatizing?”

“Come on, Sam, you were performing an essential service! The people need to know that they don’t have to suffer! Genital herpes responds well to timely medical intervention!”

“Stop fighting. You’re ruining Christmas,” Adam warbles insincerely from the other end of the couch.

“And who could forget the littlest dickhead?” He ruffles Adam’s hair quickly, pulling away before his victim can strike back. “Ooh, poor choice of words. My bad.”

“Bite me.”

“That’s the thing I like about this family. You’re all so witty.”

And then he turns to Mary, some quip lined up behind his smirking lips. She doesn’t hear a word he says because she’s busy leaving the room.

The view from her window has changed drastically since the spring. The tree outside has lost its leaves, and through the bare branches, she can see the woods, still and snow-covered, sparkling under the midday sun. It’s been so long, and no time at all, and now – now her prayers are answered, after so many months forsaken, after life and death and life again. After she’s started making a home for herself in the bloody aftermath. Hardly fair, to get what you want after you no longer need it.

Castiel might pay attention to doors, but Gabriel sure doesn’t. He pops into her bedroom and leans on her desk, looking it over.

“Pretty sure you weren’t this much of a vibe-killer the first time around,” he snips half-heartedly.

“I prayed to you,” she says coldly. “Over and over.”

To his credit, Gabriel does manage to look slightly guilty, and takes the Snickers out, offers it to her. When she looks at him incredulously, he shrugs and opens it for himself, takes a bite. “Yeah, I know. I usually don’t pick up the phone for anyone. All my brothers and sisters, you know, they say I’ve got no sense of responsibility. I guess I don’t.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be – I mean, a messenger? You’re the one who explains things. You said it, this is your holiday, you get to pull your herald bullshit. So – explain.”

He shrugs, gives her a sympathetic look as he crinkles the wrapper into a ball and tosses it into the trash. “I mean, they mostly chose me for the baby Jesus thing because I love delivering unexpected news. The looks on your faces! Oh, man. So, yeah, I’m more of a trickster type than a messenger. Sorry.”

“So what am I? Just one of your tricks? Teach us a lesson, then take me away again? What kind of sick joke—”

“Okay, hold your horses.” Gabriel waves his hands defensively. “No, it was not a joke. Or a trick. I wasn’t up to my usual nonsense, I was doing, like, a genuine, selfless thing. I do that sometimes. Not just Mr. Shits ’N’ Giggles over here, despite whatever those jokers have told you. Aw, hey, don’t cry…”

Eight months of unshed tears have broken out of their dam. She couldn’t stop them if she tried. Grief and anger and petty sadness run wild through her body and she can barely string a full thought together that isn’t Why me? Why was she born to hunting parents? Why’d they have to die? Why did she fall in love with John? Why isn’t he here? Why was she the only one brought back to see how much they’d hurt their own children? It’s a miracle, a blessing. She should be grateful. But there’s punishment in it, too.

“I just want to know – why me?”

Gabriel hovers awkwardly for a moment, then takes her hand, drops to his knee in front of her, like a father comforting a distressed child. The picture of the angel who brought her down the stairs of Heaven back to a world that didn’t need her anymore.

“Look,” he starts, coltish and awkward. “I was telling the truth. This was supposed to be a good thing. I wanted to right one of my Father’s wrongs, which was dooming you to die so that those numbskulls downstairs would get drawn into his stupid soap opera about the triumph of good over evil and blah, blah, blah. You weren’t a bad person. You deserved to have a long, happy life. Maybe it’s not turning out the way you thought it would. But I know better than maybe anyone in Creation that questioning your purpose in life, and running from it, and fighting it, is part of the deal. It just is.”

Mary sobs. “Yes – but you brought me back by myself. All by myself. How am I supposed to fight without – we said we were going to fight together, and now it’s just… me. And, you know, people keep telling me I can be more than a mother, but I don’t even know how to be me anymore. I can’t go back.”

Gabriel doesn’t say anything at first, letting her wipe her eyes. Then he says, gently, “Do you want to? Go back?”

“No.” She wipes her face, reaches for the tissue box on the nightstand and blows her nose with a horrific noise. “No, I don’t.”

“And you want to remember everything?”

Even the night where a yellow-eyed demon pinned her to the ceiling and bled her into Sam’s crib? Even her parents, cold corpses on the floor? Even John, throwing bottles in the kitchen? She shakes her head. “Who else will?”

“Okay,” he says, clapping his other hand on top of hers. “Well, that’s that. You cried it out, I gave you your options, and it looks like you’re just going to stick with this one. Nothing I can do about that.”

She blows her nose again. “You’re an asshole.”

“You’re the one who didn’t take me seriously.”

“What?”

“Be not afraid,” Gabriel says, and winks, and disappears.

Against all odds, somehow, that makes it easier. To breathe, to move forward, instead of fighting not to stay in place. Rita says she looks happier in the weeks after the new year, and she agrees. Somehow, even though nothing has changed, Mary finds her footing in the same steps she’s been walking for months: the library, the snow-covered garden, the family dinners, the research, the daywork and the correspondence courses. Castiel comes home to roost for a month or two, and their fast friendship deepens into, well, what she’d thought having a son-in-law might be like, although she’d envisioned him partnered to a future daughter, back then. He lets her try the violin, and by the time the snow has melted, she can scratch out “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” without making anyone’s ears bleed.

The interruptions of the hunt become a sort of rhythm in her life. Sometimes she tags along, sometimes she doesn’t. She trusts them to come back, and she’s afraid. Sometimes she pulls the trigger, sometimes she keeps the porch light on.

Maybe it’s not what she wanted, but she can finally love what she has, and the fact of having it, even if it doesn’t need to have her, is enough.

When the garden is sprouting and Sam and Dean have started their next home improvement project, she talks with Adam about driving to see his father, her husband – John’s grave, her grave. They pick a date, and then they take Sam’s car, an abused old Escort with duct-taped fenders, making their way through plains and valleys to Greenville, Illinois. Adam links his phone to the stereo with a cassette adapter, and they listen to Sonic Youth, Stone Temple Pilots, Green Day, The Black Keys. A far cry from Dean’s unending loop of Kansas and Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin and Iron Maiden, and Sam’s Bon Jovi-Van Halen-Mötorhead mixes, but then again, not far at all. Just like how she used to listen to her Rolling Stones and Deep Purple records when her parents weren’t home.

The grass is still dead in the cemetery, but the trees are budding with the promise of new leaves. She staunchly refuses to see any symbolism in the onset of spring; Adam yawns as they pull into the parking lot and jumps out of the car like an overeager dog, shaking his arms and legs.

It takes a little bit of legwork to track down her headstone. And there it is, small and tasteful, with no room left for John’s name. Mary Winchester, 1951-1983, In Loving Memory. Paid for by some uncle she’d never met or spoken to on the Jones side, and just as well attended, she’s sure.

“Weird,” Adam says, hands in his pockets.

“Yeah,” she replies. “Really weird.”

 “Sam said they buried John’s dog tags here. Maybe we could dig them up, or something?”

She waves the suggestion aside, even though he’s not being serious. “He would have wanted it like this. We weren’t really big on death. Too much of it, you know? It stops being this big thing that needs to be commemorated, and… just something that happens.”

“Amen, sister.” Then, “Sorry.”

Mary laughs and slings her arm around his shoulders. “You know, I thought this would be some big emotional thing for me, but it’s not. Any big feelings on your side?”

Adam shrugs. “Nope.”

“Anything you want to say to your… to John?”

“Said everything I need to say to my mom a couple years back.” He doesn’t turn away, though, and says, “Is it okay if I swear?”

“Go for it.”

He faces the headstone, and seems to think for a minute, before saying, like he doesn’t know what else to say: “I wish you’d stayed, you dumb bastard.”

Then he hugs her, and heads back to the car without another word.

“Well,” she says into the ensuing silence, brushing her hair out of her face, “now we’re finally alone, huh?”

What was she expecting? Closure? His ghost? There’s just the wind and the graves and the car, the trees and the gatehouse, the iron fence, and beyond that, the distant world, with its highways and monsters and mothers and children. Here, in the quietest corner of town, Death’s pocket, she sits down in front of her own headstone, the dry grass poking at her legs.

She used to think she would have a lot to say to John. She’s been angry with him, missed him in so many ways, felt like half a person without him. His absence felt like a punishment, but his presence – what he’d left in his sons – was so much worse. She thought she’d want to ask him why he did all of that, but she knew him – knows him so well that she understands everything, forgives almost everything, even when it’s shoved in side-by-side with her anger and regret.

The truth is, there’s nothing left to say. They said it all in their first life: I love you, I hate you, I don’t understand you, it’s okay. She’d wanted that, back and forth, their wild love, until she died. And she’d gotten it, and it still lives. His love, in her; her love, in him. Everything else was just set dressing.

So she presses her hands to the ground, hopes he can feel it where he is, and says, “Just wait a little longer, okay? You’re not going to believe the stories I have for you.”

And then she stands up, dusts off her hands, and returns to the car.

Adam drives on their way back, so she slowly taps her way through her phone, and after they get burgers from a rest stop, she switches from the fuzzy radio to the Stones, and they howl along to “Wild Horses” with the windows down.

They get home around sunset, pulling into the driveway. The porch light is on, and there are voices coming out of the kitchen window in some easy conversation. Adam throws the brake on and turns the ignition off, and waits for her to get out of the passenger seat before locking the door and heading to the house, whistling some tune she doesn’t know.

The steps up are familiar; so is the smell of mulch and compost and loam and wind through the trees. She’s walked this patch of ground so many times that it’s almost automatic, and as she wipes her boots off on the shabby welcome mat, she thinks about the incoming spring rains, the cleaning, the gutters they’ll have to unclog, the weeds she’ll have to pull. When did the future stop being such a burden? When did it become so bright?

She pulls off her shoes, then follows the sound of over-serious conversation to the kitchen. Four faces turn to look at her, each lighting up in their own way, with mischief or a simple, childlike happiness.

In their faces, she sees love reflected: the shining promise of heaven on earth.

She smiles, wide, and says, “I’m home.”