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"See you around," Missouri said, as the door to Dean's car slammed shut. She watched as the engine revved and the brothers took off, on the road once more. She didn't leave the front porch of her house until she could no longer see its shiny black shape in the distance.
As she walked back inside, she couldn't resist one last lingering stare outside.
"That boy," she began, setting her bag down on the table, "he has such... powerful abilities." The late afternoon sunlight streamed through the windows as she ventured towards her couch. "Why he couldn't sense his own father, I have no idea."
The man on the sofa held his face in his hands, rubbing at his beard before steepling his fingers against the tip of his nose. His back was hunched with fatigue, the light casting stark shadows on the bags of his eyes.
"Mary's spirit..." he said. "Do you really think it saved the boys?" Missouri sighed.
"I do." She watched as he twisted the wedding band that still adorned his finger. As it turned, it gleamed a dull silver.
"John Winchester, I could just slap you! Why don't you go talk to your children?"
"God, I want to. You have no idea how much I want to see them. But I can't. Not yet." John Winchester looked her squarely in the eye. In his gaze was a sadness so deep it seemed bottomless, infinite. "Not until I know the truth." Unimpressed, Missouri let the words hang in the still air, matching his gaze with a steely one of her own. He was the first to look away.
When the pair of them had first turned up at her door, they had looked... haunted. As if, instead of living a life on the chase, they had been living a life on the run.
Dean still appeared at least somewhat okay--- though the bags under his eyes belied an old fatigue. Sam in particular, though? The boy couldn't be more than... what? Twenty-one? Twenty-two? Whatever the case, he was hardly a grown man, though the decades had seen him shoot up like a weed from a baby small enough to dandle on her knee to an almost college graduate. Yet the look in his eyes indicated he had aged far beyond his years. Grief shone through even his neutral expression, and though she did, she needn't have read his mind to see that he had lost, and lost badly.
She decided to start on a neutral foot.
"Well? Sam and Dean, come in already. I ain't got all day."
Well, as neutral as she could manage, she reflected, ignoring their bewildered expressions. She offered them a smile.
"Well, let me look at you. Oh, you boys grew up handsome!" Not handsome enough to disguise the pain living inside them. She took Sam's hand in both of her own, and her eyes widened.
"Oh Sam," she said softly. "I'm sorry about your girlfriend. And your father..." she continued after a pause. "He's missing?"
"How'd you know all that?"
"Well, you were just thinking it, just now." Again, shock flitted across both of their faces.
"Well, where is he?" This came from Dean. "Is he okay?" She grimaced inwardly.
"I don't know. "Although she knew damn well where he was and how he was doing. Curse that man to hell! To leave his only children in this sorry state? She and him were going to have words later.
A few more words exchanged and they were sitting on her couch. She looked up in alarm just in time to see Dean twitch.
"Boy, you put your foot on my coffee table, I'm gonna whack you with a spoon."
"I didn't do anything." His tone was dubious.
"Well, you were thinking about it." She heard Sam stifle a laugh, dimples in cheeks popping out. She noted with a vague relief that it made him look more his age.
"Okay, so, our dad," Sam began.
"When did you first meet him?" Dean added.
"He came for a reading," she replied carefully, "a few days after the fire." She looked straight at them. "I just told him what was really out there in the dark."
Outside their old home, she watched Dean corral Jenny, its new owner, and her two babies out of the house so they could begin their work.
From her perch in the kitchen, she surveyed the two of them as they began to knock holes in the drywall to place her pouches in, ones that would ward off the evil that had touched the house. Then on to the basement, to place her own. Or, she tried, at least. The spirits in the house were getting in the way.
Before she knew what had hit her, the ghost had shoved a heavy wooden chest into her midsection, pinning her to the wall like a butterfly in a display case. Except for the fact that she was in twice as much danger of being squished. A scream ripped out of her, tearing her throat to shreds as it left her body. Instinctively, she shoved against the chest, trying desperately to regain the air that had been crushed out of her lungs.
Bitterly, she thought of her previous conversation with the boys.
“I don’t understand,” she had said. “I haven’t been back inside, but I’ve been keeping an eye on the place, and it’s been quiet.”
So much for that.
“No sudden deaths…” Except for that poor repair guy who had just gotten shredded by the garbage disposal.
“No freak accidents…” Yet here she was being held against a wall by a wooden chest. She strained against it again and again, each attempt more frantic than the last. To no avail. She was just wasting her energy.
Her survey of Sam’s nursery had brought more than one spirit to her attention. Irrationally, she wondered, which of them was keeping her here?
She should have stuck to normal jobs. Doing readings on average Joes who couldn’t dream of the horrors that had plagued this house. And yet, despite her current situation, she couldn’t bring herself to regret what she had done. These were John Winchester’s children. If she disapproved of the man himself, she felt a deep compassion for the plight of his boys. They had been dragged in over their heads, and far be it from her to stop them from figuring out how far under the water they had come. It could only help them learn how far up to swim.
In the nursery, she had told them, “You see, all those years ago, real evil came to you.” And it was true. She had never felt anything like it since. An evil eye had cast its dark gaze over the Winchesters. Twenty-two years later, she was still seeing its effects.
“That kind of evil leaves wounds,” she had elaborated. “And sometimes wounds get infected.”
By the time the work was done, the house was virtually unrecognizable in its disarray. She stood with Sam and Dean in what remained of the kitchen, leaning against an upturned table studded with knives.
“Are you sure this is over?” the former asked.
“I’m sure,” she replied, after a moment’s hesitation. “Why? Why do you ask?”
“No, never mind.”
It wasn’t over. Not by a long shot.
She heard the story from the pair of them the morning after it happened. She could see the flames flickering in her mind's eye as they related it to her; she could see Mary Winchester fighting it off, to her own demise. There were no more spirits left after her energy had canceled with that of the poltergeist’s. A sacrifice worthy of a Winchester. A battle casualty against a group of creatures a normal person would never have cause to believe in. How much more would they all lose in the coming war? How much more suffering could they take in silence before one of them snapped?
One of the last things she had said to the brothers before they left was, “Don’t be strangers.” And yet, as their presence in Lawrence was reduced to tire skids on the pavement, she couldn’t help but wonder how their fight against the supernatural would change them. If she would be able to recognize them the next time she saw them. With a heavy heart, she turned to go back inside toward the man that had kickstarted all of this misery. There was no telling what the future would bring. John Winchester was a dead man walking. Now, there was only her to pick up the pieces, in the town where it all began.