This is a disclaimer.
AN: ZOMG I WROTE CANON MARY/JOHN. CANON! Well, mainly canon. Mostly. I guess. Prequels, it turns out, are "Use and Old Age", along with "Thicker Than Water"; I'd call it a verse, but it's CANON. I cannot get over that.
Guide you home
Somewhere ahead of him, there's a light. No, really. A light. It's faint, true, so faint that that it could be no more than the possibility of a light, slanting through an opening. A doorway.
John Winchester's a stubborn sonovabitch, a description with which even his mother would have found no faults, but he can still take a hint. Especially one as obvious as that.
Admittedly, John's not entirely sure how he went from 'trapped in Hell' to 'hallucinating about his dead wife' to 'abandoned cemetery in the middle of nowhere', but he's not complaining, it's a huge improvement on a minute ago, and hey, there's Sam, looking terrified, so much for some kinda homecoming party, but fuck, there's Azazel.
Bending over Dean.
Oh, no. Not again.
The surge of anger he gets at the sight of his wife's killer reaching for their son cuts through the foggy haze his thoughts are blanketed in and gives him momentum, purpose, clarity. He's got an instant to realise he's not actually corporeal anymore, and then he's just over there, up behind the yellow-eyed bastard in a strange kind of rush, like he's made of air or something.
And perhaps he is made of air or something, because it's taking up a good deal of his concentration to remember what he's doing here. Like when stoned, or drunk off his ass, his thoughts are fleeing every which way and really, if he hadn't had so long to practise this iron control while alive, he'd be God knows where by now and about as much use to his sons as a chocolate fireguard.
Right. Dean. Azazel. Focus, Winchester.
It's like seeing double: there's a living human being in front of him, the same man he remembers from the hospital, but there's a black shadow there too, occupying the same space, a man-shaped darkness that seems, to John Winchester's dead eyes, to exude evil, like an aura surrounding it.
For the first time in twenty-two years, he's in a position to actually get hold of the bastard and inflict some damage on him, and that feels damn good.
Admittedly, John doesn't last long. Azazel flings him off like it's nothing, like he's a scrawny teenager again, and maybe that shouldn't surprise him, considering where he's spent the last twelve months or so, but just as he's struggling to his feet again (because damn if that's it, he's waited a long, long time for this opportunity and he's not about to let it go to waste), there's the sharp bang of a gunshot, and John's vision seems to blur, shadow and man sinking into each other and becoming one, and then the shadow that was Azazel is gone, and John is staring at a corpse.
Behind him the sound of a crypt door slamming shut, and he feels like he's breathing easy for the first time in a year, even though technically he isn't breathing at all. It's a noise like freedom, the endless freedom of the open road, the rev of an engine, the wind in his hair.
Dean is climbing to his feet, unsteady and staring. The Colt, useless now, hangs limply in his right hand, and John doesn't hesitate to go to him and lay a hand on his shoulder. He wants to say something – well done, I love you, I'm proud of you, thank you for doing what I could not – but the words won't come, and maybe they're not needed anyway. John trusts his oldest like he's trusted no one else since Mary died, and he trusts him now to know what his father's failing to say.
Sam is bloodstained and pale and looks kinda beat up, but he meets John's eyes without flinching. Sam. John has a whole speech for Sam. It starts with I'm sorry and ends with Everything I've done has been to try and save you from this, but he can't manage that one either, can't talk at all, and there's something pulling at him, catching his attention out of the corner of his eye and just tugging insistently.
Stubborn as he is, even John knows there are things you can't say no to.
He gives Dean's shoulder a last, hard squeeze, steps back but doesn't take his eyes off him, and relaxes that iron control he's had in place for so long, and the relief rushing through him is the best feeling ever, short of making love to Mary, pure bliss, so perfect that it takes a minute before he realises that the hazel-green eyes he's still staring at don't belong to Dean.
"Hello, stranger," says his wife.
"Mary," he says, a little experiment after that weird no-talking thing in the cemetery. The foggy haze seems to have disappeared along with their sons, his thoughts sharp and clear and moving at their usual pace again.
"Nice to see you too," she says drily.
"Did you just drag me out of Hell?"
She laughs, music to his ears. "No. I just... let's say I gave you the kick up the ass you needed to get out yourself."
"I don't remember."
"I wouldn't try to if I were you."
He's not masochistic enough to argue that point.
"The boys..."
"Are alive. Ergo, you know, not here."
"Yeah, where is here, anyway?" They don't seem to be anyplace in particular. As far as John can tell, they're standing in nothingness, a few feet away from each other. Mary's wearing tight jeans and that cowgirl blouse, the one he spent most of the early seventies wanting to rip off her. Her hair's loose and curly, a bit shorter than when she died. All in all, she looks about twenty.
A glance down at himself confirms that he's still in his bloodstained jeans and shirt, and that he's still got the beard, and probably looks every second of his fifty-two years and then some. Dirty, sweaty and caked in mud and blood, straight off a battlefield.
"I'm not sure it matters," she says, answering his question about their whereabouts. "I mean, if you want, we can just go home, I guess..."
There's a strange blur and shift around them, and then they're standing in their bedroom. Big soft double bed, the wardrobe behind him, curtains drawn, clothes tossed over a chair. It doesn't help.
"This isn't helping, you know."
"Well, tell me what will!" Mary snaps. "We're dead, John. As in, welcome to the afterlife, this the way things are gonna be for the rest of eternity, and while I could kinda understand you being totally rude to me while you were in Hell, I was hoping for a little more enthusiastic greeting now you're finally up here, you bastard."
She's glaring at him, hands on hips and that shirt pulled tight over her breasts and biting down on her lower lip like she's afraid he's going to shrug and tell her that, sorry, doll, but I met someone else and got over you by the time Sam was two.
Yeah, right.
John's not sure when he reverted back to the age of twenty-two or so, but obviously he has because the only scars Mary's running her hands and mouth over are the shrapnel ones he picked up in Vietnam, and he's fairly sure his beard's gone too. She tosses his shirts off the bed into a corner and goes to work on the buckle of his belt, God knows how she gets her hands between their bodies to do that, they're pressed so tight together, but her hands fall still and clench into his hips when he bends a bit to kiss her breasts, low moan of John please and he pulls away and rolls them over so she can sit up and get their jeans open and then off, an undertaking punctuated by laughter and made more awkward by a mutual need to always be touching, but then they're falling naked into the pillows together and John stops thinking and finally starts to feel again.
Possibly it's late at night. "Time has no meaning here," Mary observed earlier in her best mystic fortune teller voice, dissolving into laughter when John kissed the accompanying fake superiority away.
"You made some kinda deal, didn't you," he says quietly. He's on his front, sprawled across the bed. Mary's half next to and half underneath him, their legs tangled together. She's staring up at the ceiling, her face in profile to him. Waits calmly for him to finish.
"You must have. Everyone else I talked to who'd ever seen a man with yellow eyes... they all said he wanted something from them. And there's no way he coulda done what he did to Sam without permission from us. No way. The lore's pretty conclusive about what you have to do in order to magic an infant."
"Yeah, it is," she agrees. "Free will is the key factor, and if someone doesn't have it, you go knockin' and ask Mom and Dad. Parents have first right to their children's souls, especially their firstborn."
"At first I thought it was your parents, but they died," he says, still soft, slow but inexorable. "And then I thought, Dean, but the time span was ten years, so he was off the list."
Mary laughs then, choked and rueful. "You really are an idiot, aren't you, John?" She turns to look at him, eyes bright with tears. "Tell me, what was the last thing you ever did solely to make yourself happy?"
He stares. "Um. Bought the truck?"
"Doesn't count. You bought it so you could give Dean the Impala."
"We aren't talking about me here anyway," he protests.
"Oh, but we are," Mary says, intense and fierce.
John feels a bit like he's just been slapped. "You – it –"
"It killed you," she says. "It killed you right in front of me, snapped your neck like a twig, and there I was, sitting in the grass holding your dead body in my arms, and I – I couldn't bear – "
She starts crying then, and he sits up and pulls her against him, arms tight around her. Warm tears on his chest and her nails digging into his arms.
It killed you.
That might just be the most horrific thing he's ever heard. His beautiful beloved Mary bought his life with their son's.
"I didn't know," she whispers. "It wouldn't tell – I never imagined it could possibly want our kids. I thought I'd have to pay its price myself."
"I love you," he whispers into her hair.
She sniffles. "You better. After everything I've done for you!"
John chokes a laugh then, holds her tighter than ever, occasional little sob still shaking her body.
"It's all up to Dean, now," Mary whispers at last.
John thinks of Sammy. Of the fights they used to have. Of the ruthless determination the kid has, not caring who he hurt in his angry quest to finally get free of his Dad. Of the simmering anger that Jess' death put in him.
"I think maybe it always was," he says.