a/n: I blame Carly for this. Posting all these spn-feels-inducing things on November second…that's just mean. I haven't written anything in…..well, in a long time. So this was very quick and not edited, stemming from a thought I had a few months ago about Mary actually remembering future!Dean's warning and not getting out of bed. I wanted to post it today cause, well, it's today. All the feels are today.
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On November 2nd, 1983…
by Liisakee
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"Hey, Mary…Can I tell you something?"
"Sure."
"Even if this sounds really weird…will you promise me that you will remember?"
"MOM!"
Mary Winchester startled out of the memory. An old memory. A fragment of a time that she had done her best to forget, and with good reason.
His green eyes had been filling with tears.
They were filling with tears…and she had promised.
She blinked and turned to face her oldest son, his own eyes bright with delight as he raced into the room, holding God-knows-what in the hands he thrust towards her.
Forcing herself to smile, she bent down to investigate Dean's latest discovery.
A grasshopper. Lovely.
"I saved him!" Dean declared proudly, holding his hands partly open so that Mary could see, but the poor insect could not escape. "Dad was just gonna mow right over him, but I caught him just in time!"
Mary had long ago resigned herself to that fact that having two boys was going to mean mud and insects and animals and who-know-what-else would be brought into her kitchen. One little grasshopper wasn't enough to make her squeamish, but she did have a cooling lasagna on the stove and Sammy was scooting around on the floor, looking for anything and everything to put into his mouth.
"Good work, Love." She kissed the top of Dean's head as she straightened up. "Mr. Grasshopper is very lucky you saved him." She raised a motherly eyebrow. "I bet he'd love the wood pile in the backyard. Why don't you go find a spot for him and then tell your father that dinner's ready?"
Green eyes shining, Dean muttered an "Aw yeah!", and raced back outside, hands carefully cradling his prize.
Midway through an Olympian reach to snag a dried pasta shell off the ground, Sammy stopped short, his eyes following his big brother's trail as he raced out the door. Mary rolled her eyes, bent to remove the shell from Sammy's reach, and hoisted the baby into her arms.
"You'll never be bored, Sam," she said, smiling as she brought him back into the kitchen.
She stopped short again as her eyes fell on what she had been staring at before Dean ran in.
The calendar.
"On November 2nd, 1983…don't get out of bed."
Her hands tightened on Sammy and she heard the mower stop in the front yard, Dean's laughter mixing with John's voice as they both started to come inside.
Quickly, she looked away from the calendar, moving to place Sammy in his high chair and bring the rest of the dishes to the table. As John and Dean walked in, she forced herself not to think about it.
At least for the next few hours.
She was getting used to having John home again.
While she'll be the first to admit that their marriage hadn't been very smooth sailing, Mary still loved him dearly. And Dean, to put it simply, hero-worshipped John. The roughest part of the separation had probably been Dean: trying to figure out what to tell Dean, trying not to cry in front of Dean…But he was a smart boy. Mary knew Dean had figured out more than she wanted him to. He had been forced to grow up a little too fast for her liking.
But John was back, the wounds were mending, and Dean was loving being a 4-year-old again.
He hadn't dropped the "uber-protective-big-brother" cape though…Mary had a feeling that Dean would carry that mantle his whole life.
She flipped on the light in Sammy's room and Dean raced out of her arms. Hoisting himself up, he peered into Sammy's crib, leaning down to kiss his baby brother on the forehead.
"Goodnight, Sam." Dean said solemnly.
Mary couldn't help but smile. Dean had almost, almost been asleep, when his eyes shot open, frantically informing his mother that he had forgotten to kiss Sam goodnight and he absolutely, positively could not fall asleep without doing so.
"Sammy won't fall asleep either, Mom," Dean had told her seriously. "He won't know its bedtime unless I tell him."
Though it was already well past his bedtime, and Mary's eyes were heavy, she had smiled at the declaration and brought Dean into Sam's room.
Sure enough, the baby was all wide-eyes and giggles, not remotely tired as he smiled up at his big brother.
"Goodnight love," she added, leaning down herself to caress her baby.
"Hey, Dean," John's voice floated in from the doorway behind him.
They both turned and Dean shouted "Daddy!" and ran into John's waiting arms. John had only briefly gone to the hardware store, finally getting around to fixing the downstairs toilet that they had all been living without for the past few weeks.
Dean hadn't wanted him to leave after dinner. Probably, Mary sighed, afraid that he wouldn't come back. But after several dozen reassurances that he would be back before Dean went to sleep, John pecked Mary on the cheek and hurried out the door.
Thanks to Mary and Dean's renegotiation of Dean's bedtime, John had indeed gotten home before Dean fell asleep.
She grinned as she walked towards Father and Son, loving how brightly Dean smiled as they talked, and loving that John was there to see the smile.
And, come to think of it, loving that she could pass off the work.
"You got him?" she asked John, knowing that even if she had wanted to finish putting Dean to bed, he would probably cling to John until he fell asleep.
"I got him," John reassured her with a smile.
With both the boys finally asleep, Mary did her best not to make too much noise as she sifted through the boxes.
Just how many journals had she kept?
John always said it was "cute" that she kept journals. The habit had started when she was a preteen and just starting to realize that there were lots of things she wanted to say that she couldn't talk about with her parents, particularly her father. Being a family of hunters, she was always a bit of an odd girl and never much good at making friends. Her journal had become an outlet for all the things she wanted to say but couldn't.
When she had met John, her journal writing had slowed down.
After her father died, she had stopped writing all together.
But her last entry…her last entry was what she was looking for.
She knew she had written it down.
The box she had been trying to inch off the shelf decided to fall on her right at that moment, dropping a few objects onto her head and the floor, making quite a bit of noise that she winced at. She froze for several seconds, waiting for the wail of an infant rudely awoken from sleep, or the pitter-patter of Dean's bare feet as he tries to sneak over into Sammy's room.
Thankfully all she heard were slow, steady shuffles coming up the stairs.
That would be John.
"I thought we were blaming me for being too noisy after bedtime," John said smartly, coming into the room and smirking at her as she tried to negotiate the rest of the box off the shelf without making more noise.
"Oh hush, no one woke up," Mary defended herself as John walked over to help her with the box and she leaned down to pick up what had dropped.
"Must be important to risk waking up the kids," John mused, glancing at the items in the box. He looked at her with a raised eyebrow. "Your journals?"
Mary gave herself a silent "Hurrah!" at having finally found the right box. "Just feeling a little reminiscent, I guess," she lied with a smile.
She didn't like lying to John, but this was not something he would understand or even care to. John Winchester, as her father liked to put it, was a nice, normal boy. Rooting through old journals to find out the exact words that a hunter told her ten years ago that might affect her life tonight…well, anything and everything having to do with that experience was not something that she would be talking to him about again. It was hard enough explaining it all the first time around. Building the lies upon yet more lies.
John's face fell a bit more as he looked at her. "Thinkin' about your dad?"
"No, er-no, I just…" the lies didn't roll off her tongue quite as easily as they used to, "I was thinking of starting a journal again….for the boys." That was plausible, right? Actually, it sounds like a good idea. "It'd be fun for them to read about their lives when they were growing up together."
He smiled at that thought. "That's not a bad idea. So you're looking for inspiration?" He motioned to the old journals they had gathered back into the box.
"Something like that."
"Well, try to keep it down, alright?" He leaned over and kissed her briefly. "I intend to actually watch the whole game tonight."
She snorted a laugh. John had a bad habit of falling asleep in front of the TV. In the whole of their married life, she didn't think he had ever actually watched a whole basketball game. But she knew he worked hard and if that was how he relaxed…she could give it to him. Especially tonight when she had….other plans.
John huffed at her laugh and turned away, his footsteps receding down the hallway and stairs.
After she heard him get all the way downstairs, she reached down to pull out the journal that she had already located from the box.
It had been her last journal, with only a few entries in it, so it didn't take her long to find her very last entry.
November 2, 1983
Dean says not to forget it.
"No matter what you hear or what you see…promise me you won't get out of bed."
She snapped the journal shut, her heart pounding and her eyes flicking to the small day calendar on John's side of the bed.
November 2, 1983.
She hadn't gotten the day wrong after all.
Her heart was beating so loud she was afraid it would wake up the kids.
She opened the journal again, reading her short note.
Dean says not to forget.
Dean.
A hand came up to her mouth to try and muffle her erratic breathing.
What was happening?
Her mind whirled and she started to get a headache as she thought of the stranger who had come into her life and left just as quickly. He had been a hunter. A good hunter at that. Maybe even better than her father. He had been able to predict the future with his father's journal….he had told her not to forget.
She almost had.
She glanced at the clock and saw that it was only 10.
Two more hours.
Carefully, she collected her journals and put them back in the box, placing it back over near the closet door and walked to the doorway. She turned off the light in her room, taking a small bit of comfort in the faint sound from the downstairs television that floated through the hallway to her.
She felt herself slip back into 18-year-old Mary Campbell.
She sniffed the air.
No sulfur.
The small nightlight in the hallway did not flicker.
She did feel a bit cold, but she knew it was probably nerves.
Her fingers itched for holy water and salt.
She watched Dean's door for several minutes and then switched over to Sammy's.
Bed.
She was supposed to be in bed.
And not get out.
Slowly, she made herself get under the covers, reaching over to turn up Sammy's monitor as loud as it would go. She felt warmer under the covers, but not any better. She glanced at the clock.
10:15
One hours and 45 minutes left.
Mary awoke, heart-pounding, to a strange sound. Her eyes snapped open but she stayed still, mind already remembering what was happening.
How could she have fallen asleep?
A four year old and a six month old. THAT'S how.
She was exhausted.
But she was awake now, her body tense and alert for the noise that had startled her from slumber.
It was coming from Sammy's monitor. He was crying.
Just a little bit, a few little squeaks and sniffles. That was normal. He still sometimes woke up for a midnight snack, much to her annoyance. John had lately been taking the shifts for her, bless him, but a quick move of her arm told her that his side of the bed was still cold.
Fell asleep in front of the TV again. She was sure of it.
But Sammy's cries weren't what woke her.
Static.
Weird static noises.
She moved her head ever so slightly to glance at the open doorway into the hall. As she lay still, she faintly saw the nightlight flickering in the near darkness.
Her heart pounded louder and tears filled her eyes as she caught a very faint, but very present smell of sulfur in the air.
Another slight tilt of her head told her that she had not slept long enough.
11:30
Sammy continued to make a few whimpering noises and she felt the tears roll down the sides of her face as she lay perfectly still, not daring to move. Her hands ached to rush in and comfort her child…her baby. She pictured his little face as she and Dean had told him goodnight. She pictured his room with the mobile above his bed, his nightlight, and toys decorating the shelves. She could see him crying, fussing, wondering where his mother was and why she wasn't coming.
A little chocked sob escaped from her mouth and her hand flew up to silence it. The tears were a steady stream now, even as she head Sammy's cries dim, she could not stop. Her mind flew over to Dean, blissfully asleep in his bed. He would know. He would know if…something came into his room. He would scream for her. He would tell her.
Maybe he already did.
She closed her eyes and pictured the stranger from all those years ago. His green eyes shining with tears as he begged her to remember, to not get out of bed. His forced smile though the tears as he turned away to leave.
She saw Dean's little green eyes, overflowing with tears last week as he cried from a skinned knee at T-ball practice.
"Promise me you won't get out of bed."
Even as a hunter who had seen too much in her young life….it was an insane thought, impossible. But as she laid there, paralyzed with fear in the darkness, she could not stop thinking.
"Promise me."
She had promised. She had promised Dean. Whether it was her Dean or anyone else's Dean….he had a mother too. She had promised.
With her hand still covering her mouth, tears still streaming down her face, her eyes moved slightly to the clock.
11:45
Sammy's monitor was quiet now, the light in the hallway stable and still. She was still cold, but she doubted that was going to go away any time soon.
Mary found herself holding her breath, waiting for something, anything to happen.
Even as the clock switched from 11:59 to 12:00, she still lay there, crying, trying not to breathe.
Finally, at 12:15, she heard a noise from downstairs that she recognized as John moving around to turn the TV off and come up to bed. Her mind and body both seemed to snap out of their paralysis and she threw herself out of bed and raced into Sammy's room, the tears still falling as she saw….nothing.
The small nightlight illuminated her sleeping baby boy as she walked up to his crib, hoping her pounding heart and gasping breaths would not wake him again.
He was fine. The room was just as she left it, not a thing out of place. With a trained eye, she skimmed the entire room and her baby before reaching down to kiss his forehead and reassure herself once and for all that he was perfectly fine.
She heard John come up the stairs and hesitate in the doorway.
"Alright?" He asked softly, probably questioning if it was his turn to feed Sammy.
Mary turned to him, trying to wipe the evidence of crying off her face and whispered, "Fine, just checking him."
Either John was too tired to notice or there wasn't enough light for him to tell how much and how long she had been crying. He blew her a quick kiss and shuffled back into their bedroom.
With one last glance at Sam, Mary quietly moved from his room over to Dean's.
Dean was a lighter sleeper, so she was even more cautious with her movements, her eyes once again scanning the perfectly normal room, not daring to hope that nothing was wrong in here either.
Her eyes fell on the small angel statue that she had gotten for Dean just months before he was born. Dean liked having it on the shelf right above his bed, "so that the angels can watch over me better", as he liked to explain.
Seeing the statue seemed to be the final straw in calming her racing heart and she almost felt back to normal as she slowly and carefully bent over to kiss Dean softly on the cheek.
"Goodnight, Love," she whispered softly, her breath on his neck as she stayed still for a moment, watching him sleep. She felt the tears coming again, this time not out of fear but out of relief.
Carefully, Mary walked back to the hallway, closing Dean's door and leaning against it for a moment, letting herself silently cry for all that had just happened…and all that hadn't happened.
Minutes later, she finally got herself back into her own bed and she scooted closer to John's warm presence beside her. She felt her breathing finally slow, matching pace with his and she brought up his arm around her, wanting to feel protected in his embrace. She could hear Sammy's breathing through the monitor and pictured Dean, asleep in his bed with the Angel watching over him. One last tear rolled down her face as she silently said a prayer of thanks to whatever Angel had been watching over her family that night…and all those years ago.