Disclaimer: I don't own Supernatural in any way, shape, or form
Warnings: Mild language. Also, lots of Bible passages -- I'm not going all preachy-preachy on you here or anything like that, but just letting you know that it's there before you start reading
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Mary Mary, quite contrary, where does your garden grow?
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She was the fourth of five, all boys except her. People cluck their tongues in sympathy for her, but she doesn't understand why.
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When she's five months old, Noah watches while she gets her diaper changed. He asks Mommy where Mary's pee-pee is, and she just about dies laughing.
Her husband is happy to hear it as he smokes his pipe and opens the newspaper. She rarely laughs anymore.
--
When she's two, Mathew smashes his truck into her nose and it starts to bleed. She screams when she sees the blood on her hands and cries for hours afterwards, even when she isn't bleeding anymore.
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She's three and it's raining when she informs her family she's going to be a bird when she grows up.
Noah and Tommy try to convince her otherwise before Daddy hushes them up, and Mama just looks out the window and nurses Brendan. She does that a lot, lately.
--
She's five when they lower mommy's casket into the ground on a cold April morning. She slides her hand into that of Tommy's and wishes that she understood.
"I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies –"
--
She learns to read later that year, Tommy guiding her finger under each letter of Dick and Jane, Spot and Puff's adventures as the words laboriously cross her lips.
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They go to the shore the summer before she turns six. Her father has to pluck her out of the ocean because a riptide tries to take her away. Her father wraps her in a towel and Noah won't leave her side the rest of the afternoon.
--
You can tell when a girl lacks a female role model in her life by her hair.
Mary was the exception. Her father would brush her golden locks all she wanted. She thought it was because he loved her.
Later, she realized that it was because her mother's hair had been the same color.
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When she's seven, her grandma Hope tells her that bees swarm before death.
Two months later, she's stung by a bee. The tears have barely formed in her eyes when she hears Tommy screaming and looking down into the well. She runs over and looks down and screams when she sees the blood.
They bury Noah on a Friday.
--
When she's eight, Joel Klein makes her cry after recess one day.
The next day, his jaw is broken. The night before, she heard Tommy and Mathew plotting, and Brendan begging to come too.
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She's ten years old when their dog, Hopper, runs away. She cries every night, and Tommy tells her that Hopper found a nice new family.
He doesn't tell her that he had to pry Hopper off the road because he was so flat and that he buried her out back, by the well.
--
When she's eleven, she spends every minute with her brothers.
It infuriates her that when they're all outside, they can pee in a bush but she can't. She tries, once. Old Mrs. Lanahan sees her and calls Daddy, who gives her a good long talk about modesty.
Tommy gets a laugh out of it.
--
When she turns thirteen, she's being a pest and Tommy decides to really tell her about Hopper.
She punches him in the jaw and Daddy decides she isn't too old for a spanking.
Then he sits her down, bottom flaming, and reads to her from the Bible about loving your neighbor as yourself.
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Her and Mathew are Irish twins; he's a January baby, and she's a November.
She decides that November is her favorite month of all when she's nine, and she doesn't change her mind, even when she's on the ceiling.
She hated being indecisive.
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When she's fifteen, she has her first real boyfriend.
She doesn't dare to tell her brothers, and sneaks out the window at night to meet him. She knows for a fact that Tommy has an M70 Winchester rifle under his bed for exactly this occasion.
--
When she's sixteen, she lets Nora pierce her bellybutton one night after they've had a little too much to drink.
She nearly passes out when she sees the blood. Every time she sees blood all she can imagine is it leaking from Noah's head in the well, dribbling down his tiny, perfect face that never grew old.
--
Her period is two weeks late, and she nearly has a heart attack.
Her doctor tells her that it could be all of the running, so as much as she loves it, she stops.
--
She's two months from seventeen when Mathew decides he's too good for all of them and leaving.
He dishes it out with his father at the dinner table, with her up the stairs to their room, with Brendan down the stairs to the front door, and with Tommy on the porch.
Tommy always had the last word.
--
Two months later, a stone hits her widow.
It's Mathew. He needs money.
He smells like pot.
--
She's voted prettiest as a senior and hates them all for it. Every single one.
--
She moves out and gets her first job in the city, and a bus runs over her foot.
Brendan visits her in the hospital and tells her that Tommy's started drinking and doesn't smile anymore. She wraps her arms around his shoulders while he cries.
She doesn't know that John Winchester is in the next room, and his brother is telling him that they need to run away from their father, that he can't stand hiding the cuts and bruises anymore.
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Her first boyfriend after she moves out wants to move too fast. When she doesn't want to move with him, he uses his fists to do the talking and they move.
She sees Tommy in his eyes and desperately tries to fix that.
--
The first time she meets John, she's waiting for a bus to go home, and she knows that Tony is waiting for her there and she's late and he's going to be angry, and she can't help herself – she cries.
He sits down next to her and asks her what's wrong.
She looks at him and asks if he only cares because she's pretty.
He starts to shake his head no, and then nods yes. She loves and hates his honesty, and he buys her a cup of coffee.
--
The next day she goes to her bus stop after work and he's there waiting for her, a cup of coffee in hand.
(He'll never tell, but he waited all afternoon because he wasn't sure when she was coming. The cup of coffee he was holding was actually the sixth, because the others had gotten cold)
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One day he meets her, and she has a black eye. He asks her to tell him what happens, and she shakes her head no too quickly for him to believe she was hit by a box at the store, but he pretends to believe her for now.
--
Their first fight happens while they're watching tv in his apartment. He says she should just get away from Tony, get away from that life, and the next thing he knows she's off the couch and screaming at him, so he offers to drive her home.
He doesn't miss the hard look Tony gives him as he orders his young bride inside.
--
One night, she has a dream that she's trying to pump water out of the basement after a flood manually. Her arms are aching and she's asking Tony to help her but he crosses his arms and ignores her. John then comes behind her and puts his hands, soft, atop hers, helping her to pump out the water.
She turns at the waist and kisses him, and wakes up in a cold sweat. Tony yells at her for shaking the bed and waking him.
--
A month later, she's in the store when a call comes in for her; Tommy's dead.
The words tremble on her lips: "Is there blood?"
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He's reading the morning paper when he opens to a tragic tale on D-5; druggie snaps, comes back home, shoots his brother in the head.
He has the same last name as Mary.
He goes over to the apartment and asks her about it, and she falls into his chest and cries.
He sits with her for hours. She blows her nose and whispers, "It's like I'm cursed or something."
--
Six months later, they have their first fight for the eighth time.
And in the middle of it, John raises his hands (just to run them through his hair, he swears to himself years later) and she can't help but shrink back and cower, and his gut falls out.
He starts to back away from her, promises flying from his lips that he didn't mean it, that he wasn't going to –
She thought he was different from all the others as she walks home. Disappointment hurts worse than any slap.
--
The next week she's in the passenger seat of the Impala and she loves the way it growls.
He loves the way her hair can shine, even in the moonlight.
He lets her play The Beatles and read from the Bible. "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casteth out fear…"
"Yeah, yeah, yeah," John and Paul and George agree.
--
A week later they're having their first fight for the twelfth time.
Anger rides wild in her chest, like the horse she never had. She rips the ring off her hand and throws it at his forehead. "Happy? Happy now?"
He stares at her and she stares at him before she grabs her purse and lets the slammed door do the speaking for her.
He realizes later (with some satisfaction) that she did not take the ring home.
--
Two weeks and two days later, she tells Tony that they need to break it off.
Two weeks and three days later, she shows up at his apartment shaking, two black eyes and a split lip.
Two weeks and four days later, he lies to her for the first time when he shoots Tony.
Two weeks and six days later, they're a couple.
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They agree to take it slow, for the both of them. He needs to learn how to love, she needs to learn how to trust.
--
They have milestones, of course, like every couple – four months and he can put his arm around her shoulder without her visibly flinching.
Six months and she finally lets him kiss her – with both hands raised in the air. She likes hands where she can see them.
He laughs as he pulls away and whispers, "I love you" and instantly he knows how wrong that is and he tries to take it back and reel in all those thoughtless words words words as fear crosses through those haunted orbs of eyes –
but then she pulls him in for a kiss and it's alright.
--
They're on the couch and he's pressing into her and hot breath on her neck and face and she –
The cross mother gave her presses into her breast and she tells him they have to wait.
Trouble is, she half expects him to hit her. She's like the elephant that never forgets.
--
He's out under the hood of the car in the darkness and the pouring rain, and she can't help but laugh. Goddammit, he's a mechanic
She leans up against the car and laughs until it hurts. "What is so funny?"
She can't answer, her chest is heaving.
He slams down the hood, rain splattering his hair down flat against his face as he wipes it away with a flick of his big hands. "Goddammit Mary, what the hell is so funny?"
She takes his coat in her fists and kisses him, a laugh on her mouth the entire time. She doesn't even mind that he swears anymore.
I'm ready, she thinks she whispers.
That night, Dean is conceived in the back of the Impala.
--
She reads from her Bible every morning while she's pregnant.
(In seven years, John will use that Bible in an exorcism down in Georgia.)
Her voice rings out like a song while he shaves in the bathroom, "Behold, children are the blessing of the Lord/Happy is the man who has his quiver full of them."
He wipes the shaving cream off his face with a razor and guffaws: "Tell me that when we're up at two am and he's crying."
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Once, when she was just a little girl, her father told her that they had planned on having four boys – Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John.
Instead, they got Tommy, Noah, Mathew, Mary, and Brendan.
When she asks if he is sad about that, he shakes his head no.
He hates lying to his little girl.
--
As Dean grows, she watches the relationships of her friends fall apart.
One night (as she rocks Dean to sleep) it strikes her that she and John haven't had a fight since they were married, and she wonders if they were blest, even though she stopped believing in Blest when Noah died.
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John is out of town, and Dean is the man of the house, so naturally he crawls in bed with his mother around three in the morning.
She smiles and runs her fingers through his hair as he lays his head on her breast. She turns on the bedside table and runs her fingers through his blonde hair while she reads: "I will sweep away everything in all your land," says the LORD. "I will sweep away both people and animals alike. Even the birds of the air and the fish in the sea will die."
She thinks about how she told her family she wanted to be a bird.
--
Sam was supposed to be a twin, you know.
Twin to twin transfusion, the doctor says. Your other boy is healthy and strong. We're very sorry for your loss. Pass our name along to your other friends expecting children .
That night, she reads about Lazarus raising from the dead in her Bible and thinks about how they were going to name him Lucas.
She never gets over it and her soul dies weeping.
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When Sam is born, Dean comes bounding into the hospital, takes one look at his brother, and bursts into noisy tears.
As hard as he tries to explain what's wrong, he can't.
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"It is a burnt offering, an offering made by fire, an aroma pleasing to the LORD."
Two hours before she dies, Mary folds down this page in her Bible.
--
He's sitting in the rectory of a small Church and he can barely believe it.
The patient, smiling, overweight blonde woman points to a passage. "This one is commonly used at funerals."
He shakes his head and pulls out a crumpled piece of paper where he had jotted down a book and line numbers.
The woman patiently leafs through and reads, her crystalline eyes skimming. She raises her gaze to this man in need of a Schick. "This isn't exactly –"
"She highlighted this, she liked it," he says, is voice flat and unmoving in a way that leaves no room for argument.
The woman sighs and takes down the book and line numbers. "All right, sir."
--
"How blest are the poor in spirit:
they reign of God is theirs.
Blest too are the sorrowing;
they shall be consoled.
Blest are the lovely;
they shall inherit the earth.
Blest are those who hunger and thirst for holiness;
they shall have their fill.
Blest are they who show mercy;
mercy shall be theirs.
Blest are the single-hearted;
for they shall see God.
Blest too the peacemakers;
they shall be called sons of God.
Blest are those persecuted for holiness' sake;
the reign of God is theirs.
- Matthew 5:3-10
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