Still penniless. Either read the story or go pester someone else.

AN: Title from the CSN song "Long Time Coming". Oh yes, and this fic is entirely tigriswolf's fault. That story about why Bela stole the Colt that latched on to my brain, mated with the Ares and Artemis 'verse, and produced this.

Turn any corner

She was born in 1836, in Hartford, Connecticut, the daughter of a grim, hard-eyed woman and a successful young businessman who moonlighted as a hunter. She was blonde, green-eyed, beautiful. She had no legal right to the name, but she always called herself Mary Colt.

When she was twelve, she caught pneumonia, nearly died. It was the first, last, and only time she ever saw a flash of emotion in her mother, who had been desperate, frantic, crying with fear. Such a powerful witch, reduced to a wreck at the prospect of one arrogant foul-mouthed gutter brat's death.

Mary treasured that memory always.

There was one more memory of those weeks she was ill that she was never quite sure of, uncertain whether it was a true memory or a dream. It had seemed to her that she lay in a circle of candles, that her father was there, pale and grim, a gun in his hands, that her mother was kneeling by her, chanting strange words.

But it faded, with time, as she grew up, became a witch in her own right, learned to hunt.

At twenty-five, she died, ripped apart by a demon with yellow eyes, an old enemy of her fathers.

Shortly after the world faded to black, she woke again, in a strange bed, in a strange room, with a whole new set of childhood memories to add to the ones she already had. Her so-called parents told her the year was 1883 – twenty-two years to the day she died.

Six months later, she hanged herself in the lunatic asylum her desperate, sobbing 'parents' had delivered her to, under the name of Mary Carter.

Twenty-two years after that, she was Mary O'Neill. This time, she didn't make a scene. It took some time to assimilate all three sets of memories, to sift through Mary O'Neill and Mary Carter to find Mary Colt once more, but once she was sure of herself (hah!), once she felt confident enough, she left Philadelphia and returned to Connecticut.

But she found no trace of her mother, and no clues about what her parents had done to her to give her this curse of rebirth. It was some small comfort that she was always named Mary, and that she always looked the same. That, at least, she could rely on.

She began to hunt once more, honing long-unpracticed skills, took up her studies of witchlore. Whatever it would take to find the bitch who called herself her mother.

Mary was never entirely sure if Father had known her mother was a demon or not. She'd been very good at hiding it – but Mary, to be quite frank, was better than either of them, and she'd known since she was a child that there was a reason Mother never set foot inside a church, and that her illegitimate daughter wasn't it.

For some reason, the knowledge had never frightened her in the least.

She lived through the First World War with a sense of weary acceptance; all these people, never realising that the true battle had been going on for centuries already, throwing their lives away for nothing. In 1920, she died, killed by a poltergeist.

Bit embarrassing, really, but on the other hand, she was already thirty-seven. Longest stretch of time she'd ever spent in the world.

Then, she woke up in the middle of another World War.

Really, it was getting ridiculous. Somewhere, the fucking demon that had started all this by killing her the first time was laughing his ass off over this.

Some day, she'd kill the sonovabitch.

Mary had the misfortune to find herself in Hawaii at the time of the Pearl Harbor attacks when she woke up, and her first thought was that Mary Harper was a whiny little brat who really didn't deserve 

to have survived them. She hated the suspicion that these other girls, no matter how stupid or despicable, were merely another side of her own character, that given the right circumstances, she could be as bad as they were.

But she did take a certain amount of satisfaction in eradicating all traces of that spoiled little rich girl when she signed up as a medical officer in the Army. Somehow, she lived past the end of the war, and searched rather hopelessly and half-heartedly for her mother for a while before, naturally, the Korean War broke out. Didn't anybody in the world have anything better to do than kill other people any more?

When the hospital she was working in was bombed, she was practically relieved.

Her awakenings, oddly, were always exactly that: she'd open her eyes one morning and find her brain had gone into overdrive, stuffed to bursting with memories that it couldn't handle for some minutes. She had it down to a ritual already: lie there, calm down, figure out what her name was this time, and then jump out of bed and start pacing and cursing for half an hour or so. Then she'd sit cross-legged in the middle of the bedroom floor, and try and meditate her way back to sanity.

This time, however, the first thing she knew was the strangest sense of contentment. It took her several minutes to identify, as she'd never felt it before.

Then she realised she wasn't alone in the bed. A heartbeat later, the fact that she was also naked dawned on her.

Mary Colt turned her head ever so slowly to look at the man lying on his stomach beside her.

Beautiful. All muscle and deep tan and mussed dark hair; corps tattoo, shrapnel scars she eyed with professional cool… but not for long. His arm lay across her waist, warm and heavy and oddly comforting.

His eyes flickered open; deep dark brown with hazel-gold flecks, and oh, that lazy smile…

Crap. Mary Roberts was in love with him.

Mary Colt was headed that way too, and he hadn't even spoken yet.

But when he did, she knew she was in even more trouble than she'd thought. That voice!

Every instinct she had was screaming at her to run as soon as the apartment door closed behind him later that morning, but Mary fell into a chair in the kitchen and sobbed her heart out first, her whole body shaking with it. She was so tired of this, had been running for so damn long, always moving, always fighting. Mary Roberts was so many things Mary Colt would never be: kind, loving, warm, good, gentle. She had so many things Mary Colt had never known except in snippets of memories that never really felt like her own: a home, a family, a future, a life.

John Winchester's love.

And suddenly she wanted it – wanted him – so badly she couldn't breathe, wanted to know what it was like, to be happy, to have a family, to be a mother, even, to bear a child and give it all the love her mother had never given her, to spend her days in this one place, always, to have friends, to be liked, to be known not as the skank in the bar, or the nameless nurse on the ward, or Sam Colt's bastard daughter, but as herself, as Mary.

To love a man, to spend her life with him, and bask in the certainty that he loved her in return.

So Mary Colt forced back her memories and buried who she truly was under all the layers of Mary Roberts that had built up in the last twenty-two years, and when John got back that night, she let herself, for the first time in over a century, be happy.

She'd kinda been expecting to grow old with him, to finally live out one of these lives she'd been given, so to say she was pissed when she ran into Sammy's nursery and found that bloody demon standing over his crib was an understatement.

Twenty-two years later, she was Mary Collins.

She never even tried to live this life, in the privileged cocoon of the Upper East Side. She simply dropped everything and ran, back to Lawrence, to John, to their babies. Babies that were grown men now, broken and beautiful, and one look at them was all she needed to know she couldn't go to them. Didn't have the strength to face them. They knew what was out there in the dark, and it was her fault.

She certainly couldn't face John. He would hate her now, for the lies, the deception. For what she'd done to him, and their sons. It would be the one thing she couldn't bear, his hatred.

Mary Colt had always been a coward.

It took all her concentration to project herself into the house, appear as a spirit. Dangerous, so dangerous, employing arts half-forgotten and long unused, but she did it, she protected them, her sons, her darling boys. The closer she got to Sammy, the more obvious it became, what that demon had done to him, the faint sheen of darkness that surrounded him, and the knowledge made her quiver with fury.

Her next step needed no thought. Find Father's pistol. Kill that fucking Demon before it got its filthy hands on her boys.

When John beat her to the gun, she laughed until she cried. Of course he would find it. Of course he would leave no stone unturned, never stop until he'd saved their sons. If he'd acted any differently, he wouldn't have been John.

She would have gone to them then, explained everything, begged forgiveness, endured their hate, whatever it took to save them all, keep them alive, protect Dean and Sammy, but the demon was too fast for her, too smart. It puzzled her that it didn't kill her, but on the other hand, it probably knew that she would simply be reborn, out of its reach.

Imprisonment had been her worst nightmare since the asylum. Perhaps it knew that.

How long she was there she didn't know. Locked in a cell surrounded by grinning demons, no one to hear or care about her screams, her threats, her desperate broken sobs. Mary yelled herself hoarse over and over, beat against the walls until her hands were broken and bleeding, but it was useless, of course, it was all useless, and after so many years, she was finally beaten.

Caught like a rat in a trap.

She huddled in a corner of the concrete cell and wished she had it in her to beg, to plead with them. Mary wanted her father with her so badly it ached. He was the only one who'd ever made her feel safe, apart from John, and John surely hated her now. Even Mother…

Finally, one day, a commotion upstairs, shouts and yells, a scream, the sound of furniture crashing.

The cell door swung open, light flooding in, and Mary, crouched in a corner, gasped, flung a hand up to protect her eyes, unaccustomed to the light.

A girl younger than she was, about nineteen, blonde and pretty but grim and hard-eyed, wearing a red leather jacket, and carrying a brutal-looking knife that dripped blood off the blade.

Mary drew a ragged, uneven breath. "Hello, Mother," she said. "Been a while."