Mary Campbell got hitched to John Winchester, an Indiana-born high school dropout, in the middle of June, 1988, not that long after finding out that she was pregnant. In their case, "getting hitched" was really more like eloping, but for as much as John wanted to get to know her parents, Mary wanted nothing to do with them and for them to have no say in what happened in her life and those of her unborn child's. They were up to their eyes in spells and amulets, hunting down monsters and killing things that lived in the darkest parts of the world, away from anybody's glimpsing — and after raising Mary in that life, without a constant group of friends who weren't her cousins, forever changing schools and at each one known as that girl who'd be hot if she weren't so weird, Samuel and Deanna Campbell didn't know why their little huntress wanted to get out of it.

If Mary hadn't left for John, she'd have left for something else, but there was something about the dashing would-be Marine with the dark eyes and darker swagger. Not that she didn't have her regrets about this course of action. When her first son came into the world on January twenty-fourth, 1989, she still named him Dean after her mother. And his brother, born May second, 1993, got named Sam for her father. It didn't matter that they were perpetual fugitives from the law, or that everybody thought that they were crazy, or that she'd raised several complaints about them during her lifetime: despite herself, she'd loved her parents.

Without them around to love, Mary built up her own family; eventually, when she and John settled in Lawrence, Kansas, she made lunches and baked pies and drove her boys to soccer practice and went to PTA meetings when she had the time. She'd do anything for her three boys, Mary Winchester, from laying down her own life to killing someone bloody, but they didn't get their simple life without its costs, and it wasn't a straight shot from the altar to the tableau right out of Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, written by Thornton Wilder, designed by Edward Hopper and the people at Better Homes and Gardens.

Mary sometimes wished it could have been that simple, but in her heart, she knew better. And in her heart, she wouldn't have traded those difficult years, all the loneliness, the struggling, and the fights for all the Perfect American Dreams she could buy after an hour of picking pockets.

She tried her best not to think about what she'd grown up doing so her parents wouldn't have to quit their hunting to kill and cook a deer. Ignoring the past got easier, she supposed, if only because the present kept throwing things in her path. In the summer of 1990, the only thought insisting on its presence in her mind was the desire to smack John stupid. Even after he shipped out, she could go through entire days — drop Dean off upstairs with the old Mrs Bernstein, who babysat him; work long hours at the diner, then hope for better tips at the high-end and well-to-do steakhouse in DC where she sometimes worked nights, pray like Hell that it never got so bad she considered stealing from the register, even though she knew she could; pick her baby up whenever she could and love him more than anything else — and the only recurring thought she'd have was that John had better live through the war if only so she could get the chance to remind him that he should've tried to find another job sooner.

If he hadn't made it back, Mary didn't know what she would've done. Probably called up as many of her parents' old contacts as she could reach until someone was fool enough to teach her how to make a zombie out of her husband's corpse. She might have tried to talk to it a while, or even let it have a last meal (cow organs, naturally, not human ones), but the only reason the John-zombie would draw any breath would have been for Mary to demand to know what he thought he was doing, getting killed in the Middle East when he had a wife and son to come back home to, who needed him, who wanted him around more than he could understand — and whether or not he'd answered, Mary would have killed him herself for thinking he could get forgiven for dying.

And for being a zombie, but since it wouldn't have been his fault, she wouldn't have held it against him. The natural order of things needed to be preserved once concerns got answered.

It might have made things more interesting, anyway; for all there was enough from day to day that held Mary's interest, some nights she'd put Dean to bed, sit down with the paper and a beer, as soon as he wasn't breastfeeding anymore, and look around for anything suspicious, even just a routine salt-and-burn. Sometimes, things turned up, and the only thing that kept her centered was heading over to her baby's crib, watching him sleep by the nightlight and the ambient light from outside the window. They were living in Virginia, then, in a shitty one-bedroom apartment that had been theirs since John had been stationed at Quantico during his training. They had a good life, even when Mary had to struggle to make ends meet, and it would get better, she told herself, when John came home. As far as the other young Marines and their wives in the building said, Mary got lucky. At least the Powers That Be didn't want to send John all over the goddamn world. At least they saw the makings of an officer in him and wanted him where he could learn from the best. At least the roof leaked, it got cold at the most inconvenient times, and all Mary wanted was to know why this whole Desert Storm business was necessary, but at least her little boy could know his Daddy was a hero.

Even with all that they had going for them, though ... sometimes Mary just couldn't shake the itch to go and hunt some supernatural creep for the sake of doing so. Sometimes, she'd be sticking a knife through the plastic on the night's microwave dinner, and the lights would hit the silver and they'd glint just right, and she'd wonder if any djinn were on the loose, or werewolves, or the like. Sometimes, wind rushing through their place would slam a door, and even holding Dean to her chest, even rubbing his little back and burying her nose in his hair, she'd be back on the site of her first hunt — she could swear that she smelled the dingy, moldy scent of that old house in Tennessee, hear the creaking floorboards and her mother shouting Mary! MARY! when the ghost they were hunting had come at her from behind, feel the heat from the fire and smell the singeing flesh and bones — and sitting in the rocking chair Dean loved so much, Mary would wonder if it would really be so bad for them, if she could go on just one hunt and still have their lives be normal.

She never left; she only waited, knowing she'd never forgive herself if anything came for Dean while she was lighting up a corpse for old times' sakes.

The night that John came back, Mary didn't manage to get time off either of her jobs. She and Dean got home from Mrs Bernstein's and nodded off on the sofa — not without dinner for the two of them, and a bath for Dean, and some cuddling in front of a tape of old Rocky and Bullwinkle episodes (one of John's favorites, one of the ways that he might as well have been there), but still, they wound up sleeping there. First, Dean curled his fingers up in the collar of Mary's t-shirt, put his head down on her shoulder, and closed his eyes. Then, Mary slipped off the flip-flops that she wore around their place and laid down, stretched to full length and nestled Dean against her, rubbed his back in little circles when he squirmed — she didn't mean to fall asleep, just thought that she'd give her eyes a break from staring at Sherman and Professor Peabody and their misadventures in the Wayback Machine...

And next thing she knew, she'd heard something creaking. Even all her time away from hunting couldn't dull Mary's reflexes; at the sound, she sprung out of sleep, stumbled to her feet and brandished the remote because it was the first thing her hands found that could make a half-assed weapon. She paused when her makeshift bludgeon found a target, just short of smacking John's neck with the red POWER button. Tightening the grip that kept Dean to her chest, she stared into John's eyes for a moment, thinking is it you? could it really be? they would've told me you were coming home, wouldn't they?

"Hey, baby?" he said with a bemused chuckle, grinning at her as if everything was perfect in the best of all possible worlds. "...You know they don't really turn guys into robots in the Marines, right? All that Manchurian Candidate stuff? ...It's just me."

The remote hit the floor, and with her free arm, Mary yanked John in as close to her as she could. She muffled her gasps against his neck, against the few days' old stubble that she'd make him shave sooner or later, and she kissed him — lower neck, then above his jugular, several times on his cheek, and then on his lips, deeply, as though this was the only way to keep him here with her. He let his duffel fall and wrapped both arms around her waist, gave her a squeeze and let two fingers stray under the hem of her shirt. As he held her, she didn't fight the tears that bubbled up, or the warm relief that spread in her chest, the way that all her muscles felt slack.

"Manchurian Candidate's about brainwashing," she hissed.

Turned out, they'd made him Corporal overseas, but now that he could leave, he didn't want to stay. Some friend of his, Mike Guenther, was getting out of the Corps too, and there were better things that they could go do, things that would get Mike home to his daughters, and John home to his wife and son, without the fear of getting shot to death. Mary doesn't even hesitate in agreeing. Before the month's out, they're packed up and headed off to Kansas, keeping Dean in her lap, in the front seat of John's Impala, nodding off to cassettes of Cream and Zeppelin — she wants to have a family now, somewhere far away from hunting and the Campbell legacy and the parents and cousins who could be dead now, for all she knows.

"... Gay?"

John nods. Leaning back in his armchair, he sighs, rubs at the thick stubble on his neck. "He didn't really put it like that, but that's how he was talking about this Cas guy, Mary." And that's just as well, he thinks. If his elder son is going to go for some guy now, then this Castiel Novak had best deserve Dean.

But Mary shakes her head, and John just lets the silence between them linger, watching her for any kind of hint as to what's going on inside her head. The empty Corona bottle next to him is all the alcohol he's had since Dean went back to school the other night, and it's not as though John would make something up. And it's not that he's trying to say that Dean's not the same Dean he's always been — well, maybe he's taller than the kid who got into Little League because his dad wanted him to, and he seems better suited to college than to high school—

"I know what you're trying to say, John," she interrupts, holding up a hand to shut him up. "First of all, it's easier to be concerned for how Dean's doing when you're not drunk—"

"And we're right back to the same old place — You know, it's probably a wonder Dean's as well off as he is. I mean, there's me, for one thing, but being gay in a small town? And in a red state—"

"We're back here because it's important." Something cold flares up behind her blue eyes, burning with the intent to warn him that if he tries anything now, he'll most likely regret it. "Neither of us know what Dean's been going through. But you can't help him if you're still carrying around your own demons."

"'s better he never played football, if you think about it now. They'd never let him live that down in the locker room—"

"John!" She locks her gaze on his, and over-enunciates each syllable: "Are. you. going. to. get. help?"

John sighs, and nods. He doesn't like it, but if it's cling to his pride or make sure that Dean gets through his troubles well enough...

High school, as far as Sam's concerned, should just be called Hell. Because that's what it is, he's certain — one-hundred percent so, without any room for a margin of error. You don't need one — even the TV knows it. Practically all the shows on these days come down to how hard it is to be a pretty, rich, white kid with problems (or a pretty, rich, white kid's token minority friend with problems). Maybe they're pretty, white, and troubled in the Upper East Side, or pretty, white, troubled, and focused around a sports team, or pretty, (mostly) white, troubled, and prone to singing pop songs that are strangely relevant to their problems. But none of them — the characters, the actors, the writers — have ever had to live in Lawrence, Kansas.

At the kitchen table, Sam slumps forward and stares out the window at a Technicolor view of what his life's going to be like if he doesn't get out of here: flat, boring, about as lively as a mausoleum. He rubs the bridge of his nose with half a mind to yank it off; instead, he pours himself an orange juice, opens up the translucent orange pill bottle he keeps hidden in his jacket pocket, dumps the contents of one pill into the glass. He's supposed to be doing his homework now, but Sam can't focus, not with Mom and Dad going on about Dean in the next room. So he downs the concoction, and it might work, except that he sees Ruby's car pull up at the other sidewalk.

Sam only wears a hoodie and one of his not-quite-winter-but-colder-than-fall jackets as he slinks out of the house and into Ruby's Mustang, the one she got when her older brother hopped on a bus and never came back. It's orange, and garish, and against the practically monochrome backdrop of mid-January, it's louder than its speakers, which unapologetically blast her rotating cast of CDs. Sam can still only pick out Muse and sometimes Nine Inch Nails, or maybe Hole and Garbage, because they have chick lead singers; all he really knows is that the music Ruby likes sounds so unlike the rock that he grew up with, that Mom, Dad, and Dean all love, and that they're so much better than The Beatles for what he and Ruby get up to.

Starting with a kiss — she runs the back of her hand down his arm, getting him to turn to her, and once she has his attention, nudging him down into a kiss — soft, at first; then deeper. She drags her teeth along his lower lip; one of his hands falls to the small of her back, the other to her hip; leaning over the space between the two seats, he yanks her up and tries to lose himself in the taste of her mouth. Not that it's all that special. She tastes like mouth, mostly. But underneath that, there's a little hint of smoke and ketchup.

"French fries for breakfast ... ?" Sam asks with a chuckle when she shoves him away, nestling back into his seat.

"Better than whatever my mom tried to make." Ruby shrugs, and puts the car back in drive, takes off down the block, going west toward ... something. Maybe Alan's, where she and Sam can hide out with someone who understands — someone who won't judge them, Ruby for trying to get out of her house however she can, even if it's through drugs instead, and Sam for needing something to take the edge off the pressure to be perfect. Maybe Brady's, or maybe they'll just go to school and smoke under the bleachers.

It's not as though it matters. Sam sighs and slouches further down in the seat — as far as his long legs will let him go, anyway. Once spring rolls around, he'll be out of here. He hopes.