Castiel, a warrior of Asgard, distant cousin to Thor, and Dean, a blacksmith’s son. They’ve been keeping the routine for so long that no one can remember when it started. When they were boys, perhaps. Or men. It doesn’t matter.
What matters is that as the sun begins to set, Dean sits under the Tree of Life, twirling a knife or reading a book. What matters is that as the first stars come into view, Castiel joins him.
Sometimes they sit and chat, sometimes they leave. They touch, always. A hand to a shoulder, mussing each other’s hair, fingers discreetly entwining. It’s not wrong, what they are to each other, but it’s not spoken of openly. It wouldn’t do to flaunt it.
Of course, neither Dean nor Castiel have ever been good at doing what’s proper. They kiss under the Tree, sometimes; when nebluae are slashed across the sky and the Bifröst burns a rainbow into the sea. Castiel’s armour is hard and cold and unforgiving against the thin, plain material of Dean’s shirt but they make do. It never goes much beyond intense kissing, anyway---not that it could, given the fact that they’re in public.
When they’re alone, however, it’s a different story.
Dean’s coal-streaked shirt is peeled from his shoulders and Castiel’s breast-plate falls to the floor with in a thump of leather and metal. The cape is an inconvenience---they get tangled in it, sometimes, in their haste to disrobe. Those moments often end in a good-natured eye-roll or side-splitting laughter, both turning to hums and gasps and groans as they finally touch, skin-to-skin.
“So, how was your day?”
“I’d have much rather spent it with you.”
Warriors live in their own lodgings, not a part of the city, nor part of the castle. It’s an in-between space. It’s close quarters with the soldiers. For all Castiel lives there on paper, it is not his home.
They always end up at Dean’s house. In Dean’s room. In Dean’s bed. With clothing and armour strewn across the floor, food half-eaten on the night table, laying naked together after having or having not made love. They catch each other up on their day and Dean lets Castiel look his fill, blue eyes drinking in every freckle just as easily as he kisses the burns and scars on his fingertips. Of his part, Dean presses palms to the scars on Cas’s body as if to heal them.
Theirs is a casual, easy sort of love---filled with teasing and laughter just as easily as it can be intense and frustrating. Communication is one of those things they’ve never excelled at, but it’s a work in progress. They fight, sometimes, about the fact that Castiel is always leaving. About the fact that if they’re called to war he’d be the first to die. About the fact that Dean feels useless and left behind.
But they try not to go to bed angry, and that’s enough.
“Don’t you wish you had a home?” Anna asks one morning. Cas has waltzed into the dining hall with a full belly and the tingling sense-memory of kisses on his lips. She eyes him when he sits down, motioning to the hickey on his neck and then the table before them. “You know, something more than all this.”
It’s a question Cas has asked himself many times before. For all his thinking on it, he’s at peace with his answer. “I have a home,” he says, rolling his shoulders and reaching for a drink.
“You live in two different worlds, Castiel.”
“Doesn’t matter. Home is not a place. It’s a person.”
“Is it?” Anna asks, clearly not convinced.
But Castiel is. Should Asgard fall, should Ragnarok come to pass, having Dean safe would be enough. He cares little and less for material things---dishes and bed spreads and trinkets do not make a home. But Dean, with his sweetness and bravery and generosity? Wherever he is is where Cas belongs.
So when Castiel answers yes, he does it firmly, and without hesitation.
Home is not a place, it’s a person. And my person is Dean.
She takes the 1955 Belvedere from the bunker and drives to nowhere in particular. Just - away. Away from here.
The music on the radio is foreign but she listens to it anyway, just to drown out her thoughts and her memories and the instant regret she feels at having abandoned her boys, again.
But she needs this. She needs the open road and some fresh air. The hunt took a lot out of her. Confronting child ghosts and being possessed by a vengeful spirit isn’t something you can shake off that easily, like the pop star on the radio helpfully suggests.
The pop star also says that heartbreakers are going to break. Mary tries not to project onto that lyric too intensely.
She has no destination in mind, but she finds herself headed East on US-24, then KS-18, and finally I-70 until the green signs on the side of the road tell her she’s only a couple outside of Lawrence.
She takes exit 204. It plops her into a toll lane, which she pays for with the change rattling around in the glovebox. The tollbooth operator compliments her on the car, and she tightly smiles at him before continuing on her journey back home.
The roads are mostly the same as she remembers, with some adjustments, like extra lanes or new traffic lights. It’s muscle memory from 18th Avenue to Carpenter Lane.
The house is as she left it. It hasn’t aged in thirty years. That damn oak tree that she swore would fall into their house in a tornado is still standing in the front yard. The walls are still the soft blue she and John painted it one summer afternoon. Mary yanks the car into park along the sidewalk and marvels.
There are child’s toys strewn across the lawn and a basketball hoop set up in the road. That’s good. This house deserves to have children in it after hers were ripped from it. She wonders how many families have come and gone since John sold the house and took Sam and Dean on the road.
An itch builds from her fingers to her heart to go inside, to see if the house has changed. Mary thumbs at a ripped seam in the seating and bites her lip. She could pose as a mother looking to move into a house down the road with her kids, wanting to know what the neighborhood is like. She could pose as an FBI agent again and ask about a fictional man the family inside may have seen. She could be herself, even, just wanting to go back down memory lane by visiting the first house she ever bought.
While she’s vacillating, a child walks out of the house, his eyes glued to the phone in his hand. He can’t be older than fifteen. His hair is long, and he has to flip it out of his face every couple of steps. He walks down the road, seemingly without ever looking up from his phone, until he meets up with another boy his age. They greet each other with a fist bump and continue down the sidewalk. They turn onto Davidson Street and walk out of Mary’s sight.
Her heart pounds ferociously in her chest.
She steps out of the car.
Her feet feel like they’re on unsteady ground as she crosses the street. There’s a faint hum of life all around her: the buzz of a lawn mower, high-pitched screams of a child’s enthusiasm, cars driving by on nearby roads. The three stair steps leading up to the house feel like Everest as she climbs them.
She can hear her heartbeat in her ears now, and she feels like she could vomit. She knocks on the door anyway.
“Coming!” a woman’s voice from inside responds. Mary can hear her run down the stairs, and for some reason it’s the memory of John play-chasing her up those same stairs that makes her eyes begin to water, moments before the door is opened.
The woman is only an inch taller than Mary, blonde as well, and about her age. She takes one look at Mary and her tearing eyes and asks, “What’s wrong?”
Mary sniffs. “It’s nothing, really. Sorry.” She wipes her nose with her sleeve.
“Oh, don’t do that. Here, come in. I’ve got some tissues somewhere.”
The woman brings her arms around Mary’s shaking shoulders and ushers her into the house. Through her watering eyes, Mary notices the color of the walls and not much else. It’s changed.
She’s brought to a chair and pushed down in it. The woman brings her a box of tissues and sits down next to her. They’re in the dining room. The chandelier Mary loathed has finally been replaced with a simple fixture.
“I’m so sorry,” Mary mutters, running a third tissue under her nose. “I shouldn’t have come here.”
“No, it’s okay.” The woman speaks with a gentle voice, as if Mary were a frightened animal, a flight risk. She supposed she is the latter, having just run away from her family with barely a moment’s notice. She dabs at her eyes some more.
“It’s just -” Shit, she hates how her voice cracks. “I used to live here. A long time ago. My name’s Mary.”
“Mary,” the woman echoes. Her finger taps over the tabletop. “You know, you look familiar.”
Did this woman see her when she was a ghost? Was this woman there? Mary’s eyes flash up to hers, but the woman isn’t looking at her; rather, she appears like she’s looking into the past.
“Mary… Winchester,” the woman says at last, meeting Mary’s gaze. Mary swallows the knot in her throat. “No, that can’t be right.” She shakes her head.
Oh, you’re right. Mary doesn’t know whether to say that to this woman though, so she holds her tongue.
“I’m Jenny,” the woman says, thrusting out her hand for Mary to shake, which she does. “I moved in about twelve years ago.”
“Nice to meet you,” Mary says. “I’m sorry about this. I’ve just had… a really crazy last couple of weeks. I wanted to be…” Home. “Somewhere I recognized.” And she does recognize it, in the same way she recognized Lawrence. Some things have changed, like the light fixtures and the color of the walls, but at its core it is still the home she dreamed of raising her family in. The kitchen is in the same configuration, with the refrigerator tucked into the corner and the oven set in the center of a row of cabinets.
Jenny nods as if she understands. Her brow is set in a sympathetic curve.
Mary doesn’t know what else to say, but she doesn’t have to come up with anything, because someone else is bounding down the stairs and coming to a halt in the archway between the dining room and the living room.
“Mom?”
It’s a teenage girl, on the cusp of becoming a grown woman. She looks puzzled as she looks from her mother to Mary, and then recognition flashes in her eyes. “No way.”
“Sari, what is it, sweetie?”
“The fire woman,” Sari says bluntly, and Mary flinches. Sari’s expression is disoriented and suspicious as she looks at Mary from head to toe.
“The fire woman,” Mary whispers.
“Sari’s childhood best friend,” Jenny explains. “It’s just a coincidence, honey.”
“Yeah. Sure.” Sari doesn’t sound like she believes her.
Mary can feel the tension rising in the house, building exactly like a fire: slowly, then consumingly. She rises clumsily from the table.
“I’m sorry, I should be going. I really just wanted to see the house again.”
“Yeah, no problem.” Jenny stands up, too, with a worried look in her eyes. “You’re welcome anytime, really.”
Her, a stranger? A stranger who should be dead, no less. A stranger who died in this house.
“It’s a lovely home,” Mary says, and she lets herself out.
The door closes behind her. She breathes in the mid-October air.
She didn’t know what she expected from this visit, but this isn’t it. She didn’t think she’d leave in tears. She doesn’t feel any sense of closure.
Her hand is on the car door, about to pull it open, when Sari calls from the front steps.
“Hey!”
Mary freezes. Sari comes closer.
“Are you really the fire woman?”
Mary lifts her eyes. For just one moment, when she looks at Sari, she doesn’t see a nearly-grown woman: she sees a young child, afraid of monsters in the dark. The image doesn’t even last a second before it’s gone, but the impression continues. Sari, maybe nine years old, clutching her blanket and praying to angels to keep her safe.
“I’m sorry, Sari,” Mary says and leaves it at that. She climbs into the car, keys it to life, and drives away. Sari stays in the rearview mirror until Mary turns onto Davidson Street. She passes by the pair of boys and leaves them, too, in her wake.
She is the fire woman. Where she goes, destruction follows.
