Work Text:
On October 31st, 1983, Mary, John, Dean, and Sam Winchester go trick-or-treating.
Mary dislikes the holiday, always has, but Dean’s been coming home from pre-k since early September talking about his Halloween costume, and she just can’t say no to him. Everyone else will be parading around the neighborhood dressed up and celebrating the holiday; why shouldn’t the Winchesters, just because Mary knows more than her fair share about the real monsters that roam the Earth? As much as she wants to shield her sons from fangs and blood and evil, Halloween is just a shade of all of it. It’s just for fun, as John reminds her.
While Dean’s preferences for his costume have changed more often than the weather, he’d finally settled on Luke Skywalker, which he insisted meant that Mary had to be Princess Leia while John would be Han Solo.
As for Sam, Mary had searched high and low and found a Yoda costume for him, which was a little big, but still pretty damn cute. Maybe she is cut out for this domesticity stuff, after all.
Dean is pleased as punch to walk around their Lawrence neighborhood with a plastic pumpkin ready for candy, bragging to all the neighbors about how he’s Luke Skywalker and how he saved the whole galaxy and that one day he’s going to save the whole Earth too. An elderly neighbor, Mrs. Wright, who sometimes watches Dean in the afternoons, listens to him go on about how in Star Wars they never got around to coming to Earth but how if he had written it, he would have, because “Earth’s the most important.”
“Well, Dean, maybe that just means that saving Earth is up to you, if Luke Skywalker won’t do it,” Mrs. Wright smiles, mussing up his hair, and Dean grins and talks about that for the next five houses straight.
When they finally return home, it’s getting late, so Mary puts Sam to bed while John helps Dean finish up his homework. It’s crazy for a pre-kindergartener to have homework, but it’s just journaling prompts for which the kids have to dictate two sentences to their parents, who write it down on the little brightly decorated sheets of paper that get sent home in his folder every day. Dean brings his paper to school and shares a little about what he’s written each morning as part of the class warm-ups. It’s been explained, to John and Mary, that this is an important part of his language development.
Once Dean’s finished and has been given the all-clear to go play with his trucks in the den for ten minutes until it’s time for him to get ready for bed, Mary pads back down the stairs, yawning, her hair still done up in twin buns on either side of her head. On the dining table is Dean’s worksheet, John’s handwriting much more careful than Mary’s ever seen it as he’s written down what Dean dictated for the prompt:
What did you do to celebrate Halloween?
My mom and Dad and brother Sam went trick or treating with me. I was Luke Skywalker. It was fun.
On November 1st, 1983, Dean’s somehow still supercharged from all the candy the night before and getting him ready for school isn’t an easy task. She finally does manage to get him and Sam into their jackets, bundles Sam into the stroller, and gets Dean’s backpack on his shoulders. It’s huge on him and she smiles as he heads out the door, already talking to Sam as if he can understand, telling him what everyone’s going to do for the day.
Dean loves to do that, to narrate what the family is up to, to keep track of everyone. “Dad went to work in the Impala,” he tells Sam as they walk down the sidewalk toward the preschool a few blocks away. “And I’m gonna go to school so I can be smart and teach you everything I get to learn. And Mommy’s gonna spend the whole day with you. Is that okay?” He looks at Sam as if he’ll respond.
Mary’s day stretches out before her like a yawn, and once Dean’s dropped off at school with a kiss and an “I love you,” she and Sam go to the grocery store to pick up some things for dinner. Back home, she sets Sam up in his bouncer and makes a marinade for the pork chops, then slides them into the fridge. She grabs the newspaper from the end of the driveway and reads through it, looking carefully for anything that might seem out of the ordinary, lounged in the chair while she pushes Sammy’s bouncer back and forth with her foot.
The rest of the day goes like this; she listens to the radio as she cleans, she plays with Sam for awhile on the floor, she puts him down for his nap, she heads out to the front porch to toss out the jack-o-lantern Dean carved, which will soon start to rot.
When she finally picks up Dean from school, she’s almost grateful for the little homework assignment, since it’s something to do. Dean’s got boundless energy and she usually lets him run around the yard in the afternoons, and the day is still warm enough that she wraps Sam in his coat and brings him out onto the patio. Dean has a tee ball set that he loves and so he spends awhile playing with that while Mary rocks Sam with one arm and asks Dean the question on his worksheet.
“Your teacher wants you to talk about what you want to be when you grow up,” she tells him, ready with the pen to write down his response, though usually she has to distill it into something short enough to put on the paper.
“Easy!” Dean positions the wiffle ball on top of the tee and picks up the bat. He starts swinging at the ball wildly and without coordination, knocking it off quickly and then starting to use the bat as more of a golf club to push the ball around in the grass. “A baseball player!”
Mary laughs a little, because Dean’s goals for his future change as often as his Halloween costume choices had, and the baseball player desire only comes from what’s five feet in front of him in this moment. “Okay, so how should I write that?”
“Say…” Dean picks up the ball and pauses, holding it in his hand, contemplating it. “I want to be a baseball player. Oh! Or I can be like Daddy.”
Mary writes while Sam gurgles in her arms, happy to be outside. “Okay, slow down,” she says as she carefully fills out the page, trying to match the neat penmanship that the teacher showed them at parent’s night, making sure that all the letters will look correct, just how he’s practicing them himself. Maybe, if she does all of this right, if she’s the perfect mother, Dean really will be able to do whatever he wants. Maybe he’ll get to choose his path; he could be a baseball player or a Marine or a musician or really anything he wants to be. Maybe he’ll have real options, good ones.
What do you want to be when you grow up?
I want to be a baseball player or be in the Marines like my dad. I want to be a good brother to Sam and I will share all my money with my parents.
On November 2nd, 1983, John and Mary forget to do Dean’s worksheet with him. As they’re headed up to bed, Mary remembers with a sudden jolt. “Shit, we were supposed to fill out Dean’s sheet,” she says, frustrated with herself for forgetting.
“Oh, it’s fine,” John says, waving a hand dismissively. “We’ll just do it in the morning.”
On November 3rd, 1983, a firefighter bends down in the wreckage of the Winchester house and picks up the charred remains of a little red folder. It’s mostly burned, then doused with water, but when the cover of the folder falls to the ground, the man can still see the remnants of Dean Winchester’s homework assignment, the paper crisp and damp.
What are you most thankful for?
The lines at the bottom for the answer are blank