Time slips by. That spring, Sam starts running track. In the summer, Dean works full time at the garage, and they promise him a job once he graduates. Since Dean loves the work and John assures her he's brilliant at it, Mary doesn't worry about her older son's lack of college aspirations. He graduates with a 2.75, and they cheer for him as loud as they can when he walks.

When Sam gets to high school that fall, he joins the debate team and the drama department's tech crew. Mary worries that he doesn't sleep enough, but he's happy and his grades are still near-perfect, so she doesn't push it. She even thinks that having practically zero free time helps him cope when Sadie dies of old age that winter, though, remembering the way Sam dove into hunting lore after Doug's death, she suspects that if his schedule hadn't already been full, he would have remedied that.

In the spring, John declares that he misses having a dog around the house, and he and Sam go to the animal shelter and return with a pit bull called Harley and, to Mary's surprise and delight, a young cat named Quinn.

"We fell for this one," John explains sheepishly, rubbing the pit bull's ears, "and apparently she and the cat are inseparable, and I know you like cats, so . . ." Dean walks in to see what all the fuss is about, sneezes, curses, and walks out again. "I guess we'll need to stock up on allergy medicine." Mary shakes her head in fond exasperation. John's tough old Marine act might not be an act, but it doesn't change the fact that underneath it he's the world's biggest softy.

That summer, John finally talks Mary into going on a hunt ("for practice," he always says), so she finds them a case nearby, a run-of-the-mill salt-and-burn. She's not sure she likes the twin gleams in John and Dean's eyes when they have to fend off the spirit while she and Sam light it up.

In the mean time, the Internet's increasing scope has allowed them to really widen their net as they try to find the information that will let them put the remaining pieces of the puzzle about the demon and Sam together.

"Why don't we just focus on how to kill it?" Dean asks one day. "I mean, Mom, you've been trying to find out about this thing for Sam's whole life, and there's still a lot we don't know and might never. But if we kill it, then it doesn't matter anymore, right?"

"Yeah, 'cause no bad guy ever had henchmen or seconds or anything like that," Sam deadpans. "There's definitely, absolutely no way that other demons could possibly pick up the torch if we take out Yellow Eyes."

"All right, all right. Geez."

"And it's not like there's anyone around here who, oh, I don't know, might want to understand what Yellow Eyes did and how it might affect them for the rest of their life. Nope, definitely no situation like that at all," Sam continues.

"Yeah, you made your point, Sammy."

"It's Sam."

"Whatever."

For what feels like the millionth time, Mary considers broaching the subject of Dean maybe getting his own place. But just a few hours later he and Sam are playing Mario Kart and laughing and joking like they're the best of friends, and even though she knows it's only a matter of time before they're sniping at each other again, she can't bring herself to break up the party. Plus, as long as Dean is still under her roof, she knows he sleeps safe—and so do the girls she's pretty sure he thinks he's sneaky about bringing home.

When Sam is sixteen, Mary realizes that Keisha and Heather, who have been Sam's friends since grade school, don't really come around anymore. In fact, it occurs to her, she isn't sure when Sam last had someone over for a reason not related to homework or one of his extracurriculars, and she has a sneaking suspicion she knows why.

She finds him in his room, reading.

"Sam?"

He looks up. "Yeah, Mom?"

"I was just wondering—it's been a while since I've seen Heather and Keisha. Did you have a falling out, or is everyone just too busy these days, or—?"

Sam flushes. "No, nothing like that. I mean, we are busy, crazy busy, but that's not it."

Mary comes in and closes the door behind her. "Then what?"

He looks down. "I don't want . . . I mean, uh . . ."

Oh. Mary suppresses a smile. Maybe it isn't what she feared after all. "Sweetie, are you interested in one of them? Romantically?"

Sam blushes even more. Bingo. "I don't know, maybe. I mean, it doesn't matter one way or another with Heather—I told you she came out, right?" Mary nods. "Yeah, she and Shannon started dating a couple weeks ago, actually. They're really happy," he says wistfully.

"So, Keisha, then," Mary pushes.

"Kinda, yeah," Sam finally admits.

"And, what, she's not interested?"

"Worse—I think she is."

Oh. So it probably is what Mary thought. Still, best not to assume. "Sorry, I don't understand why that's a bad thing."

"Because if the demon killed Doug and his whole family just because he was my friend, what do you think it would do if I got . . . involved with someone?"

And there it is. Her kind, sweet, selfless Sammy, putting everything and everyone before his own happiness, always thinking things through. And the worst part is, it's not as if she can tell him his fears are groundless.

"I just hate to see you missing out, not letting yourself—"

"But I'm right, aren't I? And it would be selfish to put Keisha or anyone else in danger just so I can . . . whatever."

"We could make hex bags, you could hide them at her house, in her purse . . ."

"Mom."

"Yeah, I know." She sighs. "Well, I guess we'll just have to step up our game, huh?"

Sam smiles lopsidedly. "What do you think I've been doing?" he asks, holding up the book he's reading: an obscure demonology text she's pretty sure he ordered off the Internet.

Mary smiles back. "That's my boy." She leaves him to it.

One Saturday, a couple of months after Sam's seventeenth birthday, Mary comes into the kitchen where Sam and Dean are shuffling around, sleepily making themselves coffee and breakfast. They're standing next to each other at the counter, and suddenly she realizes what she's seeing. "Boys," she says, trying to suppress a smile. They turn to her in unison. "Could you stand back-to-back for me?" They glance at each other in tired consternation, shrug, and do as she asked.

"Really stand up straight," she tells them, grabbing a large hardback from the kitchen table. They comply, and she reaches up on tiptoe to set the book on their heads, laughing at their near-identical expressions of what the hell, Mom? Sure enough, the book tilts slightly down towards Dean. "John," she calls, "you need to come see this!"

John ambles in, takes in the spectacle, and slowly shakes his head. Sam grabs the book off his and Dean's heads, and they turn to face their parents, confusion written all over their faces.

"Hate to break it to you, Dean," John says, "but you have officially surrendered the title of tallest Winchester."

"Wait, what?" Dean asks, aghast, as a slow grin spreads its way across Sam's face. He'd shot up like the proverbial weed during the last year, and now he's living the younger brother dream. He and Dean turn to face each other, Sam making a show of looking down at Dean, exaggerating the distance.

"Sorry, big brother. Or whatever I call you now."

Dean puts him in a headlock.

"Not in the kitchen," Mary reminds them, and she and John step out of the way as Sam lets himself be dragged to the living room.

"Look, coffee!" John says, and pours some for himself and Mary as they hear the crash of tall, muscular bodies hitting the living room floor.

Sam's senior year, everything comes together: all the years of gathering scraps of lore and rumor and hearsay, and they finally have a more-or-less complete picture. The demon is probably Azazel, who may or may not be a fallen angel. It wants to unleash hell on earth, but to do that it needs to open a gateway so that a lot of demons can come up at once. And to do that, it needs a human with special abilities, one it can somehow turn to its purposes.

They've also learned of the existence of a special gun, made by Samuel Colt. According to the lore, and to Colt's journal, which they found among Mary's parents' possessions, it can kill literally anything. So, as best they can tell, find the gun, find the demon, bang, party's over, they can finally get on with their lives and, as Dean insists on flippantly pointing out, Sam can finally go on a date. Sam shoots Dean a very eloquent expression in response—Mary once marveled to John that she doesn't know where Sam got that, at which point John raised his eyebrows and just looked at her meaningfully until she whacked him lightly on the shoulder. He just grinned and said "my point exactly."

But tracking down both the gun and the demon proves difficult and time-consuming. Sam, meanwhile, gets accepted to Stanford with some very impressive scholarships. Between that, what John and Mary have saved to contribute, and what Sam himself has saved from his job at the library, he's more than set.

But then, in the spring: "I'm going to defer my enrollment," Sam says at dinner one night, out of the blue.

They all freeze. "Come again?" John says.

"Stanford. I'm gonna wait a year. I checked, I can do it without losing any of my scholarships."

"And why the hell would you do that?" Dean asks, clearly baffled.

Sam looks at Mary, and she sees that he knows that she understands, and is silently asking for her to back him up. "You want to wait until we take care of the demon, don't you? So that you don't have to worry about anyone getting hurt."

He nods.

John and Dean are silent: they know there isn't a good counter-argument; they also probably recognize the look in Sam's eyes, the one that means he isn't backing down no matter what anyone says.

"Well," John finally says. "I guess that just means we have to step up our game, now that we've got a solid deadline to work with."

Sam looks relieved. "Thanks, Dad."

"One condition," Mary says suddenly, as inspiration strikes.

Sam turns to her in consternation.

"Take Keisha to prom."

"Mom!"

"I'm serious, Sam. It's one night. You go, you have fun with your friends, stay out way past your curfew, the whole nine yards. It's just prom. People go to prom together all the time without it meaning anything more."

Dean is starting to look like Christmas came early, so Mary kicks him under the table before he can open his mouth. He flinches and stays quiet.

"OK," Sam quietly acquiesces. "You're right: one night won't hurt."

"That's my boy," John enthuses.

Prom comes and goes, and Mary is delighted to overhear Sam admitting to Dean, under the duress of Dean being an enormous pain in the ass until Sam gives him details, that Sam and Keisha kissed. He's quick to clarify that that's all it was, that they aren't seeing each other now—Mary had been the one to suggest, privately, that Sam use the excuse that they would soon be attending college on opposite ends of the country for why, as much as he liked her, he didn't want to start a relationship, just have a good time together at the dance, and he had smiled gratefully, even though she's pretty sure he could've come up with that on his own—but she's still glad to hear that, for at least one night, Sam just let himself be a high school senior at the prom with the girl he liked.

Sam's valedictorian, and they all whoop and holler at his graduation, Dean especially. Then graduation parties (Mary and John give Sam his own laptop; Dean gives him a car he fixed up so it runs like it's new) and one last summer with his friends, most of whom are going off to college in the fall, a few locally, but most are scattering around the country. Once he's helped pack up the last of his friend's cars and said his final goodbyes, Sam gets to work, and Mary sees a side to her younger son that she quickly realizes must have been there all along, because how else could he have gotten top grades and done all the extracurriculars he did so well at the same time - she's just never seen it so out in the open before.

He's driven, laser-focused, a machine. He works out, does his shifts at the library, does his chores at home, and researches and tracks down leads on Azazel and the Colt. It's almost more effort than it's worth to get him to play video games with Dean or watch TV or a movie with the three of them in the evenings. Almost, but not quite, because Mary recognizes this obsession, and she knows what happens when hunters let cases consume them like this, so she has no qualms siccing Dean on Sam, because Dean can always at least irritate Sam enough to get him out of his head for a while, and often once that happens he can also be persuaded to call a friend or read a novel or go to a movie.

"I found it," Sam says abruptly one day from his nest of research on the kitchen table.

"Found what?" Mary asks cautiously.

"The Colt. I know where it is."

"Wait, really?" She goes over to him.

"Yeah. Or at least, I'm pretty sure I know who has it. You ever hear of a Daniel Elkins?"

Mary groans.

"So that's a yes?" Sam asks, eyebrows raised.

"He's a hunter, with the usual hunter personality in spades."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning he's a stubborn, paranoid loner who likes to shoot first and answer questions never."

"Ah. So, not likely to want to part with the gun."

"Not likely at all."

"Is there a story we could feed him to help the odds? Or, wait, if you know who he is, doesn't that mean he might know who you are? Could we play the Campbell card?"

Mary blinks. By now she's spent more of her life as a Winchester than a Campbell, and she's been networking long enough that she doesn't have to name drop her parents anymore. But with someone like Daniel Elkins . . . "You know, that might just work. Is there a phone number?"

"Yeah, but I think we should wait."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, what if, I don't know, the demons find out we talked to him, find out what he has. Or what if they find out we have it before we track down Azazel and mount an offensive or something. I just think we should wait to get the gun until we know we have a way to get to Azazel pretty soon after."

"Smart," John says, coming into the dining room from where he was apparently lurking in the entryway. "If you'd had a mind, you'd have made a good officer, Sammy."

John means it as a compliment, but Sam stares at him in horror. After a moment, John realizes why.

"Aw, fuck, son, I'm sorry. I didn't mean . . . I didn't mean it like that."

"Yeah, I know you didn't," Sam says, turning back to his notes.

John sits down across from Sam. "Sam, I'm serious. I just meant you're a good strategist, you think things through. That's a neutral ability, something people can use for good or bad, and you've only ever used it for good, OK?"

"Yeah," Sam says, not looking up.

"So long as we're clear." When Sam doesn't respond, John continues: "So, any new leads on how we find the thing? The demon, I mean?"

"There have been a few references to a book that may or may not exist. I've got Bobby and a university professor who thinks I'm working on my PhD both trying to track it down in their own ways, so we'll see whether anything comes of it. My money's on Bobby, but on the other hand, the professor's enthusiastic."

Mary smiles, feeling an odd mixture of pride and sadness: she'd taught him the grad student trick, but she wishes every day she'd never had to. And yet, she doesn't think she can ever bring herself to regret making that deal, because the alternative would be a life without John, a life where Sam and Dean never existed, and that doesn't bear thinking about.

They all make Sam take a break for the holidays, which isn't too hard since his friends are home for winter break and want to see him. Mary hopes that they'll gush about college just enough to remind Sam that his current efforts are a means to an end, but not so much that it sends him on a downward spiral of any sort.

Mary thinks he seems happier, lighter, while his friends are around, but as soon as they all go back to school in January, Sam is, if anything, even more driven than before. But then again, she supposes that makes sense considering the looming deadline.

It turns out Sam was right to bet on both Bobby and the professor: the professor is the first to confirm the existence of the text Sam needs, but Bobby is the one, in March, who is able to acquire it. Having been brought into the inner circle several years ago, Bobby refuses to take any payment for what was probably an expensive and maybe even dangerous black market endeavor. He gruffly insists that knowing the demon is out of the picture will be payment enough, but Mary's pretty sure it has more to do with Bobby's fondness for Sam and his desire for Sam to be OK.

The book has what they need: a spell that will let them summon a specific demon, so long as they know its "name and nature." Some of the ingredients are a little . . . interesting, but between Bobby and Missouri they get them all.

Then it's time to talk to Daniel Elkins. Mary and Sam drive to Colorado to see him in person.

"Demon hunt, huh?"

"Yes, sir."

"And you're really little Mary Campbell?"

"Yes, sir," Mary says, biting back a sharp retort at being called "little" and "Campbell."

"Well . . . OK, then. But understand, you don't bring this back to me, I'll come for you."

"I understand, sir."

Hardly able to believe that it had been that easy, Mary and Sam get back in the car, Sam cradling the box with the gun and bullets. However, once they're safely on the road, Sam turns to Mary and says, "I vote we bring Dad and Dean with us when we return the gun."

"And why is that?" Mary asks with a smile.

"Guy's a dick. Someone should punch him. And I don't know if you've noticed, but your husband and older son are a couple of hotheads, especially when it comes to this family."

"As a matter of fact, I had."

"So?"

"So, it's been way too long since we've had a family vacation."

Sam grins.

There's an abandoned cemetery not too far from town, so they decide to do the spell there: if something goes wrong, they don't want innocent people caught in the crossfire. The plan is that Sam will do the spell, Mary will do the shooting, and John and Dean will be armed with holy water to act as backup.

"Will we be killing a person?" Sam asks abruptly as they go over the plan around the kitchen table. "I mean, the demon's going to be possessing someone. What if they're still alive in there?"

"That's a risk," Mary admits. "There's just no way to know without performing an exorcism, but if we do that we lose the demon. With one that powerful, getting sent back to hell won't be more than a minor setback, easily remedied. We're just going to have to accept that there might be a civilian casualty here. It's not pretty, and it's not nice, but I think, in the balance of things, killing the demon serves the greater good."

"Do we have the right to make that call, though?" Sam asks.

"Sammy, where is this coming from?" John asks. "You've been working your ass off for months to get us here, and now you're balking? It's like your mother said: it ain't pretty and it ain't nice, but it's what we have to do"

Sam gives his head a little shake, as if to clear it. "Yeah. Yeah, you're right. I just . . . I wish it didn't have to be this way. And if it was only for me I'd put the kibosh on the whole thing. But there are other people like me out there, and if the demon lives, it could end up using one of them to raise its army, and then a lot more people would get hurt. So I'm on board. But after it's over . . . we should try to find out who it is. Give their family closure."

Mary covers his hand with hers. "And that's exactly what we'll do," she promises.

The summoning spell works.

"Mary, Mary, quite contrary," the demon says, eyes smoky yellow, "how does your princeling grow?"

"Ask him yourself," she snarls, raising the Colt.

The demon turns to Sam. "Oh, Sammy, look at you. Finally hit that growth spurt, huh? The things we could do together, if only you'd let me show you."

"Not a chance," he snaps. Mary cocks the gun.

"And what are you going to do with that?" Azazel taunts, but then he takes a closer look. "Oh, you have been a bad girl. It's almost enough to make me wish I could've gotten my instructions sooner, gotten started early enough to recruit you. You're really something, Mary." He turns. "And you, Johnny. No, I suppose it really did have to be this way. I'm just glad I was able to get Mary into the bloodline. But of course, you have no idea what I'm talking about, no idea what really happened to your father."

That gives them all pause, but not for long.

"You're stalling," John says. "Maybe you know something, maybe you don't; either way you die today."

"What did you do to me?" Sam asks.

The demon turns back to him. "Gave you something special, something to make you strong. Kill me and you'll never find out what, never learn to use it."

"That's fine by me," Sam says, and nods to Mary. She pulls the trigger, and the demon drops, infernal lights flashing, flickering, and dying, and all that's left is the body of the man the demon possessed.

After a brief silence, Dean says, "Kinda anti-climactic if you ask me." Mary sees him try to catch his brother's eye, but Sam ignores him and paces solemnly to the body, kneels, and closes the dead man's eyes, head bowed. Mary joins him and puts her hand on his shoulder, and he reaches up to cover it with one of his own.

"We did it," Sam murmurs. "So why does it feel like this?"

Mary thinks back to her first kill. She was only fourteen. Campbell family tradition: every few years, find a big hunt for the whole extended family to go on, let the younger members get blooded with minimal risk thanks to all the backup. For her it was a vampire nest. She'd known they were monsters, known they'd probably killed hundreds of innocent people in their lives, and she'd still thrown up after she took the youngest one's head off. Her dad had clapped her on the back and said she'd get used to it; she'd looked around at the carnage and promised herself that that would never happen.

"It feels like this because taking a life is supposed to be hard, and it shouldn't feel good, no matter how necessary it was. The demon may once upon a time have been an angel, a servant of God, and if not that then, a very very long time ago, it was a person. And this man, who might have still been alive, was innocent in all of this." Sam nods slowly, as John and Dean join them by the corpse, John giving Sam a hand up as he stands, Dean walking around to the other side of the body so he can see his brother's face.

"We did what we had to do," John says, "and it's made the world safer. Try to focus on that, OK, Sam?" Sam nods slowly.

"So what now?" Dean asks, giving up on trying to lighten the mood. "I mean . . . " he gestures to the body.

"Now we put him to rest," Mary says, and they get to work.

Sam is quiet when they get home, and Dean is loud and exuberant to try to make up for it, but Sam just retreats to his room with Harley and Quinn and turns up his music whenever Dean bangs on his door.

They hardly see him for a couple of days, and John and Mary are beginning to talk strategy when he emerges, carrying his laptop and Stanford folder and followed by Harley and Quinn.

"So," he says, plopping down on the couch and turning off the TV before Dean can try to get the remote out of his reach. "Who's up for a trip to California?"

The other three Winchesters exchange glances.

"Stanford," Sam clarifies. "I'd like to visit, talk to my advisor about classes in person, get a feel for where I'll be spending the next four years of my life. And Mom was just saying a couple of weeks ago that it's been too long since we had a family vacation."

"OK, but I'm not going on the kiddie rides with you at Disneyland," Dean says; Sam whacks him in the head with a pillow, knowing Dean won't risk damaging the laptop by retaliating.

"I take it you've got hotel information all pulled up there?" John asks, moving over to sit beside Sam. Sam nods.

Mary smiles as Sam begins to explain the options to John. They are moving forward, finally leaving the nightmares behind. This is what she always dreamed of for herself and her family, and after almost eighteen-and-a-half years, they finally, truly have it: a normal life.

She squeezes onto the couch between her sons, picks up Quinn and sets her in her lap, and joins the discussion of where they should stay when they go on vacation to California.