#i can make up backstories for all the grandmothers in spn just you watch

[tiarnanabhfainni]

i wrote another fic about generational trauma and the winchesters, this time featuring deadbeat mom extraordinaire mary née campbell, displacement, emigration, the american wake and just really missing your mom.

gonna quickly tag a few mutuals who might be interested but also you can find the fic under the cut

@uhuraha @myaimistrue @nonsensegnomes

American Wake

On a mild summer’s day in 1950, a wedding took place in Normal, Illinois. Dressed in a simple white dress that she had inherited from her mother, Millie Walsh looked up at the man who was to be her husband in daze of transcendent happiness. She had good reason to be besotted. His name was Henry Winchester and he was a dashing young academic of the supernatural with a fascinating air of mystery that surrounded him. They had met the previous year when he had come to her home in New York on a fact-finding mission. Millie fell in love after only two minutes of conversation.

With such a buoyant adoration to carry her through, Millie was perfectly happy to relocate to a state far from her family and friends to build a new life with charming debonair Henry. She knew about the supernatural elements of his life. How could she not? But it was a trade she was perfectly willing to make for the opportunity to create a family with him.

And she paid dearly for that decision. Millie lost a husband and was left to raise her four year old son alone.

It was all entirely avoidable of course. The Winchester name was not her inheritance by birth. No Cupid had ever marked her name for Henry. It was by no means a match made in heaven. If not for love, Millie could have lived a life completely divorced from the less-than-natural.

After her husband’s disappearance her heart hardened and she abandoned the Winchester name and any association with the supernatural. Packing her bags for Kansas, she returned instead to the ways of her own people. For Millie’s family had a long history of leaving their pasts behind them.

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Millie’s maternal line can be traced back to a small town in Limerick, Ireland now known by the name of Patrickswell. The farm where her grandmother was reared would likely have been a fair few miles from the town itself but it’s difficult to be precise about these things since many of the records of the era were destroyed in an explosion during the Civil War of the 1920’s.

Bridget Ó Laochdha lived in a hard place surrounded by tough people. There was no work in the surrounding towns and villages and her family was forced to eke out a living on rented land. Most of the local community spoke little to no English and spent most of their day-to-day lives conversing and working through the medium of the Irish language.

The Ó Laochdha family was no exception to this rule. Bridget - as the sole member of the family with more than a rudimentary grasp on the foreign tongue - had been translating for her father at the market for most of her young life.

The rugged countryside that surrounded them was austere and beautiful but there was darkness around every corner. Violence engulfed the region as the Land War raged around them. The threat of eviction was a constant sword of Damocles over their heads and the precarity of the political situation left a permanent mark on Bridget’s development.

Bridget loved her family, of course she did. She loved the language she spoke with them and the easy rhythm of her life. But she knew that there was a brighter future out there somewhere on the other side of an ocean. Somewhere she wouldn’t hear constant news of Whiteboys, Invincibles and their clashes with the police. Somewhere that was safer, where she might get a job and support her family from afar. All she needed was the means to get there.

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Mary idolises her dad when she’s young as children are prone to do. Her family are heroes who straddle the line between the known and the unknown and keep the world safe from the evil lurking in the shadows.

As a teenager, she joins the family business and she’s a natural. She excels particularly at getting information out of young witnesses. She sits amongst small groups of girls, nodding along to conversations about music, miniskirts and make-up and nudging the topic of discussion slowly around to the subject of her father’s latest hunt. Mary’s good with the guys too, she finds that a well-placed laugh or look can get her most of what she needs.

But intel is not the only area where she excels. Mary’s a sharpshooter and she’s not afraid to get her hands dirty. Hand her a shovel and she can dig a grave just as fast as the boys. She even knows the best technique for washing blood off her hands.

She’s on a path to be one of the best in the business. And she hates it.

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Although many people left Ireland to try their luck in the United States in those days, it was still a difficult path to tread. Tickets to get to New York were expensive and hard to come by. Buying a ticket at the harbour was as likely to get you scammed as to get you a place on the boat.

Bridget was fortunate in that her local parish priest was looking to sponsor a few young hopefuls on the trip across the Atlantic and offered her a place. That decision might have been the hardest any in her family had ever had to make. To leave behind everything she knew and understood for the small chance that her life could be better. She made that choice nonetheless.

The tradition of The American Wake was one that dated back to the famine years in Ireland to mourn the departure of a loved one to that far off place across the ocean. There would be no real way to send letters home consistently and economic conditions meant that the emigrants would likely never be able to return home. What do you do when you are setting up to grieve someone who is still alive? You hold a funeral.

On Bridget’s last day in Limerick she cried until her tear ducts ran dry. She sat in the centre of the room and listened to the keening women wail around her. Her father could not speak his sadness but he stood beside her and rested his hand on her shoulder, bowing his head in silent prayer. Her mother held her face in her hands and whispered one last goodbye.

Yet amidst all of the tears and the heartache, a sense of relief made its way into Bridget’s bones and settled in her spine. There was death and loss but a future there too. A brand new life in a brand new land. And while they’d never say it, her family was relieved too, she could see it in their eyes. This was one less mouth to feed, one less person to clothe. The money she will send home in remittances would lighten her father’s load by a considerable degree.

As she boarded the boat in Cobh, she stared at the ticket clutched tightly in her hand and thought not of what it had taken from her but of the life it stood to grant her.

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When Mary meets John for that second date outside his mother’s house, she knows that this is it. That he is her ticket out.

She clutches his body in her lap and cries and she doesn’t know what to do. With death and destruction all around her, Mary makes the only choice she can.

Deanna’s body still lies abandoned on the kitchen tiles. But isn't it better, in a way, that she never had to face her daughter leaving her behind?

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The first impression America made on Bridget was not a positive one. No sooner than she arrived at Ellis Island, did they take the last vestiges of her home away from her. Bridget Leahy took her first step onto foreign soil without even her name to console her.

Her first job in New York was that of a kitchen worker in a large airy home in the employ of a family belonging to the upper echelons of East Coast society. Her hours were long and her fingers near scrubbed to the bone. Since her food and board were covered, every penny that she earned was sent home to Patrickswell.

While her English had served her well in local markets of Limerick, she found that they were quite inadequate here among native speakers. She sat around the table in the servants’ quarters with the others who worked in the home and listened as conversations happened all around her. They all spoke so fast and the topic of conversation switched so quickly that she couldn't quite keep track. Bridget simply did not have the vocabulary to contribute and so she stopped speaking entirely.

The longing for home was like a physical wound lodged just under her ribs and sometimes she wondered how she continued to breathe through the pain.

The only times that she could recognise herself was on her rare evenings off when she made her way down to the local Irish dance hall. There she could allow young men from Inchicore, Kilrush and Listowel to spin her around a room to the music of home and forget where she was for just a few hours.

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It is impossible to overemphasise how little the role of a housewife suits Mary Winchester. The sundresses feel awkward on her form and the kitchen still feels like a foreign land.

The other mothers in the neighbourhood all seem to speak the same language as they switch tracks fluently between complaining good-naturedly about their husbands and swapping recipe cards. Mary has never felt more out of place.

She doesn’t know where she fits or how to contribute. The loss of her mother is like a crater in her chest and she doesn’t know where to lay down all of the grief she holds in her hands. She thinks she would be better at holding her children without it.

When it all gets too much, she sheds the skin of Mary Winchester and leaves her small family behind to retrace the Campbell path. She might not be able to get her family back but she can pretend to be home for just a small while when on a hunt.

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In a small catholic church on an intersection, Bridget Leahy married Mick Walsh of Tyrone in a small, private ceremony. As a married woman, she left the world of employment behind and started the task of homemaking in their small Manhattan apartment. She did her best to keep the rooms aired out and clean but the grime of the city was ever present.

When she looked out of the window and saw grey dusty streets she couldn't help but compare the view to green fields and the fresh air of the Limerick countryside. Her husband worked in construction, building monuments of steel to the sky that looked towards an American future while she remained stuck in an Irish past.

When Bridget’s pregnancy first became obvious to the couple, they were delighted. This was their chance to build something of their own on American soil. A family.

When her waters broke, the women of the neighbourhood rushed into her room to oversee the birth and refused to let her husband in so he could hold her hand.

In another life maybe Bridget stayed at home and married a local boy in Patrickswell. Maybe she gave birth at home next to her parents’ fireplace with all of the women of her family around her and her mother stroking her hair.

Maybe she was destined to die in childbirth no matter where she was but at least at home the last voice in her ears would have been in a tongue that was her own.

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Just like Millie Winchester née Walsh before her, Mary Winchester let the supernatural into her home in a desperate grab for the life that she wanted to build.

And just like her mother-in-law before her, a demon crashed through the walls and destroyed every semblance of a family that she had found.