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Mary feels like the worst mother for what she is about to do.
Scratch that. She already feels like the worst mother on earth. Her demon deal got her killed, made Sam and Dean grow up without a mother and made John spend his life hunting her murderer and raising their sons as hunters instead of… instead of normal, happy children. Mary had never wanted them to find out about all the things that go bump in the night, not her husband and certainly not her boys. Her dream had been to remain a liar until the end of her days—she was a hunter, after all, a liar by profession—she had thought she could keep telling her boys that there was nothing, nothing at all to be afraid of in the dark.
Mary’s fingers feel numb as she pulls the fridge door open. The beers clack quietly against each other as she pulls them out of the fridge, but she can barely hear it, hardly feels the coldness of the glass bottles. Staring inside the illuminated fridge, she doesn’t see its contents but instead Sam: standing in her doorway, his hands in his pockets and his shoulders slightly raised, reassurances and offers for an open ear and conversation on his tongue. Maybe shy, maybe unsure, maybe nervous; Mary couldn’t yet read her stranger-son, still can’t. Sam had brought her tea, and John’s journal. To help fill in some blanks, he had said.
A good man. Her six months-old baby. A good man.
And a hunter.
“Dean said you got out of hunting,” Mary says. It sounds like a statement, but really, it is a question.
Sammy got out. Her baby Sammy got out, went to college, was going to become a lawyer. He’d had a girlfriend. And despite it all he is now standing right in front of her, surprisingly unfazed for a man that very recently got kidnapped, tortured and had his long-dead mother returned to him without any prior warning. Sam—and Mary remembers heaven, remembers Sammy’s tiny fist wrapped around her finger, his baby smell and how his big eyes would light up and his little face bloom with happiness whenever she made funny faces at him—is standing in the middle of a secret bunker, calling this strange place his home, living with his brother and an accountant-looking angel, no romance or family or normal life in sight. No safety.
Sam puts his hands back in his pockets, shrugs a little.
“Yeah.”
He had gotten out—
“And yet here you are.”
—for a while, at least.
Mary just wants to understand. Because this, the hunting life, is the last thing she ever wanted for her boys. Because Sammy got out. Because, clearly, Sam did not stay out.
Sam shrugs again. Expression a tad sheepish, a tad resigned, he says, “Well, this is my family. My family hunts, you know? It’s what we do.”
He says it like it is the most natural thing in the world. Like it should be obvious. Maybe it is.
Mary feels like crying. She nods, more resignation that anything else, the motion perhaps a futile attempt to shoo away her desperate grief. Unable to look at her grown-up son any longer, she turns to put John’s journal down on her desk, staring at it for a moment.
Oh, John, she thinks, what did you do to our sweet boys? What did we do?
Mary had thought hunting would help. Now, she thinks that if anything, it might have made things worse.
They are good hunters, her boys. Great hunters, even. They saved her life and freed all those children, they know the lore and are strong and smart and skilled. They have got resources, weaponry, contacts, and The Internet. But oh God, her big little boys are hunters.
Somehow, seeing it for herself is worse than just knowing about it. And how much things have changed in all the time Mary was gone doesn’t help either. There had been moments during the hunt where she had felt… lost. Useless. Confused. And not in the way she usually did on the less straightforward hunts. Sure, she’d figured the case out and everything, but the whole thing still left a sour aftertaste in her mouth.
And all those dead kids. They had reminded her of her own dead-not-dead kids. Alive, but lost to her forever.
Trying to combat the warmth getting in through the open door, the fridge starts humming as it begins to cool itself back down. The loud noise in the otherwise quiet kitchen startles Mary out of her thoughts. She quickly closes it, just to come face to face with Sam’s weird kindergarten-drawing.
Mary tenses up, caught off-guard when she shouldn’t be.
Dean had been on edge when she had commented on the picture. On edge and so damn proud. And Mary is reeling with all the new things she is learning. That’s another thing she just can’t seem to piece together, Sam and Dean’s relationship.
There is nothing about them being… too close, or anything, in John’s journal. Nothing much at all about their childhoods, really. Most of John’s notes are in regard to hunts; case entries, contacts and lore. No pictures of Sam and Dean growing up.
Reading John’s notes had left her sad, and, if she is entirely honest with herself, slightly horrified. It is like she didn’t know him at all, and if the journal hadn’t clearly been written by her husband, Mary might even have believed that Sam had given her a complete stranger’s notebook. But Mary knows John’s handwriting, knows it from love letters and little notes he used to leave for her all around the house. This journal did belong to her John.
Considering John’s handwriting, it hits Mary square in the chest that she doesn’t even know her own sons’ handwritings. She doesn’t know their hobbies and what they like to do in their spare time. Mary does not know them at all.
Well, Mary supposes, I guess I know one way they like to relax.
Sam and Dean, closer than any adult brothers should be, together in the bathtub in the middle of the night doing who knows what. Barely audible moans spilling through the crack beneath the bathroom door along with a faint strip of light, the quiet splashing of bathwater.
But did she really know? Did she?
Mary unclenches her jaw, her tightly balled fists. She can still feel the phantom-sting of her nails digging into her soft palms—so much softer than when she was a girl, so much softer because her hands have gotten used to holding children instead of weapons over her last four and a half years. But her body remembers how to be a hunter. It always will.
Just when she had thought that she had Sam and Dean figured out, Mary had realized that maybe she had been misinterpreting things. Or maybe—maybe not? She had no idea.
Her sons are incestuous—it had been hard to admit this to herself, harder still to accept and outright impossible to understand. It had been obvious, though, once she had allowed herself to see: the way they would look at each other sometimes, the way they seemed to be able to understand each other entirely without words, the way Dean would stroke over the top of Sam’s head with such tender affection when he forgot his mother might see. Dean’s expression whenever he realized that he had been caught red handed. Again, the bathroom. That one was without doubt the most incriminating one of her observations.
However, nothing in John’s notes had indicated that either of them might be gay. Sam had told her about his late girlfriend, and from what Mary has gathered, Dean is quite the—Dean really likes women. That tidbit of information had even made its way into John’s notes.
Mary runs her thumb along the edge of Sam’s drawing. For some reason, it feels almost sacred. Dean’s reaction to her acknowledging it has made it painfully clear that it is special for some reason. And while Mary doesn’t know much about art, she is pretty sure the picture stuck to their fridge is not supposed to be abstract art. It is something else entirely.
Mary casts a glance behind herself, for some reason afraid of being caught.
The drawing isn’t even good. The colors aren’t well chosen, Sam hasn’t kept to the confines of the lines, and the stick figures beside it seem like they have been drawn by a preschooler.
“Sammy drew it for me,” Dean had told her. But the way he had said ‘Sammy’ had been nothing like he usually addressed his brother. Dean had sounded like he was talking about a child.
Looking back, all those strange interactions Mary had witnessed and interpreted as… well, romantic intimacy between brother-lovers, might as well have been platonic affection between a parent or big sibling and a young child—a very young child, which Sam obviously is not.
Maybe she had misheard, that night in front of the bathroom door. She had been very tired.
But Mary knows she had not misheard.
The whole thing still makes Mary queasy, though she doesn’t know if this other dynamic would be worse than outright incest or not. Incest is—it is unspeakable, unthinkable, forbidden. Not only taboo, but illegal. But the thought that her boys were pretending that Sam was a child was somehow even… worse? Better? More freakish.
In comparison to her boys being freaks who pretend that Sam is a child, incest seems almost easy to accept, straightforward to explain. They have grown up too close, with too little socialization, they are maybe emotionally stunted, definitely twisted and intertwined. And sex, in the end, is mechanical, provides physical as well as emotional relief.
Mary does not want to think about her children having sex. More than that, he does not want to think about her children having sex with one another. Yet here she is.
But the thought that Sam and Dean might be—what, making Sam a child? It makes her think they are damaged even worse than she had assumed previously. It hurts worse, for some reason. Why would they—what could they possibly hope to get out of that?
She doesn’t want to think that her boys are somehow wrong, broken, defective, messed up. Those are, and always will be, her babies. And she wants to accept and love them as they are.
It is with anger that Mary notices the single tear making its agonizingly slow way down her cheek. She rubs it away brusquely. With everything that is going on, the last thing she wants, the last thing she needs, is to let herself be overwhelmed with confused emotion. No matter what, she is still her parents’ daughter, she is a hunter. What she needs to do now is stay focused, keep a clear head, and figure this whole thing out, just like she would a case. Not only Sam and Dean’s relationship, but also her own place in their family and in this seemingly whole new world. And for that, she needs distance.
Mary needs to leave. She knows that it is selfish, but she simply can’t keep doing this. It is too painful, staying. Whenever she looks at her grown-up sons she sees her babies, remembers heaven, remembers happiness. And Mary knows that these handsome, rough trade men are her boys, that those two are Sammy and Dean-o. But reason is of little relevance when she is overcome by grief every time she looks into their eyes, identical to those of her little boys and yet so different.
There are still moments where Mary thinks that all this is just a weird dream and that she will wake up any minute now. These moments are much rarer now than they were right after she’d gotten back, but they still happen, mostly when she wakes up from a dream about her past, or of heaven.
They are alive, Sam and Dean. They are right in front of her, and they are strong and capable and good men—even if they are more twisted than she ever could have fathomed.
It still feels like Sammy and Dean-o died. She just lost her whole family, her husband and her children. Every reference and inside joke of Sam and Dean she doesn’t understand, every word in John’s journal she reads makes her realize everything she missed, everything that she will never get back.
Mary has lost so much time—how can she ever hope to catch up with them, to understand the life they have led up until now? How can she still be a mother? She wasn’t there for any of it.
Sam learning how to walk, Dean learning how to ride a bike. Sammy’s first tooth, both their first crushes, kindergarten-feuds and boring teacher-parent conferences. No driving them to sleepovers with friends, no eating ice cream in celebration of a good grade, no graduations or helping her sons move into their first apartments. Mary was not there for any of it, and some of it—a lot of it—her boys did not even get.
It hurts, hurts, hurts.
Love, when unrooted, is the most painful thing in the world. Mary wishes she were still dead and hates herself for it. Sam and Dean are so excited to have her with them. They seem so happy.
Mary feels like the worst mother for what she is about to do.
Despite Sam having again shown her how to do it only yesterday, and for the third time at that, it takes Mary multiple tries and a lot of already frayed nerves until she manages to activate the camera-function on her new phone. She holds it out in front of her, as steady as possible, and snaps a photo of Sammy’s drawing. Why she does it, she doesn’t fully understand. Pocketing her phone again, Mary simply doesn’t question her action.
As of now, there are only three pictures on her phone: the one she just took, a ‘selfie’ with Sam from when he first taught her how to navigate the different functions—applications?—and a slightly blurry picture she had taken of Sam and Dean a day ago. They had been sitting at the tiny motel table, having a call with their friend Castiel, and Dean had put his hand on the back of Sam’s neck, their faces close together over the phone, giving Sam a gentle squeeze and leaving it there for just a moment too long. Maybe. Long enough for Mary to somehow find the camera and snap the photo, anyway.
The thing is, and this really trips Mary up, that Sam and Dean are not all that affectionate with each other most of the time. While they are clearly comfortable being close, they are not usually overly touchy. Not as far as she can tell. Whenever she has seen them touch, outside of those very unsettling and too-intimate moments, it all seemed strictly brotherly. It’s just that those other instances are very… intense. Uncomfortably so.
“Mom?”
It is Dean calling for her, and Mary quickly grabs the beers, by now slippery with condensation, from the counter. Looking around the kitchen, she wonders if she will ever be able to think of this place as home. Despite what Castiel and her boys keep telling her, it doesn’t feel like it. Mary still doesn’t feel like she belongs. She doubts she ever will.
“Mom, you alright?”
“All good,” Mary calls back. “Coming!”
Mary belongs back in time, or back in heaven. She belongs with John, her little boy Dean and her baby Sam. That is her family, that is her home.
Mary feels like the worst mother in the world for what she is about to do. But she will do it anyway.
“I have to go,” she tells Sam and Dean once they are done discussing the successful hunt. The beers on the table are getting warm, but she isn’t thinking about them anymore. Mary has to do this now, before she can convince herself otherwise. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. I just need a little time.”
They don’t say anything. Mary doesn’t know if she would have preferred it if they did. She doesn’t know if their stunned, pained silence is worse or better than understanding words or a try to convince her to stay.
She tells them she loves them, because she does, she just needs a little time.
And then she leaves.