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Dean’s rage is white, she thinks hysterically. Nothing like the ugly red splotches she gets on her cheeks, inherited from her mother, and passed onto her Sam. Her father had been puce from his neck to his bald bonce when enraged. She and her cousins used to call him ‘the purple fury’ behind his back.
Dean is like John, his rage constrained, a silent fuming. His knuckles are white, clenched against the back of a chair in the library, his face equally pale in disgust. Mary wants to say something to make everything better, to make him understand why she kept this from him. But nothing springs to her mouth - she just doesn't know him well enough to guess what to say. To know which buttons to press.
Sam, unskilled at mediation but willing to try, speaks up first. “Why didn't you tell us about this? You’re happy, being at the beck and call of these British douchebags?”
“No fuck that,” Dean snarls; actually snarls, his top lip curved into such an aggressive grimace, she almost steps back from him. But she straightens her back, refusing to be cowed by her own son. She gave birth to him, she doesn't have to justify her choices.
She opens her mouth to say so, but he beats her to the punch:
“What I want to know is, what was so goddamned important that you risked our lives, Cas’ life for it? You stole something from a Prince of Hell and you were prepared to let Cas die, in agony, rather than admit it.”
It sounds horrific when he puts it like that, and she supposes it is.
“You know, Mary, that Cas has been our family longer than you were married to Dad?” Dean begins conversationally, but his voice is flint-sharp, ready to pierce flesh and rend.
“He went against more than a millennia’s worth of brainwashing to go to bat for us in the Apocalypse, literal end times and he threw in his lot with a couple of grimey humans with no more than a trunk full of ammo and a hail mary to rely on.” He continues softly, glaring into her eyes, refusing to give any ground. “And we failed. Lucifer got popped out of his box and Cas could have left us, gone crawling back to Heaven, or zapped himself to some tropical island, spend the end of days getting high and drinking booze out of a coconut. We had fuck all to offer him, God knows we treated him like trash - and he stuck by us anyway.”
She doesn't know what to say to that, and Dean finds he doesn't want to hear whatever weak explanation she can find. He doesn't care, because the bottom line remains the same.
“You betrayed us.”
“No-” she insists, finding her voice, but almost drowned out but Sam’s tired; “Dean-”
He has so little patience it's laughable. Frustrated, that it always turns out this way. Sam and Cas have earned their free passes: they’ve built a family together, the three of them, relying on each other through everything, for everything, more than any other soul could bear to endure. There is nothing Dean couldn't forgive them for, now.
Mary hasn't earned that level of devotion, and is no longer a figure that commands respect. She is no mythical creature of sacrifice, but a living, fallible human, judged and found wanting.
“I used to think, if only you had lived, everything might have been different. Better." Dean says, wrapped up in memory, "But we would have been weak, unprepared to defend ourselves when Heaven and Hell came knocking. We wouldn't have been able to stop the Apocalypse, more than once, if we hadn't grown up Hunters, trained like warriors.”
Sam looks scandalised, that Dean has the balls to insinuate they needed Mary to die in order to succeed. But for Dean, it feels like a huge weight, a solid boulder of guilt has been removed from him, finally voicing his treacherous thoughts outloud.
“All my life I thought I needed you.” He admits, quiet, controlled. Unsentimental. “That our family, our lives, were somehow incomplete for not having known you. But the reality is - we did just fine without you. We might not always have been happy, but we weren't willfully blind. I never put the people I care about in danger by wanting to live in a dreamworld of denial, or going behind their back, undermining us to our enemies.”
“That is not what I did.” Mary disagrees, latching onto the one part of the speech that it doesn't hurt her to think about.
“Isn't it?” Dean demands, “Working us, like a mark. Fooling us into getting involved with boss level demons, kicking up a disturbance where there didn't need to be any. We have enough problems without the remaining Princes of Hell directly gunning for us for ganking their brother. They were living off the grid, isolated, in their own little pockets of damnation, now they're geared up, working together to come after us. How many people are going to die in the crossfire?”
“We have this bunker, Dean. Safe and warded. Not to mention our skills. We’ve taken down some heavy hitters before-” Sam tries again to forestall the inevitable.
“At what cost, Sam? We make a deal, with a lesser devil to defeat the evil in front of us, and they eventually call in our debts. In the end, we always get fucked. And innocent people die.”
Dean doesn't roar, he merely huffs out the words, and Mary can finally see that beneath the anger, it's mostly fatigue.He's tired with the constant threats to their lives. That's exactly why accepting help from the British Men of Letters is so important. She was right to do it, though next time she’ll be more stringent when checking over a case before inviting her sons to help. Later, when the tension is less immediate, and the danger has receded, he’ll reconsider his stance. Right now his fury is reactionary, but he’ll cool off.
But Mary is forgetting how little she knows Dean. She's heard of his stubborn, unforgiving nature, sure. But in reality she's only seen him interact with Sam and Cas on a regular basis. The two people whom Dean could forgive anything at this point, too far gone when it comes to his love for them.
She's never seen how ruthless her eldest can be.
“You put us in danger, Mom.” Dean almost whispers, his voice hurt and small.
She expects she’ll have to grovel, that one apology won't be enough- she doesn't expect the next words that fall from his lips.
“I think you should go.”
Sam makes another noise of protest, which Dean quells with a single look. Mary couldn't make a peep if she tried.
“I want you to leave,” Dean clarifies. “Sammy might think of this place as his work, but this is my home. It’s where I keep my family safe. And its been a long time since blood was the only qualifier for family round here.”
She hears Sam mutter “Jesus, Dean.” Though the sting of pain and sudden rush of blood in her ears. Who knew a few words could hurt so much?
“You're not the only person I’ve had to kick out of this bunker, and I gotta admit, it hurt a hell of a lot more last time.”
She finally finds her voice, somewhere among the rubble of their relationship. “Dean-” she begins her plea, but he has no interest in her words.
“You sure as hell had no problem walking out on us before. You get an hour or so to clear out your shit, then I want you gone.”
Its Sam that tries again to reason with him, to implore on her behalf. “Look maybe Dean's right, a few weeks, work on some cases or whatever and then, she can come back and visit, right Dean?”
Sam sticks out his chin, typically stubborn. But secretly it has more to do with clinging on to the idea of a nurturing mother, that wants to be there for them, than Mary herself. He’s pissed at her too, but taking Dean’s side right now might mean she walks away for good. And Sam knows that deep down, that isn’t what his big brother wants either.
“No Sam! Wrong. Cas nearly fucking died! Cas!” Dean glares at Mary again, “You wanna work a case, you call Sam. You wanna apologise to Cas, fine. But don't ask him for favours, don't invite him anywhere. You try to drag him into this shit storm you have started, I swear to god you’ll be making time with Dad on a cloud again real soon.”
Mary swallows thickly, nodding her acceptance of his terms. She doesn't trust her voice to speak.
“One hour. You better take anything you want to keep.” Dean turns away from her, retreating towards the rooms where Cas is recuperating. He pauses at the doorway. “And Mom? Don't come back.”
With that parting shot, he’s gone, into the bowels of the bunker to the fridges where they keep blood bags. It was a genius idea of Dean’s to take a pint or so when they had the spare time, for future use in rituals or medical emergencies. There's no better transfusion than the juice from your own veins.
Mary has only a single bag labelled with her name so far, and Dean uses a syringe to take out the little that he needs. He knows Sam won't come after him until Mary’s on her merry way.
There are whole rooms in the bunker covered with runes: Dean heads to the relevant one, dropping a little of Mary's blood into a particular sigil, carved into an altar. It will bar her entry to the bunker unless he personally allows it, due to the blood he’d dropped into a corresponding sigil some time before. Cas explained how it worked to him some months back, and he’s neglected to tell anyone. So far, hairs from Rowena and Crowley’s demonic blood have been added to the ‘banned’ mix.
Dean never expected to be adding his own mother to that list, but as he heads to his room, where one very shaken angel is resting, he doesn’t regret any of it.