Acting as Mom

ameliacareful:

It’s been a few weeks stranded here in the next century and Mary Winchester can say that the food is better.  Not the stuff the boys eat, but when Sam found out she was willing to try things, he started taking her for sushi (scary but great once she tried it) Indian (some things like butter chicken are incredible but some of the food she doesn’t really get) and good Italian (not just spaghetti and meatballs although nothing wrong with that.)

The rest?  There is just too much.  So there’s Netflix which sounds like heaven on earth but she finally writes down a list of steps because the menu is supposed to be intuitive but isn’t.  The kitchen in the bunker is a weird mix of too old and microwave (she’s used a microwave, okay, but how is she supposed to know the weight of the hamburger patties she’s defrosting?)  The clothes, which seem gratuitously ugly. 

Her boys.  She should feel instant love and connection but they’re two men.  Sam probably weighs a hundred pounds more than she does.  They’re hunters.  They walk like hunters, they act like hunters, they drink like hunters.  They’re strangers. They making joking references to television shows and movies she’s never seen.  Dean’s room looks like a fourteen-year-old with access to way too many weapons lives there and Sam, like John, wouldn’t know a creature comfort if it bit him.  They’re rough with each other emotionally.  When they bicker, sometimes it’s like an old married couple but sometimes it’s with knives.

Seriously, she tries.  She remembers that they think of her as a mother and so she mothers them as best she can.  “You boys want lunch?” she calls.

They come into the kitchen, shy as deer.  “Lunch?” Sam says, like the word is in Sumerian.

“Awesome,” Dean says.  He’s as excited as a puppy, all shining eyes and adoration.

“We had that chicken last night,” Mary says.  “I could make chicken salad sandwiches.”

Would it make a difference if she said ‘lobster’ or if she said ‘cardboard’?  Let’s have champagne for lunch.  Let’s have fried cockroaches. 

The first time she swears, Dean looks startled.  Sam doesn’t.  Sam doesn’t seem to have any expectations which is as bad as all of Dean’s.  She feels as if she’s losing herself in these two giant, damaged men’s needs.  Part of her just wants to flee this ghastly place with no windows. 

But she can’t.  It’s her fault.  She sold her baby to a demon.  She set things in motion so huge.  She misses John with a fierceness that makes her sob into her pillow each night.  John is dead, John is dead, John is dead.  And the photos of him, the memories the boys occasionally let spill–Dean grinning at Sam and saying, ‘Dad would have your hide,’ or Sam saying he likes to run, it was the one thing Dad made them do that he liked best–doesn’t sound like her John at all.

So she makes chicken salad sandwiches and iced tea (the boys will ignore it and drink beer and so will she but they like that she makes iced tea and Sam will drink it.)  She puts her hand on Dean’s hair.  Carefully touches Sam’s shoulder.  The boys startle like combat vets half the time but then they look at her like she’s some sort of celestial being blessing them.  So she smiles.  She tries to act like their mom.

She is sure that she’ll love them.  She loved her boys so much.