Being a mom, I’m having a lot of feels about Mary returning to Sam and Dean’s lives. Thinking a lot about how they’d adjust. 

So, of course I had to write a drabble about it.

Dean likes to keep everything neat and orderly. Sam is like John. He doesn’t care where it’s supposed to go, as long as he can find it later. Dean, though. He’s like her. Plates in the sink, clothes in the baskets, feet off the table. Floors shining. It makes her smile a little because it’s familiar. It’s her son doing something that she would have taught him over the years, but ingrained itself regardless. 

“Sam, pick up your towel out of the bathroom,” she says nicely while he passes by her in the kitchen to start the coffee maker.

Two days later, Dean yells down the hall, “Sammy, pick your damn towel up!”

There’s an echo of John when Sam and Dean are thundering down the stairs with armfuls of groceries and bickering. Sam is insisting, “it doesn’t even matter, Dean! Jesus. It goes where it goes.”

“C’mon, Mary, it’s all in the garage. No one’ll see it, anyway. As long as it’s out of the way, who cares? It goes where it goes.”

Most of it is so hard to make sense of. She sees her father in her boys more than her husband, more than herself, and it makes her ache on no small level. She didn’t know these men. Or their father. Who he’d become in her… absence. She doesn’t know how to be okay with that when she feels like an interloper in her own future. It’s useless to regret the inevitable that she doesn’t even remember, but at the same time she’s trying to live in the middle of the ocean, paddling just to stay afloat.

Trying to figure out which Mary Winchester her sons need, and not the Mary Winchester she’d planned to be. That woman died years ago and won’t do anyone any good. 

At least there are life vests in this ocean. She’d once told John, “don’t test me on this or I’ll stop making you hamburgers for a year. What’ll you do without the best one you’ve ever had?”

He’d tried to flirt and convince her that she was the best he’d ever had. It had never worked.

Sam actually groans around a mouthful of the hamburgers that Dean cooked. “Seriously, every time, oh my God.”

“See? What’d I tell ‘ya? Think about the best one you ever had next time you wanna argue salads.”

Dean looks as proud and expectant as Mary always did feeding them to John. She takes a bite of hers. It takes her back and takes her by surprise. The secret ingredient. She’d never told a soul. “How did you know?” she asks.

Dean understands what she means. He shrugs, but looks more pleased than ever. “Dunno. Just thought of it.”

It just tasted right, she’d thought back then.

“Just tasted right,” Dean says.

Sam gestures to his brother’s face. “Hey, Dean, you got a little ketchup and mustard… everywhere.”

Dean wipes his mouth with an unapologetic grin.

“Mary,” John had laughed. “How can you eat like that? You got something… like, everywhere.”

Another life vest. Maybe land would be in sight soon.