Mary had been mostly silent on the ride over from the complex but her silence had a different tone than Sam's tensed muscles and obvious absorption in his own thoughts and plans and spun out scenarios of what might happen when they reached Dean and John. She was outwardly calm, serene even, and had put a reassuring hand on her son's shoulder a couple times during the drive when he had seemed particularly tense. The only betrayal of her own nerves was the way she twisted her wedding band on her finger, turning it over and over. She'd done that on her wedding night (after, well, the wedding night bit). When John had fallen asleep Mary had lain beside him, one of his arms slung around her and her back curving close against his chest so that she could feel his breathing, be certain that he was asleep, and twisted the new wedding band on her finger, staring at it like she thought it was going to disappear. That had been her symbol, the line she could draw between being a hunter and a daughter and blood and fear, and a wife and someday a mother herself and worrying only about the small boggarts of housekeeping, the really supernatural way a floor just washed became dirty again so quickly, the way a pot roast burned and dried out when she took her eyes off it for just a second. It had been a symbol of safety, and she'd twisted herself to face John that night, careful not to wake him, and promised herself she'd keep him safe too, safe from ever having to know what was in the night, and more importantly from any attempt life might make to shatter his impossible, irrational belief that happy endings were possible, that you could leave the war behind.
Both had failed, she'd died, John- from all accounts- had become bitter and obsessed with revenge, but the ring still held some of what it had on the first night of her honeymoon. The promise of safety, maybe not physical or the kind that came with naivety, but the kind of safety that being in love inherently gave you even as it compounded your worries and your fears and the angles from which you could be attacked. She'd never doubted that she loved John, even when they were fighting, when they were lying to each other, they could do that because the fact that they loved each other was unalterable, could stand up to any pathetic attempts they had made as stupid young people to chip away at it. Being without it, without John, had been more difficult than she had let on. She loved her sons, of course, and liked to think that if it had been her in John's place she would have been different, would have put them first, but maybe all that had kept her holding the fort down these past few months without him had been her absolute belief that he would come back the way she had.
The car rumbled to a stop and for a moment, seeing John and Dean standing together froze Mary where she sat even with all her hopes and good intentions. Seeing Dean alive and as far as she could tell unharmed felt like someone had lifted a weight off her chest, given her permission to start breathing properly again. John, however...somehow, impossibly, she'd imagined him as the comparative boy she'd left when she died almost thirty years ago. But he'd lived most of those years, done things she'd never believed him capable of, and the man in front of her held all the scars and lines of those years so that she had to freeze for a moment, mapping them with her eyes, trying to mentally account for and close the gap between them. But no matter how much he'd changed he was still John and when she caught her breath and emerged from the car behind Sam she was quiet not with hesitancy or nervousness but to hold herself in check until they'd done the tests she knew the others would insist on. Maybe John had somehow passed his old belief in happy endings on to her because as she smiled at them, her whole family together for the first time in more than a decade, she couldn't help believing that this was real. This time I'll protect them, she promised herself as she made herself stand silently by Sam's side instead of running over to the other half of her family.