Mary ducked her head as she sat on a chair across from Dean, looking away from her son to compose herself. ”You’ve got a case of the stares,” her mother used to tease when Mary had been a child, too stubborn to break eye contact to the point where her parents joked with each other when they thought she couldn’t hear that their daughter was attempting to become staring contest champion of the world. It had never been her way to look down, to avoid things, and since she’d returned to Lawrence, to life, it had been hard for her to take her eyes off of her family for even a moment when she still sometimes woke with a start afraid she’d find John gone, look on the network and find another post about a dead son. Still, it was too hard to watch Dean fumble for how to talk to her, how to look at her, going through the motions of forcing an intimacy he knew he should feel but that he’d lived for decades without. The boys might fight with John more often than they had a calm conversation but no matter how dysfunctional the motions the male Winchester went through were they were familiar, neither Sam nor Dean stopped to weigh every word against a hazy or non-existent memory before they said it to him. It was usually something she could deal with, steel herself for and remind herself that the only thing that could help was time enough for Dean to get to know her again. Tension made that harder, the way he was obviously pulling his verbal punches for fear of hurting her serving as the strongest reminder yet that he wasn’t comfortable enough with her to let himself go, to say anything of substance.
>>“’Couple nights...Why?”
She looked up again and raised her eyebrows. “You must know I’ve been, all of us have been, worried about you lately,” she said quietly. She’d meant to lecture, had come to the apartment thinking of parenting books and responsibilities and plans, but in the moment she was startled into merely being honest. He’s not four any more, he’s not going to look crestfallen just because I snap at him for yanking all the pans out of the cabinet and waking up the baby. He’s as old as I was when he did that, she thought, but the four-year-old she remembered was still inextricable from the hungover thirty-year-old in front of her and she couldn’t be as a sharp as she’d meant to be, her next words more earnest than demanding. “Everyone needs to let off steam sometimes but this isn’t...” she wanted to tell him this wasn’t normal, that he knew better, but if he came back with ’and how would you know anyway?’ she’d have no response. I should have let John do this. I yelled at him, when he came back, for raising them the way he did but I can’t even... “I just want to know what’s going on.” Liar. You need him to be responsible. You need him to be ready. Ready to clean up your mess. She looked down at her hands again.