Mary found Sam in the Bunker kitchen, washing and chopping vegetables and tossing them into a huge bowl.

"That's quite a salad you've got going on there," she said.

"The only green food I've seen for two months was lime jello and mushy green beans. I'll do without a lot but I need vegetables." He pulled two bowls from the sink rack. "Would you like a salad?"

"Sure, thanks."

They brought everything to the table and sat down to eat.

"So, tell me," Mary said over a forkful of salad. "How did you survive those six weeks of 'nothing'?"

Sam shrugged. "I exercised, I read a lot."

"Read? But I thought – "

"Oh – um – no, yeah. I mean -" he gestured to his head with an embarrassed look on his face. "I have like a – a library up here. Books, movies, music, TV shows. I can pull them out and open them up and read them or watch them or listen to them whenever I want to."

"That's pretty cool."

Sam shrugged again. "Growing up I had a lot of practice keeping myself entertained waiting in the car for Dad & Dean to finish a hunt."

"I'm sorry," Mary said. "That's a terrible way to grow up. I know from experience."

"I survived. We survived," Sam said, gesturing between them. He smiled. "And see, it came in handy now, so..." He was obviously trying to make light of it, but Mary couldn't laugh.

"Then why did Dean give up? Forty years in hell. A year in Purgatory. Why after six weeks of nothing did he give up?"

"Because there was nothing," Sam said. "Dean never had to wait in the car during a hunt; he was always in the hunt. Thinking, planning, fighting. All his life, he's been action and attitude and getting the job done. He needs that, he needs a challenge to take head-on. If he doesn't, if he doesn't have something to fight against or someone to fight for, then all he has to fight is himself and he's not good with that. He's never been good with that."

"What can I do?"

"Be his Mom?"

That was a deceptively simple and agonizingly complex answer. "How do I do that?"

"I'm sorry," Sam said. He sounded genuinely regretful. "But I don't know."

Mary reached over and squeezed Sam's hand. "I'm sorry, too," she said. "What would your Dad do?"

"Dad? He'd – he and Dean – Dad wasn't much for talking, you know? Especially not about how we were feeling or how to make it better. He'd just – he'd just be there, you know? A bowl of soup if we were sick, a shot of whiskey if we were injured, a bottle of beer if it was just a bad day. Just sitting there, just being there."

"And that helped?"

"Yeah, yeah it did. I mean, I didn't always realize it at the time, but yeah. It helped a lot."

"All right, then. Wish me luck." She stood up, grabbed two bottles of beer from the fridge, and went in search of Dean.

TBC