The Difference Between Me & You...

[blubird_pie]

Title: The Difference Between Me &You is that You’re not on Fire

Summary: “It seems like he ends up doing this song and dance at every school, eventually. There’s a certain way that teachers in any town react to boys in ill-fitting clothes who miss three days out of ten and come back with unexplained bruises and cuts.”

Word count: 1,000
Rated: pg-

Comments

[nong_pradu]

I don't think John was abusive, per se, but I do think that he made a lot of poor decisions as a parent. And I think the scenario you've described is possibly spot on, too

[blubird_pie]

Thank you very much! I don't know if I buy John hitting his boys, but if he did I see it going like this- in the heat of the moment, trying to make them safer in the future.

I think that you're right about how Dean sees John's love as unequal, and I wonder when that happened, too- in flashbacks he hero-worships the guy, and seems secure in feeling loved... but by mid-series he's developed some real resentment (Dream a Little Dream). Maybe it's the transition from John hunting and keeping him safe to John actually taking him on hunts where Dean is worried he won't live up to his Dad's expectations? The abandonment right before the pilot can't have helped, either.

Part of what I like about fic is, like you say the gaps- the Dean/John relationship goes through so many subtle permutations over time! Thanks again for the thoughtful comment.

[emmademarais]

Great bunny! It's a good insight into their world that Dean and Sam's injuries and flakey school history would raise red flags at school and cause them to have to do some fancy stepping to keep their Dad out of trouble. Dean would consider it a kind of odd duty to deflect such trivial matters from his heroic life saving Dad. Oddly it's Sammy I can see occasionally wanting to cave so he can be put into foster care and have a normal life, but he couldn't risk losing Dean so he'd never do it.

Thought provoking! Very nice!

[blubird_pie]

That's a good point about Sam- I kind of figure he went on fewer hunts and cared more about missing class, so he might have had less reason to get questioned, but in this situation, I think he'd be much more annoyed about lying than Dean was. And as Dean got older, I'm sure that people just thought he was a delinquent, so I kind of wanted to capture that moment when he'd decided to be a hunter but the normal world hadn't quite written him off yet. Thanks again for the comment!

[embroiderama]

I love how steely and yet sad Dean is here. I can't really imagine John hitting either of the boys unless it was in the middle of a crazy situation and he just *reacted* very badly, but you left it open to interpretation here which is cool. :)

[blubird_pie]

Woo, comment on an fic more than a week old! My day is officially made.

TBH, I don't really see John hitting the boys either- but if he did, I'm positive that Dean would have covered for him upside down and sideways. Dean's crazy exceptionalism when it comes to his dad is what prompted this fic, John's actions were more an unfortunate side effect. /apology-slash-justification. Anyways, thanks very much for taking the time to respond to something older, SPN fandom is a crazy big pond its charming to have proof that my older stuff hasn't totally fallen through the cracks ;)

[rince1wind]

So sometimes Dean's injured by something supernatural and sometimes it's his dad -- and Dean doesn't distinguish between them: they're what happens in his life. I can see him being like that as a kid.