Ten Green Bottles - 1/1
Ten Green Bottles
Rating: G, Gen
Characters: Dean, Sammy, John, Bobby
Word Count: 3,398
Disclaimer: The characters are sadly not mine. I’m just sticking pins into Winchester dolls for the purposes of general angst. Sorry about the holes!
A/N: Door 10 in my SPN Advent Calendar
This one’s for mysticmhorag. Happy birthday (and thanks for the explosive lyrics.) Wee!chesters romping around Bobby’s yard (with only trickles of angst - couldn’t leave it all out could I? Thanks to secret-seer for blowing up the bottle in the banner - good shot!
Setting: Lawrence County, SD, 1983-1992, 2010.
Summary: Sing-A-Long-A-Boom-Boom.
1983
Sammy liked to remember things. It took him a while to learn how to do it on his own, until then he had Dean. So he didn’t remember the first time, although sometimes he thought he did. But that might have been because of Dean.
Dean’s hand skimmed his hair as Sammy looked up at him. ‘The snow was this high.’
‘How high?’ Every time he asked, the snow was exactly his current height.
‘Too high, dude. Dad had to carry us both inside.’ Even years later Dean sounded annoyed that he hadn’t met the man they soon called Uncle Bobby standing on his own two feet holding his brother.
It was Christmas, Sammy remembered that much.
~
1984
When Sammy was one Dean plumped his diapered butt onto Schlesinger’s broad back and led him around the yard for his first riding lesson.
Dean said Schlesinger didn’t mind the smell. Sammy didn’t think that bit was true, especially as Dean always told the story with one hand clamped over his nose.
‘He never dropped you once, well, not after the first time anyway.’
Sammy wanted to rub his backside, but didn’t dare with Dean watching. He was old enough to know it couldn’t still be sore after all these years, but Dean was much too good at telling stories that felt true.
‘Dad and Uncle Bobby yelled a lot,’ Dean said happily. ‘That’s the first time I ever got grounded.’ He still looked smug at the idea of starting his career as a juvenile delinquent at age five. ‘You cried. You were such a wussy.’
Sammy just remembered sunshine, and Dean. He hadn’t been the one to cry, he knew that much.
~~
1985
At the age of two Sammy was just like Dean. Well, that’s how Dean told the story.
‘You ate everything, man. You were a regular Hoover.’ He shook his head in mock astonishment. ‘Dad used to have to run a separate credit card just for all that applesauce you loved.’ Dean didn’t sound jealous at all. Probably because he’d filled out the application for Sammy’s card himself. Sammy knew that because there was no way their father would have ever filled out a form for a Mr C. Monster. Dean had kept the card and still liked to flash it at Sammy whenever he wanted to rile him up.
‘Then we got back here in fall, and Uncle Bobby ruined you for life, just when I was about to start you on hamburgers and hot rod magazines.’ Dean’s voice still held the bitter echoes of that old complaint.
‘Next thing I know you, he’s got you sitting there listening to him read Latin texts out loud and you’re following his finger and nodding along as if you can read every word. Crawler! We all know you didn’t start reading until you were three after I started reading all those Richard Scarry books to you.’
Sammy shrugged. He knew what he liked, and he liked books. Dean might complain, but he’d spent the better part of those years lifting all the comics and kid’s books Sammy even bothered to look sideways at in a shop. Uncle Bobby was just responsible for the more formal side of his literary education.
‘If I’d given you a dictionary you’d have taken it up to bed with us instead of good old Mr Fred.’
All Sammy could remember was the smell of dust and the bland floury taste of paper and paste. But maybe that wasn’t his memory either. It felt like it was though, and that was the important thing.
~~~
1986
Three was just that little bit different. That was the year Sammy started remembering for himself. Not everything, just the important things.
Two bodies curled up as one in the back of the car. His Dad timing them doing sprints between towering rows of corn, shouting them on to victory, and rewarding the winner of each heat with a rare Twinkie. Being kicked in bed for shoving his cold feet under someone else’s legs. Racing his brother through the ever-changing iron and steel maze of Uncle Bobby’s yard. Dean always complaining of being too hot in winter and flinging the extra blankets right in his face.
~~~~
1987
When Sammy hit four and he could be of more help, Dean’s idea of fun reached new heights. And Sammy began to realise that his big brother always carefully saved his best ideas for Uncle Bobby’s where they could both roam free without their father’s usual strange list of nots.
That May they somehow managed to build an entire fort out of the rusted through hulks of empty fuel drums with an army tarpaulin doing a second tour of duty as a roof. Dean had grand plans to use it as their base of operations whenever they were there. Unfortunately for them, a sudden deluge brought the tarp flooding down on them at 7.15 am on an unseasonably bleak Thursday morning. Dean pretended it was all part of the plan, screaming ‘Surprise drill! Tunnel out, Private!’ in his best imitation of their father’s parade ground growl. When they crawled out side-by-side to crash to a dripping stop against Dad’s feet, they both got grounded for the next month.
Dean whacked Sammy up the back of the head that night, whispering excitedly under the covers, ‘You beat my record by a year!’
There was no way that Sammy was ever going to forget that visit.
~~~~~
1988
By the time Sammy was five, they both had a pattern of dares etched into their souls.
In diners across the country they forced each other to eat the most disgusting combinations of food available. Dean always won those challenges, except for the one time in East Texas that Sammy choked down broccoli without anything else to mask the smell or the taste. Even Dean had to admit he couldn’t top that effort, particularly after Sammy opened his mouth to show him the evidence.
The endless night-time parade of strange motel rooms usually involved Sam ramming a lot of stolen potatoes into the exhaust pipes of other people’s cars while Dean managed to put Dad’s lock-pick training to good use in order to creatively re-wire a number of engines. Sammy found out that Dad was right; you never knew when a skill might come in handy. On quiet nights they fell back on an old favourite - tossing water balloons at anything that moved into their target area. Sammy thought Dean took the joke too far when he kept pretending to bless the water first, “just in case they’re door-to-door Bible salesmen.” Sammy assumed Dean was hedging his bets in case Pastor Murphy was right about there being a heaven up above.
Uncle Bobby’s yard, however, was always their personal Holy Grail. Sammy was glad his Dad’s job kept bringing them back to South Dakota where even Dean had trouble running out of things they could build, take apart, or completely destroy. No matter what they did to one wreck, there was always another one to move on to. Strangely enough, Uncle Bobby didn’t seem to mind them descending like locusts on the corner actually designated as scrap on his property. Sammy couldn’t tell the difference between it and everything else, but Dean could, and he trusted his brother on that.
For the rest of his life Sammy always associated the smell of engine oil with the sound of Dean laughing.
~~~~~~
1989
When Sammy was six, he came rushing back from his self-imposed duty patrolling the western perimeter to drag Dean away from “helping” Uncle Bobby, screaming, ‘Elephants!’
He was sure he’d seen them moving through the dank October fog, lumbering between the battle-scarred hulks of old Ford pickups and the odd Greyhound bus. Dean moved fast, but he never saw anything and Sammy cursed the fact that he’d stood there dumbly staring into the deepening shadows for a full ten minutes before he’d run back for his brother.
Dean said he was just dreaming and told him not to be a total dork before he spent the next hour helping Sammy scout through the mud and metal carcasses in search of giant hoofprints.
After Sammy had looked up everything in the encyclopaedia on elephants that evening, Dean finally said he should remember that it was Uncle Bobby’s yard after all, and anything was possible.
~~~~~~~
1990
The next year Sammy got away with a lot. Unfortunately that weird string of good luck seemed to have mostly worn off before his birthday came around. But he still had enough random episodes over the next few months to keep him off balance.
In one infamous incident he and Dean were caught red-helmeted in the act of zooming out of Uncle Bobby’s arched gateway riding double on an old Indian at what Dean later insisted had to have been at least 50 mph.
Dad yelled at Uncle Bobby for leaving a working vehicle around and refused to listen to his protestations that it had still been broken the last time he’d looked. Then Dean got yelled at the longest for being the driver, and for fixing the bike in the first place. Sammy strangely just got smothered in one of Dad’s overwhelming bear hugs. In the end the only one punished was Dean who ended up being banished to his room for a week-long detention.
Sammy thought it was unfair because Dean had spent days huddled over that dismantled engine cursing up a storm, and if Dad had spotted them five minutes earlier he’d have found Dean riding pillion instead of Sammy as they inscribed figures of eights in the dust behind the shed sensibly chosen for its position furthest from the house.
They spent the next seven days cooped up together playing endless games of Monopoly while Dean steadfastly refused to answer any of his questions about Dad. In the end Dean tied a gag around Sammy’s mouth before saying this was his lucky year and that he should learn how to make the most of it because it surely wouldn’t last.
Sammy just wished he could remember how he’d gotten that “get out of jail free” card in the first place.
~~~~~~~~
1991
The year Sammy turned eight he spent most of it listening to Dean.
Which was kind of like every other year except that now when Dean was happy he sang, and not just in the shower or in the back seat while Dad churned up miles of blacktop en route to another forsaken town to sell something he said was so boring he couldn’t even begin to talk about it.
When he was in a good mood, Dean sang every single tune he’d ever heard. The rest of the time he sat there and pouted a lot. Dad said it had something to do with being a teenager. When Sammy said Dean wasn’t one yet, Dad answered that Dean was always an early starter. Sammy didn’t think that sounded like a good thing. It meant you could never predict from one moment to the next what sort of mood Dean would be in. Dad said Sammy was better at that than he was. Sammy was glad his Dad thought he was good at something.
Dean liked to sing advertising jingles, mostly the ones about food. The M&M ad was his all-time favourite. Sammy hated that ad after the forty-third repetition.
He sang country and western songs and majored in Johnny Cash, even spending two months dressing entirely in black before Sammy kind of accidentally on purpose tipped some bleach in with a load of washing. They had a really good fight after that and Dean stopping singing for a whole day, but didn’t pout either. For twenty-four hours Sammy thought he had the old Dean back, and then the sun got up.
You name a musical genre Dean tried it. He got down, he got up, he hipped, he hopped, he boogied his bugle (and Sammy wished he’d never got out of bed that particular day), and he even tried to blow chewing gum bubbles while he sang pop songs. That turned out to be a mistake on his part, but at least Dad managed to get him to cough up the gum before he turned completely blue.
Dean even sang hymns (but only once, and it was under duress) in the choir for Pastor Murphy, but he refused to wear any girly robes. Sammy thought that was a shame because he was saving a roll of film for just such an occasion. Sammy never found out exactly what Pastor Jim had on his brother, but he reckoned it was something big.
He sang when Dad was there, he sang even more when Dad was off on a work trip. During those times he mostly sang songs that Sammy liked, which meant that Dean ended up singing a lot of John Denver that year. Even though Dean winced he did an awesome version of “Grandma’s feather bed,” even if his song only had the bed hold two kids, one hound dog, and no geese (though he spent a lot of time trying to catch one to join in the chorus).
The only thing he refused to sing was Abba. Even Dean had limits.
By the end of the year Dean had narrowed down his preferred song list to rock music, the louder and angrier the better.
It turned out that Dean was quite capable of using music to distract both himself and Sammy.
In December Sammy found out everything. Afterwards he wished he couldn’t remember every single moment of that conversation with Dean, especially when their father got home. Sammy had never been good at keeping secrets, and that Christmas night was no exception. Sammy learned fast after that.
The one thing he never regretted, and never wanted to forget was his gift to Dean.
~~~~~~~~~
1992
From then on life was different. Once Dad found out that Sammy knew all the family’s secrets (and after he’d finished tearing Dean a new one), everything changed.
What Sammy had thought of as his father’s weird insistence on all those Marine drills took on a whole new level of meaning, and he started to pay closer attention to all his lessons.
It was no longer about beating his big brother’s speed on the track, or becoming the quickest Winchester to pick a lock. It was about learning how to fight, stay alive, to kill the enemy - all the enemies. It was about Mom and making sure he never ever lost another family member.
The first thing Dad did was to teach Sammy how to shoot. It wasn’t something that came easily the way Dean told him it would. It had to be worked at until he thought he’d always go to sleep smelling of gun oil and sweat.
But later that year when Sammy told his father there was something in his closet and Dad simply handed him a gun on the way out to a hunt, he knew exactly what to do. He threw up afterwards though. Dean held him through it, cleaned up both messes and never told their father about the second one.
By the time their father was forced to drop them off in South Dakota that December, both of them were desperate to pretend, if only for a few days, that their lives were completely ordinary.
Faking normal turned out to be more dangerous than it looked.
You couldn’t say anything that happened over the next few days was Uncle Bobby’s fault. He’d taken one look at them and banished them to bed with hot cocoa and all the dogs, bar the one on night duty, for company.
The next day they didn’t do anything normal kids wouldn’t do. No Latin, no spells, no target shooting, no other drills. Instead Uncle Bobby had them up at dawn and they didn’t stop until they collapsed in a confused heap on the same bed at dusk. Normal was hard work.
Amongst all the items on Uncle Bobby’s newly created “to do” list they did that day, the hardest thing of all was Grandma Singer’s Bourbon Balls.
‘Hell, boys! The army didn’t teach me how to cook, my grandmomma did! All the army ever showed me was how to cater in quantity.’ Uncle Bobby shook his head, muttering something under his breath about how it was safer to be descended upon by demons than a plague of Winchesters.
Uncle Bobby had all the ingredients, and his assistant chefs, lined up with military precision. Sammy knew that if he hadn’t been trying so hard to pretend right along with them he’d have probably shot off a pistol to start them off.
All due respect to Grandma Singer, her Bourbon Balls were a pain to make. But luckily Dean excelled at smashing things; once he’d successfully shattered his own lot of pecans and ginger biscuits he generously offered to whack everyone else’s ingredients with an empty Jack Daniels bottle for free.
Sammy stuck his tongue out and kept on gently steamrollering on. Eventually he caught up.
The last stage was where trouble struck. As soon as their instructor told them to form the mixture into balls Dean lost it, and no amount of kicking from Sammy could stop him snickering and repeating, ‘Balls! I must make more balls!’ in a squeaky voice.
Thankfully Uncle Bobby had learnt a thing or two about psychological warfare from the Marines. All it took was one gruff comment that Dean wouldn’t get to eat any of the results of their hard work and Dean was (almost) meekly rolling spoonful after spoonful between his palms before dive-bombing them into the icing sugar.
After that Uncle Bobby gave up trying to keep his forces in check, and he gave as good as he got in the snowstorm that followed. In the end they only lost a few balls in the fray. Even Dean admitted they were worth the effort, or at least until he got very sick from a combination of all the Bourbon Balls he ate and the couple of slugs he’d taken from a not so empty bottle. This time Sammy did the holding.
The next morning Uncle Bobby set them free in the yard. What they ended up doing out there wasn’t his fault at all, despite what their father said afterwards about the danger of keeping nitroglycerin on the premises.
It was mostly Dean’s fault, but Sammy took the burden of the blame this time and smiled through it.
It started out innocuously enough with Dean singing. Unfortunately he happened to choose “Ten Green Bottles” just to annoy Sammy. So, yeah, it was indeed mostly Dean’s fault.
It didn’t take many lines before Dean started getting creative, and that was the trigger for what followed.
The minute Dean changed to ‘Ten bottles of nitro,’ Sammy knew exactly where the day was going. So, yeah, he had a chance to stop it and say no, and he didn’t. That was the third reason he took the blame.
Dean, being Dean, decided to up the stakes. Dean, being a Winchester and his father’s son, decided to add a little target practice to the mix.
Sammy, being Sammy, followed Dean all the way. Sammy, being a Winchester, his father’s son, and Dean’s brother, took the dare and the first shot. He didn’t miss.
‘Shit! Run, Sammy! Run!’
As one of Uncle Bobby’s storage sheds exploded behind them Sammy admitted to himself that sometimes it was still about trying to beat Dean.
~~~~~~~~~~
2010
Sam liked to remember things. It took him a while to remember everything on his own, until then he had Dean. So he didn’t remember the first time, or the next, although sometimes he thought he did, but in the end none of that mattered. That, like everything else in his life was because of Dean.
Ten bottles of nitro sitting on the wall
Ten bottles of nitro sitting on the wall
Ten bottles of nitro sitting on the wall
If one bottle of nitro should accidentally fall
There’d be no bottles of nitro and no fucking wall!
For further Christmas stories and graphics see my: SPN Advent Calendar
Rating: G, Gen
Characters: Dean, Sammy, John, Bobby
Word Count: 3,398
Disclaimer: The characters are sadly not mine. I’m just sticking pins into Winchester dolls for the purposes of general angst. Sorry about the holes!
A/N: Door 10 in my SPN Advent Calendar
This one’s for mysticmhorag. Happy birthday (and thanks for the explosive lyrics.) Wee!chesters romping around Bobby’s yard (with only trickles of angst - couldn’t leave it all out could I? Thanks to secret-seer for blowing up the bottle in the banner - good shot!
Setting: Lawrence County, SD, 1983-1992, 2010.
Summary: Sing-A-Long-A-Boom-Boom.
1983
Sammy liked to remember things. It took him a while to learn how to do it on his own, until then he had Dean. So he didn’t remember the first time, although sometimes he thought he did. But that might have been because of Dean.
Dean’s hand skimmed his hair as Sammy looked up at him. ‘The snow was this high.’
‘How high?’ Every time he asked, the snow was exactly his current height.
‘Too high, dude. Dad had to carry us both inside.’ Even years later Dean sounded annoyed that he hadn’t met the man they soon called Uncle Bobby standing on his own two feet holding his brother.
It was Christmas, Sammy remembered that much.
~
1984
When Sammy was one Dean plumped his diapered butt onto Schlesinger’s broad back and led him around the yard for his first riding lesson.
Dean said Schlesinger didn’t mind the smell. Sammy didn’t think that bit was true, especially as Dean always told the story with one hand clamped over his nose.
‘He never dropped you once, well, not after the first time anyway.’
Sammy wanted to rub his backside, but didn’t dare with Dean watching. He was old enough to know it couldn’t still be sore after all these years, but Dean was much too good at telling stories that felt true.
‘Dad and Uncle Bobby yelled a lot,’ Dean said happily. ‘That’s the first time I ever got grounded.’ He still looked smug at the idea of starting his career as a juvenile delinquent at age five. ‘You cried. You were such a wussy.’
Sammy just remembered sunshine, and Dean. He hadn’t been the one to cry, he knew that much.
~~
1985
At the age of two Sammy was just like Dean. Well, that’s how Dean told the story.
‘You ate everything, man. You were a regular Hoover.’ He shook his head in mock astonishment. ‘Dad used to have to run a separate credit card just for all that applesauce you loved.’ Dean didn’t sound jealous at all. Probably because he’d filled out the application for Sammy’s card himself. Sammy knew that because there was no way their father would have ever filled out a form for a Mr C. Monster. Dean had kept the card and still liked to flash it at Sammy whenever he wanted to rile him up.
‘Then we got back here in fall, and Uncle Bobby ruined you for life, just when I was about to start you on hamburgers and hot rod magazines.’ Dean’s voice still held the bitter echoes of that old complaint.
‘Next thing I know you, he’s got you sitting there listening to him read Latin texts out loud and you’re following his finger and nodding along as if you can read every word. Crawler! We all know you didn’t start reading until you were three after I started reading all those Richard Scarry books to you.’
Sammy shrugged. He knew what he liked, and he liked books. Dean might complain, but he’d spent the better part of those years lifting all the comics and kid’s books Sammy even bothered to look sideways at in a shop. Uncle Bobby was just responsible for the more formal side of his literary education.
‘If I’d given you a dictionary you’d have taken it up to bed with us instead of good old Mr Fred.’
All Sammy could remember was the smell of dust and the bland floury taste of paper and paste. But maybe that wasn’t his memory either. It felt like it was though, and that was the important thing.
~~~
1986
Three was just that little bit different. That was the year Sammy started remembering for himself. Not everything, just the important things.
Two bodies curled up as one in the back of the car. His Dad timing them doing sprints between towering rows of corn, shouting them on to victory, and rewarding the winner of each heat with a rare Twinkie. Being kicked in bed for shoving his cold feet under someone else’s legs. Racing his brother through the ever-changing iron and steel maze of Uncle Bobby’s yard. Dean always complaining of being too hot in winter and flinging the extra blankets right in his face.
~~~~
1987
When Sammy hit four and he could be of more help, Dean’s idea of fun reached new heights. And Sammy began to realise that his big brother always carefully saved his best ideas for Uncle Bobby’s where they could both roam free without their father’s usual strange list of nots.
That May they somehow managed to build an entire fort out of the rusted through hulks of empty fuel drums with an army tarpaulin doing a second tour of duty as a roof. Dean had grand plans to use it as their base of operations whenever they were there. Unfortunately for them, a sudden deluge brought the tarp flooding down on them at 7.15 am on an unseasonably bleak Thursday morning. Dean pretended it was all part of the plan, screaming ‘Surprise drill! Tunnel out, Private!’ in his best imitation of their father’s parade ground growl. When they crawled out side-by-side to crash to a dripping stop against Dad’s feet, they both got grounded for the next month.
Dean whacked Sammy up the back of the head that night, whispering excitedly under the covers, ‘You beat my record by a year!’
There was no way that Sammy was ever going to forget that visit.
~~~~~
1988
By the time Sammy was five, they both had a pattern of dares etched into their souls.
In diners across the country they forced each other to eat the most disgusting combinations of food available. Dean always won those challenges, except for the one time in East Texas that Sammy choked down broccoli without anything else to mask the smell or the taste. Even Dean had to admit he couldn’t top that effort, particularly after Sammy opened his mouth to show him the evidence.
The endless night-time parade of strange motel rooms usually involved Sam ramming a lot of stolen potatoes into the exhaust pipes of other people’s cars while Dean managed to put Dad’s lock-pick training to good use in order to creatively re-wire a number of engines. Sammy found out that Dad was right; you never knew when a skill might come in handy. On quiet nights they fell back on an old favourite - tossing water balloons at anything that moved into their target area. Sammy thought Dean took the joke too far when he kept pretending to bless the water first, “just in case they’re door-to-door Bible salesmen.” Sammy assumed Dean was hedging his bets in case Pastor Murphy was right about there being a heaven up above.
Uncle Bobby’s yard, however, was always their personal Holy Grail. Sammy was glad his Dad’s job kept bringing them back to South Dakota where even Dean had trouble running out of things they could build, take apart, or completely destroy. No matter what they did to one wreck, there was always another one to move on to. Strangely enough, Uncle Bobby didn’t seem to mind them descending like locusts on the corner actually designated as scrap on his property. Sammy couldn’t tell the difference between it and everything else, but Dean could, and he trusted his brother on that.
For the rest of his life Sammy always associated the smell of engine oil with the sound of Dean laughing.
~~~~~~
1989
When Sammy was six, he came rushing back from his self-imposed duty patrolling the western perimeter to drag Dean away from “helping” Uncle Bobby, screaming, ‘Elephants!’
He was sure he’d seen them moving through the dank October fog, lumbering between the battle-scarred hulks of old Ford pickups and the odd Greyhound bus. Dean moved fast, but he never saw anything and Sammy cursed the fact that he’d stood there dumbly staring into the deepening shadows for a full ten minutes before he’d run back for his brother.
Dean said he was just dreaming and told him not to be a total dork before he spent the next hour helping Sammy scout through the mud and metal carcasses in search of giant hoofprints.
After Sammy had looked up everything in the encyclopaedia on elephants that evening, Dean finally said he should remember that it was Uncle Bobby’s yard after all, and anything was possible.
~~~~~~~
1990
The next year Sammy got away with a lot. Unfortunately that weird string of good luck seemed to have mostly worn off before his birthday came around. But he still had enough random episodes over the next few months to keep him off balance.
In one infamous incident he and Dean were caught red-helmeted in the act of zooming out of Uncle Bobby’s arched gateway riding double on an old Indian at what Dean later insisted had to have been at least 50 mph.
Dad yelled at Uncle Bobby for leaving a working vehicle around and refused to listen to his protestations that it had still been broken the last time he’d looked. Then Dean got yelled at the longest for being the driver, and for fixing the bike in the first place. Sammy strangely just got smothered in one of Dad’s overwhelming bear hugs. In the end the only one punished was Dean who ended up being banished to his room for a week-long detention.
Sammy thought it was unfair because Dean had spent days huddled over that dismantled engine cursing up a storm, and if Dad had spotted them five minutes earlier he’d have found Dean riding pillion instead of Sammy as they inscribed figures of eights in the dust behind the shed sensibly chosen for its position furthest from the house.
They spent the next seven days cooped up together playing endless games of Monopoly while Dean steadfastly refused to answer any of his questions about Dad. In the end Dean tied a gag around Sammy’s mouth before saying this was his lucky year and that he should learn how to make the most of it because it surely wouldn’t last.
Sammy just wished he could remember how he’d gotten that “get out of jail free” card in the first place.
~~~~~~~~
1991
The year Sammy turned eight he spent most of it listening to Dean.
Which was kind of like every other year except that now when Dean was happy he sang, and not just in the shower or in the back seat while Dad churned up miles of blacktop en route to another forsaken town to sell something he said was so boring he couldn’t even begin to talk about it.
When he was in a good mood, Dean sang every single tune he’d ever heard. The rest of the time he sat there and pouted a lot. Dad said it had something to do with being a teenager. When Sammy said Dean wasn’t one yet, Dad answered that Dean was always an early starter. Sammy didn’t think that sounded like a good thing. It meant you could never predict from one moment to the next what sort of mood Dean would be in. Dad said Sammy was better at that than he was. Sammy was glad his Dad thought he was good at something.
Dean liked to sing advertising jingles, mostly the ones about food. The M&M ad was his all-time favourite. Sammy hated that ad after the forty-third repetition.
He sang country and western songs and majored in Johnny Cash, even spending two months dressing entirely in black before Sammy kind of accidentally on purpose tipped some bleach in with a load of washing. They had a really good fight after that and Dean stopping singing for a whole day, but didn’t pout either. For twenty-four hours Sammy thought he had the old Dean back, and then the sun got up.
You name a musical genre Dean tried it. He got down, he got up, he hipped, he hopped, he boogied his bugle (and Sammy wished he’d never got out of bed that particular day), and he even tried to blow chewing gum bubbles while he sang pop songs. That turned out to be a mistake on his part, but at least Dad managed to get him to cough up the gum before he turned completely blue.
Dean even sang hymns (but only once, and it was under duress) in the choir for Pastor Murphy, but he refused to wear any girly robes. Sammy thought that was a shame because he was saving a roll of film for just such an occasion. Sammy never found out exactly what Pastor Jim had on his brother, but he reckoned it was something big.
He sang when Dad was there, he sang even more when Dad was off on a work trip. During those times he mostly sang songs that Sammy liked, which meant that Dean ended up singing a lot of John Denver that year. Even though Dean winced he did an awesome version of “Grandma’s feather bed,” even if his song only had the bed hold two kids, one hound dog, and no geese (though he spent a lot of time trying to catch one to join in the chorus).
The only thing he refused to sing was Abba. Even Dean had limits.
By the end of the year Dean had narrowed down his preferred song list to rock music, the louder and angrier the better.
It turned out that Dean was quite capable of using music to distract both himself and Sammy.
In December Sammy found out everything. Afterwards he wished he couldn’t remember every single moment of that conversation with Dean, especially when their father got home. Sammy had never been good at keeping secrets, and that Christmas night was no exception. Sammy learned fast after that.
The one thing he never regretted, and never wanted to forget was his gift to Dean.
~~~~~~~~~
1992
From then on life was different. Once Dad found out that Sammy knew all the family’s secrets (and after he’d finished tearing Dean a new one), everything changed.
What Sammy had thought of as his father’s weird insistence on all those Marine drills took on a whole new level of meaning, and he started to pay closer attention to all his lessons.
It was no longer about beating his big brother’s speed on the track, or becoming the quickest Winchester to pick a lock. It was about learning how to fight, stay alive, to kill the enemy - all the enemies. It was about Mom and making sure he never ever lost another family member.
The first thing Dad did was to teach Sammy how to shoot. It wasn’t something that came easily the way Dean told him it would. It had to be worked at until he thought he’d always go to sleep smelling of gun oil and sweat.
But later that year when Sammy told his father there was something in his closet and Dad simply handed him a gun on the way out to a hunt, he knew exactly what to do. He threw up afterwards though. Dean held him through it, cleaned up both messes and never told their father about the second one.
By the time their father was forced to drop them off in South Dakota that December, both of them were desperate to pretend, if only for a few days, that their lives were completely ordinary.
Faking normal turned out to be more dangerous than it looked.
You couldn’t say anything that happened over the next few days was Uncle Bobby’s fault. He’d taken one look at them and banished them to bed with hot cocoa and all the dogs, bar the one on night duty, for company.
The next day they didn’t do anything normal kids wouldn’t do. No Latin, no spells, no target shooting, no other drills. Instead Uncle Bobby had them up at dawn and they didn’t stop until they collapsed in a confused heap on the same bed at dusk. Normal was hard work.
Amongst all the items on Uncle Bobby’s newly created “to do” list they did that day, the hardest thing of all was Grandma Singer’s Bourbon Balls.
‘Hell, boys! The army didn’t teach me how to cook, my grandmomma did! All the army ever showed me was how to cater in quantity.’ Uncle Bobby shook his head, muttering something under his breath about how it was safer to be descended upon by demons than a plague of Winchesters.
Uncle Bobby had all the ingredients, and his assistant chefs, lined up with military precision. Sammy knew that if he hadn’t been trying so hard to pretend right along with them he’d have probably shot off a pistol to start them off.
All due respect to Grandma Singer, her Bourbon Balls were a pain to make. But luckily Dean excelled at smashing things; once he’d successfully shattered his own lot of pecans and ginger biscuits he generously offered to whack everyone else’s ingredients with an empty Jack Daniels bottle for free.
Sammy stuck his tongue out and kept on gently steamrollering on. Eventually he caught up.
The last stage was where trouble struck. As soon as their instructor told them to form the mixture into balls Dean lost it, and no amount of kicking from Sammy could stop him snickering and repeating, ‘Balls! I must make more balls!’ in a squeaky voice.
Thankfully Uncle Bobby had learnt a thing or two about psychological warfare from the Marines. All it took was one gruff comment that Dean wouldn’t get to eat any of the results of their hard work and Dean was (almost) meekly rolling spoonful after spoonful between his palms before dive-bombing them into the icing sugar.
After that Uncle Bobby gave up trying to keep his forces in check, and he gave as good as he got in the snowstorm that followed. In the end they only lost a few balls in the fray. Even Dean admitted they were worth the effort, or at least until he got very sick from a combination of all the Bourbon Balls he ate and the couple of slugs he’d taken from a not so empty bottle. This time Sammy did the holding.
The next morning Uncle Bobby set them free in the yard. What they ended up doing out there wasn’t his fault at all, despite what their father said afterwards about the danger of keeping nitroglycerin on the premises.
It was mostly Dean’s fault, but Sammy took the burden of the blame this time and smiled through it.
It started out innocuously enough with Dean singing. Unfortunately he happened to choose “Ten Green Bottles” just to annoy Sammy. So, yeah, it was indeed mostly Dean’s fault.
It didn’t take many lines before Dean started getting creative, and that was the trigger for what followed.
The minute Dean changed to ‘Ten bottles of nitro,’ Sammy knew exactly where the day was going. So, yeah, he had a chance to stop it and say no, and he didn’t. That was the third reason he took the blame.
Dean, being Dean, decided to up the stakes. Dean, being a Winchester and his father’s son, decided to add a little target practice to the mix.
Sammy, being Sammy, followed Dean all the way. Sammy, being a Winchester, his father’s son, and Dean’s brother, took the dare and the first shot. He didn’t miss.
‘Shit! Run, Sammy! Run!’
As one of Uncle Bobby’s storage sheds exploded behind them Sammy admitted to himself that sometimes it was still about trying to beat Dean.
~~~~~~~~~~
2010
Sam liked to remember things. It took him a while to remember everything on his own, until then he had Dean. So he didn’t remember the first time, or the next, although sometimes he thought he did, but in the end none of that mattered. That, like everything else in his life was because of Dean.
Ten bottles of nitro sitting on the wall
Ten bottles of nitro sitting on the wall
Ten bottles of nitro sitting on the wall
If one bottle of nitro should accidentally fall
There’d be no bottles of nitro and no fucking wall!
For further Christmas stories and graphics see my: SPN Advent Calendar