Nighthawks 1/1
Nighthawks
Rating: R, Het, Gen
Characters: John/Mary, John/OFCs, Dean, Sam, Sam/Jess
Word Count: 3,401
Disclaimer: The characters are sadly not mine. I’m just sticking pins into Winchesters for fun and angst. Sorry about the holes!
A/N: The Winchester trinity - sex, love, and sacrifice. Spoilers up to 4.01 Lazarus Rising.
Thanks to noirbabalon for appreciating John enough to force herself to beta several fics in a 24 hour period.
Summary: People die. You die. Some things you remember, some you can’t. There’s really only one thing that’s important.
If he were the sort of man to look back and psychoanalyze his life, he’d have said he spent most of his life fighting one thing or another. Family, friends; whoever was on the opposite side of whatever war he happened to be in at the time.
He only had the grace of one lull, and her name was Mary. Cornsilk hair, eyes that laughed despite the fact he sensed she had secrets of her own. By rights they shouldn’t have been able to make it work, but his Mary had a way of leaping over all the obstacles and holding him down until he listened to her particular form of reasoning. Then, by some miracle she managed to add to more voices to her side of the argument-first Dean, and then Sammy, and John Winchester was pretty much a goner.
Then the war followed them home, Mary was taken from him, and his children were the only reason he didn’t go too.
After that he never stopped fighting. Crusades didn’t leave time for backwards looks, compassion, or anything other than the all-encompassing love he had for the sons he fought for.
Sometimes it caught him off guard.
John Winchester didn’t want, and he didn’t need. He made sure of that. Denial became policy.
Two years, three months, and five days after Mary died he woke up with the sort of morning wood his wife used to joke meant he was born for a career in forestry rather than the Marines.
Two years, three months, and five days before his body betrayed him.
He was stuck in an ancient unheated Airstream in a trailer park on the outskirts of Albuquerque being jumped on by two hyperactive little boys who wanted to ‘Go outside and play,’ before demanding to know ‘Why are you hiding, Dad?’
Two years, three months, and five days and he wished he could laugh. On a positive note, at least the water in the shower was enough to freeze him back to his version of normality.
Two years, three months, and six days and his body definitely had a mind of its own again.
A year later he ended up having to do something about it.
He had come to what he liked to think of as a ceasefire with his dick. He went on as many long evening runs as he could with Sammy clinging like a stubborn monkey to his back and Dean trotting uncomplainingly alongside. That usually wore him out enough that the problem stopped becoming a daily occurrence. It had the added benefit that he could outrun just about anything he fought if he had to. Having children had redefined his concept of cowardice; if a hunt went to pieces he had no qualms about making a break for freedom. It was about survival and coming back to kill another day. Most of all it was about living long enough to teach his boys what they needed to stay alive, and not failing them the way he had their mother.
When the night-time marathons didn’t work he got up early; really, really, early-being a parent had a lot of drawbacks-and got rid of the problem the quickest way possible.
With hindsight, he should have known those solutions wouldn’t always work.
The first time he slept with someone other than his wife he threw up on his way home.
That didn’t happen the next time, but he didn’t feel any better about himself.
His dick on the other hand had absolutely no complaints whatsoever.
In the end, it became just another thing he had to do, one way to get the adrenaline going, and then release tension without actually killing anything. He still cherished Mary every second of every day, but he had to live to raise his sons, and kill that demon. Sex became just another part of his life. He was pragmatic; accepted it, did it, liked it, sometimes it was even completely amazing, and he dealt with that and moved on to the next hunt.
He took care with his choices. No blondes-real or fake-ever. He knew he wasn’t strong enough to deal with that kind of emotional fallout.
That mainly left him targeting brunettes, with the odd diversion into a strangely statistically correct smaller percentage of redheads, and once in Tallahassee a remarkably cheerful blue-haired contortionist who came close to putting his back out.
Every woman was single, determinedly out for a good time with no other expectations, and most importantly, childless.
Over the years John Winchester shocked himself by ending up getting laid on a regular basis.
He knew that Dean-who he found himself giving a belated sex education talk to years before he thought he’d have to-probably had a fairly exact account of where, when, who, and undoubtedly how often his father was getting any. Which just went to show that Dean was an even better hunter than John ever let him know, because John went to great lengths to keep any incursions he might make into the female population as far from his boys as possible.
He never brought any of them home; if you could call whichever motel room or abandoned house they currently inhabited that. The only times he allowed himself to cut loose were when the boys were safe with Bobby or Jim; at least until they were grown up and were more than capable of killing anything that might come calling. Although, with Dean that had been around the age of ten, with Sammy it was thirteen. Still, John was a father before anything else, so he didn’t allow himself to have sex even in the same town as his sons until Dean was eighteen. That made life a little difficult sometimes.
That’s not to say he didn’t flirt his way to a discount at a diner or motel, and he could charm information out of a woman even faster than Dean could. But he did turn it off as soon as he was out the door because that was another conversation he didn’t want to have with either of his sons.
Dean still knew though-John sometimes suspected that Dean had spies everywhere. Paranoia came with being a father.
Despite that, Dean seemed to have his own vigorous form of denial and whilst he happily talked in scary detail about his own sexual escapades as he got older, he never joked about his father getting laid. At first John thought it was just Dean’s way of protecting his younger brother, by letting him keep the illusion that their father was still physically, as well as emotionally, faithful to their mother. He was wrong.
Sometimes John forgot how much Dean remembered about his mother.
His wife died once. He always remembers. He went with her.
Sam had loved exactly four people in his entire life-his father, his mother, his brother, and his girlfriend. Three were family, and one never got the chance to be.
You say ‘I love my family,’ and people think they know what you mean. Like it’s automatic; a free gift with purchase that you get along with the genes or upbringing. Sure. That’s one thing they never discuss during the whole nature versus nurture debate, even at Stanford.
People know nothing. Some people love their family, or some of them anyway. Others can’t stand most, or all of theirs. Hello modern life; Freud probably got a fair bit right. Families are awkward. Love them or hate them, you’re generally stuck with them whether you like it or not. Therapy might help. So might running away. Sam had tried both.
What he’d come to realise was this. He really did love his family; more than his friends or even Jess ever knew-he loved his family-less in the clichéd ‘I’d do anything for you’ way, and more in the ‘I’d die for you’ and actually mean it way. Sam had been there and done that, and was ready to do it all again. Don’t get him wrong. He wasn’t a big Goddamn hero like his brother. It was just the family thing, you know. You had to be a Winchester to understand it.
Loving his mother wasn’t a given. He never knew her. Despite the pictures and the way Dean talked about her, to Sam she was always this idealised image of the perfect mother who was stolen from them. The loss of Mary was the reason their family wasn’t the way it should have been.
They only had a few pictures to share between them. Later on Dean saved up enough to get copies made and had them framed for Sam so he could have his own set. But the pictures weren’t ever going to be enough. They weren’t real. Mary was just a face, and a name; an artificial emotional construct that said ‘mother.’ How could pictures give him love? That didn’t stop him treasuring them though, until even those were lost with Jessica.
Dean always tried to give him more, saving up stories to whisper to him before he went to sleep, recreating their past imperfectly every night. Wherever they were, whatever they were doing, every night for years Dean told him everything he remembered about their mother. Sam spent his childhood falling asleep to the sound of his brother’s voice: in diners; tucked up safe in Dean’s arms locked in the Impala while their Dad took out some monster; dovetailed with Dean at the foot of one more motel bed; or more usually curled around each other on the back seat on the road to another hunt.
Every night Dean’s bedtime stories started out with what she smelled like when she bent down to kiss you goodnight, the songs she’d sing, how she’d tickle Dad till he begged for mercy-that was always the one that made Sammy’s eyes go wide. It took Sammy a while to notice that Dean always made sure their father couldn’t hear them before he started, by then it had become a habit to make sure it was just them, another one of their secrets.
Sam thought he loved his mother almost as much as he loved Dean and his father. He missed her. He wanted her back, for Dean, for his father, and for himself. He wanted her to make everything right again, the way it had never been for him; the way Dean remembered it.
It wasn’t till years later that Sam began to wonder how much of what he knew about his mother was truth, and how much came from Dean’s wishful thinking. When he met his mother again in Lawrence he found out that Dean had never needed to make up anything about their mother.
And when he met his mother he found out he did love her.
Loving his father was … problematical. When he was young it was unconditional. Bear hugs, and riding high on broad shoulders while Dean stood ready to catch him if he fell.
Later it was about learning, running, and fighting, struggling to be as good. Be a part of them both. Trying to earn those few fragments of grudging praise that made all the sweat and too many hidden tears worthwhile. Needing to catch up with his older brother, to be equal, to be considered as worthy. Wanting to be enough. Because, if he could get there everything else might make sense, and he could just-stop.
It was being part of a strangely insular team that operated like an undercover assassination squad, all orders, action, and no questions. The first time he screamed at his father that he wasn’t part of some mindless Goddamn pack he wished his father had simply punched him because the blazing argument seemed to go on forever. The strongest memory he had from that occasion was of the way Dean forced himself between them, using his body as a barrier to their heated words. The look on Dean’s face finally scared them both enough to stand down.
That wasn’t their last fight; it took him a lot longer to understand what he saw in his father’s eyes.
One day he ran out of time to show his father what he felt.
Loving Dean was never the problem. His Dad taught him how to hunt, Dean taught him everything else.
He was the world’s most annoying big brother who made him completely insane, and run after him screaming ‘I’m going to get you for that!’ Bruises and bandages; chewing gum down his neck; blue dye and Nair; wedgies in the middle of the schoolyard; taunts of ‘Shortstop,’ ‘Slow poke,’ and ‘Fucking Gigantor;’ whacks up the back of the head; almost always sharing the extra cookie; and never, ever, not being there when he was needed.
He was a jerk, but… He was Dean.
Loving Jess was easy. From the moment they met, she treated him like everyone else. Like he was normal. Sam loved normal and he’d come a long way to find it.
She gathered him in, and just like that he was part of another group, he had friends, a lover, it was the family he’d always dreamt about. It was studying; eating s’mores on weekend campouts like people did on television; using his skills to not get caught making out in the library stacks; looking at his law texts shoved in next to her art books; and getting excited about the fact that they left each other notes that said ‘Gone to class,’ or ‘Milk!’
It was lying about everything he was, except for one thing.
For a few years Sam got to live the dream, and pretend it could be real. Jess never realised how great a gift that was.
Sam got lucky. He got a choice. He didn’t have to love Jess, but he did. He chose to love her, the way he’d never gotten to choose anything else in his life. He chose to make her part of his family; the chance to make it official, however, was ripped away from him.
Loving Dean was awkward.
It was feeling so swamped that sometimes he couldn’t breathe under the weight of all of that unconditional love. Whatever he did, no matter how often he stuffed up, Dean was always there to help him up, ‘You can do it,’ punch him in the shoulder, ‘Come on, I’ll show you how to do it-better, faster… Come on, Sammy.’
It was feeling like they were hawks tossed from their father’s glove into the night air; arrows shot from the same bow. Knowing their father had moulded them into weapons in a war neither of them had a choice about fighting in, loving the fact that they were two halves of a bigger whole, and hating what that meant. It was realising that there was only one person in the world who understood and accepted everything about him regardless of what he did.
It was running away when staying hurt more than leaving.
It was reaching out after Jess was gone, and fitting himself back inside the passenger seat of the Impala as if he’d never left. It was driving, fighting, yelling, killing, and loving his way home again.
Sam only thought he loved normal.
Sam would always love four people-his father, his mother, his girlfriend, and his brother. Three he loved enough to do anything for. One he loved enough to do everything for.
He died once. He can’t remember. He went… where isn’t important. Who brought him back is.
Dean loved. An outsider would say he loved indiscriminately. He loved lots of things; let’s hear it for equal opportunity! He loved poker, pool, and pie. He loved beer, women, and rock music-the louder, the better. He loved kids, cars, and crazy pranks. He loved hunting, killing monsters, and choosing the coolest names ever to put on credit card application forms. He loved the fact he was the only person alive that looked hot in a Day-Glo orange prison uniform, that the world was mostly black and white, and that his Dad was almost always right. Dean knew life was short, so naturally Dean loved everything.
Outsiders knew squat. He loved his Mom, his Dad, and his Goddamn totally awesome car. Some days he thought he loved his brother, even if he was a freakishly tall geek who bitched about almost anything Dean did. Oh, fuck it. Yeah, he supposed he kind of loved Sam too.
But there was no way he was ever going to talk about it. Don’t get him started on any of that emo bullshit. He wasn’t going to have a chick flick moment, and talk about anyone’s feelings, particularly his own or Sammy’s. Not even for pie. Not even for the kind of really amazing deep-dish double cherry pie that he only ever had that one time down in Mississippi. Not even… No. Just. No.
He didn’t love everything. He hated planes, couldn’t even flap their wings like birds, so how could you expect them to stay up? He had a grudge about the lids they put on takeaway coffee, no way you can take a good slurp through those stupid baby food slots. And as for coffee, what was it with all this flavoured, frothy, chick stuff people were dumb enough to pay for and then actually drank as if they liked it? It was probably a plot, demons out to take over the world one Starbucks’ franchise at a time. It was insidious, that’s what it was; even Sam had fallen prey to the evil that was a venti mocha caramel soy latte.
He really hated shades of grey. Dad never said anything about grey. It was always ‘These are the victims, here are the facts, this is what killed them; this is how we’re going to kill it.’ Simple. Easy. Didn’t leave any room for any of this New Age doubt crap. You start identifying with the enemy; you’re lost.
Dean preferred to save his thinking for working out how he could kill something fast, not whether or not it should be killed in the first place or whether monsters had feelings. People had feelings. Sam had feelings-lots of feelings. Must get that from Mom because Dad and Dean sure as Hell didn’t waste time with… Ugh, not gonna even think that word again. Dean hated it when bits of Sammy rubbed off on him.
Hate. Dean was good at hating. He still hated Gordon Walker even though he was long dead. Fucker. Second best present Sammy ever gave him was the head of Gordon the Hunter on a platter. Hell yeah. Gordon hunted Sam, and almost got him killed when he tried to save Dean. Gordon deserved everything he got. Dean wished he’d taken him down himself the first or even the second time they’d met. But Sam did it. That freaked Dean out a lot, not because he didn’t know that Sam was a better hunter than anyone outside of the family ever gave him credit for. But because Dean had forgotten that Sam would react exactly the same way Dean would if his brother was in danger-with deadly force. Dean just wished he could fight every battle for his brother.
So, he hated lots of things. Most of all he hated demons, because-Hey! They started it. But Dean? He was going to end it.
Dean loved his parents, and maybe Sam was partly right when he said that he had some issues with his Dad turning him into a perfect soldier, and not having a life because Sam came first. But, you know what? He was a Winchester, and he could take anything as long as he had Sam to look after.
Dean loved.
Dean. Loved. Sam.
He loved his brother. So what?
‘Okay? Happy now? Take what’s left of your pie and get out of here!’
He died once-twice. He doesn’t remember, not yet. He went to Hell, which isn’t at all important, neither is how and why he returned. Who he went for, and came back to is.
He went to Hell, and it was fucking worth it.
There is now a companion story: Happy Hour
Rating: R, Het, Gen
Characters: John/Mary, John/OFCs, Dean, Sam, Sam/Jess
Word Count: 3,401
Disclaimer: The characters are sadly not mine. I’m just sticking pins into Winchesters for fun and angst. Sorry about the holes!
A/N: The Winchester trinity - sex, love, and sacrifice. Spoilers up to 4.01 Lazarus Rising.
Thanks to noirbabalon for appreciating John enough to force herself to beta several fics in a 24 hour period.
Summary: People die. You die. Some things you remember, some you can’t. There’s really only one thing that’s important.
If he were the sort of man to look back and psychoanalyze his life, he’d have said he spent most of his life fighting one thing or another. Family, friends; whoever was on the opposite side of whatever war he happened to be in at the time.
He only had the grace of one lull, and her name was Mary. Cornsilk hair, eyes that laughed despite the fact he sensed she had secrets of her own. By rights they shouldn’t have been able to make it work, but his Mary had a way of leaping over all the obstacles and holding him down until he listened to her particular form of reasoning. Then, by some miracle she managed to add to more voices to her side of the argument-first Dean, and then Sammy, and John Winchester was pretty much a goner.
Then the war followed them home, Mary was taken from him, and his children were the only reason he didn’t go too.
After that he never stopped fighting. Crusades didn’t leave time for backwards looks, compassion, or anything other than the all-encompassing love he had for the sons he fought for.
Sometimes it caught him off guard.
John Winchester didn’t want, and he didn’t need. He made sure of that. Denial became policy.
Two years, three months, and five days after Mary died he woke up with the sort of morning wood his wife used to joke meant he was born for a career in forestry rather than the Marines.
Two years, three months, and five days before his body betrayed him.
He was stuck in an ancient unheated Airstream in a trailer park on the outskirts of Albuquerque being jumped on by two hyperactive little boys who wanted to ‘Go outside and play,’ before demanding to know ‘Why are you hiding, Dad?’
Two years, three months, and five days and he wished he could laugh. On a positive note, at least the water in the shower was enough to freeze him back to his version of normality.
Two years, three months, and six days and his body definitely had a mind of its own again.
A year later he ended up having to do something about it.
He had come to what he liked to think of as a ceasefire with his dick. He went on as many long evening runs as he could with Sammy clinging like a stubborn monkey to his back and Dean trotting uncomplainingly alongside. That usually wore him out enough that the problem stopped becoming a daily occurrence. It had the added benefit that he could outrun just about anything he fought if he had to. Having children had redefined his concept of cowardice; if a hunt went to pieces he had no qualms about making a break for freedom. It was about survival and coming back to kill another day. Most of all it was about living long enough to teach his boys what they needed to stay alive, and not failing them the way he had their mother.
When the night-time marathons didn’t work he got up early; really, really, early-being a parent had a lot of drawbacks-and got rid of the problem the quickest way possible.
With hindsight, he should have known those solutions wouldn’t always work.
The first time he slept with someone other than his wife he threw up on his way home.
That didn’t happen the next time, but he didn’t feel any better about himself.
His dick on the other hand had absolutely no complaints whatsoever.
In the end, it became just another thing he had to do, one way to get the adrenaline going, and then release tension without actually killing anything. He still cherished Mary every second of every day, but he had to live to raise his sons, and kill that demon. Sex became just another part of his life. He was pragmatic; accepted it, did it, liked it, sometimes it was even completely amazing, and he dealt with that and moved on to the next hunt.
He took care with his choices. No blondes-real or fake-ever. He knew he wasn’t strong enough to deal with that kind of emotional fallout.
That mainly left him targeting brunettes, with the odd diversion into a strangely statistically correct smaller percentage of redheads, and once in Tallahassee a remarkably cheerful blue-haired contortionist who came close to putting his back out.
Every woman was single, determinedly out for a good time with no other expectations, and most importantly, childless.
Over the years John Winchester shocked himself by ending up getting laid on a regular basis.
He knew that Dean-who he found himself giving a belated sex education talk to years before he thought he’d have to-probably had a fairly exact account of where, when, who, and undoubtedly how often his father was getting any. Which just went to show that Dean was an even better hunter than John ever let him know, because John went to great lengths to keep any incursions he might make into the female population as far from his boys as possible.
He never brought any of them home; if you could call whichever motel room or abandoned house they currently inhabited that. The only times he allowed himself to cut loose were when the boys were safe with Bobby or Jim; at least until they were grown up and were more than capable of killing anything that might come calling. Although, with Dean that had been around the age of ten, with Sammy it was thirteen. Still, John was a father before anything else, so he didn’t allow himself to have sex even in the same town as his sons until Dean was eighteen. That made life a little difficult sometimes.
That’s not to say he didn’t flirt his way to a discount at a diner or motel, and he could charm information out of a woman even faster than Dean could. But he did turn it off as soon as he was out the door because that was another conversation he didn’t want to have with either of his sons.
Dean still knew though-John sometimes suspected that Dean had spies everywhere. Paranoia came with being a father.
Despite that, Dean seemed to have his own vigorous form of denial and whilst he happily talked in scary detail about his own sexual escapades as he got older, he never joked about his father getting laid. At first John thought it was just Dean’s way of protecting his younger brother, by letting him keep the illusion that their father was still physically, as well as emotionally, faithful to their mother. He was wrong.
Sometimes John forgot how much Dean remembered about his mother.
His wife died once. He always remembers. He went with her.
Sam had loved exactly four people in his entire life-his father, his mother, his brother, and his girlfriend. Three were family, and one never got the chance to be.
You say ‘I love my family,’ and people think they know what you mean. Like it’s automatic; a free gift with purchase that you get along with the genes or upbringing. Sure. That’s one thing they never discuss during the whole nature versus nurture debate, even at Stanford.
People know nothing. Some people love their family, or some of them anyway. Others can’t stand most, or all of theirs. Hello modern life; Freud probably got a fair bit right. Families are awkward. Love them or hate them, you’re generally stuck with them whether you like it or not. Therapy might help. So might running away. Sam had tried both.
What he’d come to realise was this. He really did love his family; more than his friends or even Jess ever knew-he loved his family-less in the clichéd ‘I’d do anything for you’ way, and more in the ‘I’d die for you’ and actually mean it way. Sam had been there and done that, and was ready to do it all again. Don’t get him wrong. He wasn’t a big Goddamn hero like his brother. It was just the family thing, you know. You had to be a Winchester to understand it.
Loving his mother wasn’t a given. He never knew her. Despite the pictures and the way Dean talked about her, to Sam she was always this idealised image of the perfect mother who was stolen from them. The loss of Mary was the reason their family wasn’t the way it should have been.
They only had a few pictures to share between them. Later on Dean saved up enough to get copies made and had them framed for Sam so he could have his own set. But the pictures weren’t ever going to be enough. They weren’t real. Mary was just a face, and a name; an artificial emotional construct that said ‘mother.’ How could pictures give him love? That didn’t stop him treasuring them though, until even those were lost with Jessica.
Dean always tried to give him more, saving up stories to whisper to him before he went to sleep, recreating their past imperfectly every night. Wherever they were, whatever they were doing, every night for years Dean told him everything he remembered about their mother. Sam spent his childhood falling asleep to the sound of his brother’s voice: in diners; tucked up safe in Dean’s arms locked in the Impala while their Dad took out some monster; dovetailed with Dean at the foot of one more motel bed; or more usually curled around each other on the back seat on the road to another hunt.
Every night Dean’s bedtime stories started out with what she smelled like when she bent down to kiss you goodnight, the songs she’d sing, how she’d tickle Dad till he begged for mercy-that was always the one that made Sammy’s eyes go wide. It took Sammy a while to notice that Dean always made sure their father couldn’t hear them before he started, by then it had become a habit to make sure it was just them, another one of their secrets.
Sam thought he loved his mother almost as much as he loved Dean and his father. He missed her. He wanted her back, for Dean, for his father, and for himself. He wanted her to make everything right again, the way it had never been for him; the way Dean remembered it.
It wasn’t till years later that Sam began to wonder how much of what he knew about his mother was truth, and how much came from Dean’s wishful thinking. When he met his mother again in Lawrence he found out that Dean had never needed to make up anything about their mother.
And when he met his mother he found out he did love her.
Loving his father was … problematical. When he was young it was unconditional. Bear hugs, and riding high on broad shoulders while Dean stood ready to catch him if he fell.
Later it was about learning, running, and fighting, struggling to be as good. Be a part of them both. Trying to earn those few fragments of grudging praise that made all the sweat and too many hidden tears worthwhile. Needing to catch up with his older brother, to be equal, to be considered as worthy. Wanting to be enough. Because, if he could get there everything else might make sense, and he could just-stop.
It was being part of a strangely insular team that operated like an undercover assassination squad, all orders, action, and no questions. The first time he screamed at his father that he wasn’t part of some mindless Goddamn pack he wished his father had simply punched him because the blazing argument seemed to go on forever. The strongest memory he had from that occasion was of the way Dean forced himself between them, using his body as a barrier to their heated words. The look on Dean’s face finally scared them both enough to stand down.
That wasn’t their last fight; it took him a lot longer to understand what he saw in his father’s eyes.
One day he ran out of time to show his father what he felt.
Loving Dean was never the problem. His Dad taught him how to hunt, Dean taught him everything else.
He was the world’s most annoying big brother who made him completely insane, and run after him screaming ‘I’m going to get you for that!’ Bruises and bandages; chewing gum down his neck; blue dye and Nair; wedgies in the middle of the schoolyard; taunts of ‘Shortstop,’ ‘Slow poke,’ and ‘Fucking Gigantor;’ whacks up the back of the head; almost always sharing the extra cookie; and never, ever, not being there when he was needed.
He was a jerk, but… He was Dean.
Loving Jess was easy. From the moment they met, she treated him like everyone else. Like he was normal. Sam loved normal and he’d come a long way to find it.
She gathered him in, and just like that he was part of another group, he had friends, a lover, it was the family he’d always dreamt about. It was studying; eating s’mores on weekend campouts like people did on television; using his skills to not get caught making out in the library stacks; looking at his law texts shoved in next to her art books; and getting excited about the fact that they left each other notes that said ‘Gone to class,’ or ‘Milk!’
It was lying about everything he was, except for one thing.
For a few years Sam got to live the dream, and pretend it could be real. Jess never realised how great a gift that was.
Sam got lucky. He got a choice. He didn’t have to love Jess, but he did. He chose to love her, the way he’d never gotten to choose anything else in his life. He chose to make her part of his family; the chance to make it official, however, was ripped away from him.
Loving Dean was awkward.
It was feeling so swamped that sometimes he couldn’t breathe under the weight of all of that unconditional love. Whatever he did, no matter how often he stuffed up, Dean was always there to help him up, ‘You can do it,’ punch him in the shoulder, ‘Come on, I’ll show you how to do it-better, faster… Come on, Sammy.’
It was feeling like they were hawks tossed from their father’s glove into the night air; arrows shot from the same bow. Knowing their father had moulded them into weapons in a war neither of them had a choice about fighting in, loving the fact that they were two halves of a bigger whole, and hating what that meant. It was realising that there was only one person in the world who understood and accepted everything about him regardless of what he did.
It was running away when staying hurt more than leaving.
It was reaching out after Jess was gone, and fitting himself back inside the passenger seat of the Impala as if he’d never left. It was driving, fighting, yelling, killing, and loving his way home again.
Sam only thought he loved normal.
Sam would always love four people-his father, his mother, his girlfriend, and his brother. Three he loved enough to do anything for. One he loved enough to do everything for.
He died once. He can’t remember. He went… where isn’t important. Who brought him back is.
Dean loved. An outsider would say he loved indiscriminately. He loved lots of things; let’s hear it for equal opportunity! He loved poker, pool, and pie. He loved beer, women, and rock music-the louder, the better. He loved kids, cars, and crazy pranks. He loved hunting, killing monsters, and choosing the coolest names ever to put on credit card application forms. He loved the fact he was the only person alive that looked hot in a Day-Glo orange prison uniform, that the world was mostly black and white, and that his Dad was almost always right. Dean knew life was short, so naturally Dean loved everything.
Outsiders knew squat. He loved his Mom, his Dad, and his Goddamn totally awesome car. Some days he thought he loved his brother, even if he was a freakishly tall geek who bitched about almost anything Dean did. Oh, fuck it. Yeah, he supposed he kind of loved Sam too.
But there was no way he was ever going to talk about it. Don’t get him started on any of that emo bullshit. He wasn’t going to have a chick flick moment, and talk about anyone’s feelings, particularly his own or Sammy’s. Not even for pie. Not even for the kind of really amazing deep-dish double cherry pie that he only ever had that one time down in Mississippi. Not even… No. Just. No.
He didn’t love everything. He hated planes, couldn’t even flap their wings like birds, so how could you expect them to stay up? He had a grudge about the lids they put on takeaway coffee, no way you can take a good slurp through those stupid baby food slots. And as for coffee, what was it with all this flavoured, frothy, chick stuff people were dumb enough to pay for and then actually drank as if they liked it? It was probably a plot, demons out to take over the world one Starbucks’ franchise at a time. It was insidious, that’s what it was; even Sam had fallen prey to the evil that was a venti mocha caramel soy latte.
He really hated shades of grey. Dad never said anything about grey. It was always ‘These are the victims, here are the facts, this is what killed them; this is how we’re going to kill it.’ Simple. Easy. Didn’t leave any room for any of this New Age doubt crap. You start identifying with the enemy; you’re lost.
Dean preferred to save his thinking for working out how he could kill something fast, not whether or not it should be killed in the first place or whether monsters had feelings. People had feelings. Sam had feelings-lots of feelings. Must get that from Mom because Dad and Dean sure as Hell didn’t waste time with… Ugh, not gonna even think that word again. Dean hated it when bits of Sammy rubbed off on him.
Hate. Dean was good at hating. He still hated Gordon Walker even though he was long dead. Fucker. Second best present Sammy ever gave him was the head of Gordon the Hunter on a platter. Hell yeah. Gordon hunted Sam, and almost got him killed when he tried to save Dean. Gordon deserved everything he got. Dean wished he’d taken him down himself the first or even the second time they’d met. But Sam did it. That freaked Dean out a lot, not because he didn’t know that Sam was a better hunter than anyone outside of the family ever gave him credit for. But because Dean had forgotten that Sam would react exactly the same way Dean would if his brother was in danger-with deadly force. Dean just wished he could fight every battle for his brother.
So, he hated lots of things. Most of all he hated demons, because-Hey! They started it. But Dean? He was going to end it.
Dean loved his parents, and maybe Sam was partly right when he said that he had some issues with his Dad turning him into a perfect soldier, and not having a life because Sam came first. But, you know what? He was a Winchester, and he could take anything as long as he had Sam to look after.
Dean loved.
Dean. Loved. Sam.
He loved his brother. So what?
‘Okay? Happy now? Take what’s left of your pie and get out of here!’
He died once-twice. He doesn’t remember, not yet. He went to Hell, which isn’t at all important, neither is how and why he returned. Who he went for, and came back to is.
He went to Hell, and it was fucking worth it.
There is now a companion story: Happy Hour