S is for Winchester - 2/2
S is for Winchester - 2/2
Rating: R, Gen, Het
Characters: Dean, Sam/Jess, John, Bobby
Word Count: 5,782/11,342
Disclaimer: The characters are sadly not mine. I’m just sticking pins into Winchesters for fun and angst. Sorry about the holes!
A/N: Coda to 3.16 No Rest For The Wicked.
The first in The Hollow Hours series
A birthday fic for the wonderful trulybloom who requested “a weeChesters story, young Dean teaching wee Sammy a new word (or words).” I may have got a little carried away with the request. Sorry it took forever to write.
Thanks to secret-seer for chalking up another great banner and amping up the contrast in my flash cards.
Setting: Damn nigh everywhere stateside (1984-2008)
Summary: People tell a lot of stories about the Winchester brothers. Some of them are true; some of them we only wish they were. What is fact is that Dean Winchester taught Sam almost everything he knows, even if sometimes Dean didn’t realize it at the time.
Part 1 | Part 2
Part 2
The one thing Sam couldn’t get used to was how sex seemed to be the least part of living together.
Dean would have snorted if he knew that his brother kind of liked that situation. Not that there wasn’t a lot of sex, there was … Sam tried not to blush about exactly how much sex he was getting, and where, and oh my God, for how long …
‘Sam?’ Jess’s tawny mane of hair drifted along his chest and tickled its way up his neck before shaking itself wildly at him as his girlfriend pounced on his lips and began to devour him with a mock growl.
Sam let her have her wild and wicked way with him for quite some time (turned out women loved sensitive guys despite what Dean said) before he gathered her up-those miles of tanned California legs locking around his waist as she giggled and almost put paid to his stamina there and then-to dump her down onto a hopefully sturdy chest of drawers to christen the last remaining surface in their new apartment.
It wasn’t the sex; it was the sharing.
Jess brushed her hand gently along the top of the frame that Sam had only just had the courage to put out after two months of living together. ‘She’s beautiful.’
Her choice of the present tense was only one of the many reasons Sam loved her. ‘Yes, she is.’
‘Her name’s Mary.’
‘She has laughing eyes just like you.’ Jess was looking back and forth between the photo, comparing features.
She looks like Dean. You both do.
He had everything he’d ever wanted. He had a gorgeous girlfriend whose heart was bigger than her smile. He had friends, a life, and a future he’d mapped out in the tiniest detail. He came home to the same place every night. He had normal. And yet...
No one had ever told Sam that normal didn’t mean perfect.
Kansas was always called home.
It was one of the first things he learnt-Dean, his own name, Dad, a picture of Mom, the car, and the words ‘Lawrence, Kansas.’
Dean used to point it out on a map for him when he was younger. Kansas was the first state that Sam memorised the position of. That didn’t stop him asking Dean to show him though.
In the end it got to be a habit. They’d roll into yet another town, and while Dad filled up with gas, Dean would show Sammy where they were, where Lawrence was, and Sammy would insist on Dean working out exactly how many miles they were from home.
'Welcome to Atoka, Tennessee' the sign said. The sign looked bigger than the town.
‘Dean?’
‘518 miles, Sammy.’
Plentywood, Montana? 1,064 miles of blacktop.
Cottondale, Florida?
‘Dean?’
‘Deeeeeean!’
‘Not talking, Sammy.’
‘Why?’
‘Hate fucking Florida.’
‘So? You really must know how far we are from home then.’
‘Sixteen hours and twenty-two minutes, Sammy. You don’t count the miles out of Florida. You count the hours, and the freaking seconds if you have to.’
Dean really did hate Florida.
Turned out Dean was a human GPS before there ever was such a thing.
Sammy was very tempted to blindfold his brother one day, spin him around and watch him walk all the way to Lawrence. Sammy never doubted that Dean knew where home was.
Sammy asked why they didn’t go home. Once.
Kansas has always been called home. It took Sam years to truly understand why.
Locks, it turned out were all about ropes, and ropes were all about knots. Well, not really, but in Sammy’s head it all got a bit confused. He was only ten after all.
‘It’s easy, Sammy. Locks have defects. We’re just exploiting those faults.’
Sammy just looked all the long way up at his father. Huh?
John looked back down and sighed. ‘Dean. Your turn, kiddo.’
‘Sammy it’s all about being cool,’ Dean said with a smirk.
It was right then that Sammy realised there was no hope for him.
‘Maybe we should just start off with bobby-pins,’ Dean said with a pointed look at Sammy’s shaggy hair.
‘Not cars?’ Sammy asked, face dropping with disappointment. It wasn’t that he had any intention of ever majoring in burglary, but cars seemed like a reasonable goal to aim for. And Dean loved cars.
‘For that you need packing tape and…’ Dean’s voice trailed off as Sammy’s frown started to morph into a pout. ‘We can do cars next week; we just need to work up to it, okay?’
‘kay,’ Sammy said. He didn’t see why there wasn’t a book on this that he could study, but if Dean thought he could do it, Sammy was going to ace this for him.
‘Good. Let’s start with basics. Paperclips are your friend.’
In the end it wasn’t the lock picking that was hard, it was having your father stand there critiquing you with a stopwatch in his hands.
‘So, which do you want to do, Sammy? Your choice, MVT or GTA? Pick an acronym, any acronym.’
‘What?’
‘MVT or GTA, dumb-ass.’
‘I heard you the first time, Dean. I wasn’t asking what the letters were; I wanted to know what they stood for.’
Dean sighed, ‘And I thought you were the bright one. You’re going to fail B&E 101, Sammy, unless you study harder.’
Sammy flipped his brother the bird. Unfortunately, with Dean that turned out to be less of an insult and more of an encouragement.
‘Ooh, naughty!’
It never took much to excite Dean.
‘Acronym, Dean?’
‘Motor Vehicle Theft or Grand Theft Auto.’
‘Uh, Dean?’
‘Yeah?’
‘They both mean the same thing.’
‘Duh! I know that. But it’s what you call what you do that’s important. Grand Theft Auto is so much grander and cooler. What you have to remember about B&E, Sammy, is that half of it is attitude.’
Strangely enough Sammy turned out to be a natural. He didn’t have his brother’s mechanical intuition, but he had a damned good analytical brain, and he was a lot more patient than Dean.
The first time Sammy beat his brother’s time on a lock Dean almost fell off his chair in shock.
The second time he thumped him on the shoulder, said ‘that’s my baby brother-Super Thief! Told you, Sammy. It’s in your freaking genes.’
Then he bought him pie.
Sam once thought that his mother was the person that held the family together, even in death. She was after all, the reason for everything.
Their mother was the one topic they did and didn’t talk about.
For eight years all Dad had said to Sammy was, ‘She died.’
For eight years Dean told him everything else, except why.
Sammy knew not to ask. It didn’t stop him asking himself though. The answers he came up with varied over the years.
When a car hit Sonya Kim’s cat, Sammy thought about car crashes for the next month.
In Boise he watched a whole wall of cereal boxes come down on a woman while her kids screamed from their shopping cart. The woman crawled out with nothing but a few bruises and some Fruit Loops scattered through her hair while Sammy bit his tongue to stop his voice joining her kids.
When Dean threw popcorn at the Perils of Pauline on TV all Sammy could see was his Mom tied to the railroad tracks. Sammy ended up throwing his popcorn up all over Dean.
At the age of seven years, three months and four days he stood next to Gerry Youngman while Mr. Youngman drove their sick Labrador to the vet. Diego never came home.
Gerry never believed his Dad about it being painless. Neither did Sammy. He wondered if that was what you did to Moms too.
The next time Dean got sick, Sammy pushed a chair under the doorknob while his Dad was out at the drug store getting ‘medicine.’
Sammy nearly smothered Dean by lying on top of him to protect him while their father kicked the door in.
Turned out they didn’t do that to Moms or brothers.
It didn’t stop Sammy thinking though.
Of all the things he ever imagined about his mother, he never expected her to be a ghost.
Missouri tried to explain to him why his mother stayed.
Part of Sam understood what she was saying; the rest of him just couldn’t accept the fact that their mother hadn’t stayed with them.
Sam once thought that his mother was the person that held their family together.
That was another thing he got wrong growing up. But then, of them both, Dean was the most like Mary.
There were only so many ways to keep yourselves entertained on long car journeys across the country. Games of I spy; Rock, paper, scissors; License plates; or Hangman-Dean was infamous for giving his victims particularly realistic death grimaces.
‘Daaad! He’s doing it again.’
‘Dean. Stop torturing your stick figures. You’re scaring your brother.’
The day after Dean’s first terrifying run in with a vindictive poltergeist Sammy finger-painted ‘I’m back!’ in sugar water on the bathroom mirror.
It worked a treat in a steamy bathroom and Dean literally fell out of the shower and ran through the motel room naked yelling, ‘Dad! Gun!’ at the top of his lungs.
Sammy wished they could afford a camera.
A week later Dean dyed all Sammy’s underpants bright pink-the very day before he went on his first, and last, sleepover at Timmy Burton’s.
Sammy favourite form of revenge always involved glue. Very strong glue.
In Odessa Dean carefully painted a big red S on the front of each of Sammy’s t-shirts.
‘So you don’t forget who you are, dumbass!’
Big, red, waterproof, S’s.
After that their pranks got increasingly more creative. They did have a lot of time between their father’s hunts after all.
In New Hampshire Dean demonstrated his fondness for woad and the colour blue. Sam was still working on the perfect revenge for that expression of brotherly love.
Unfortunately for Sam, his brother always was just that little bit quicker off the mark.
‘DEEEAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNNNNNNN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!’
‘Daaad?’
Sam had to use a razor on the tattered clumps of what was left of his hair.
He used Dean’s; leaving it lying, clogged and rendered impotent-hopefully for life-and dripping wet, in the middle of his brother’s pillow.
Sam might love studying, but even he had to admit that school could often be Hell.
Especially on kids who’d never grown up locally. Whatever happened you never let the new kids in. Ever. It was a rule that was written in indelible ink on the walls of every school toilet block that Sam had been in.
Three weeks in DeBeque and that rule was still unbroken.
Walking through the school corridors with his shoulders hunched and his naked, tragically glaringly white, head temporarily covered in unseasonable beanie, fighting back stupid fucking juvenile tears, Sam couldn’t have been more obviously out of place if he’d stripped off a few layers of camouflage to reveal the five weapons he had tucked away, not to mention the scars of a childhood spent fighting more than books and other kid’s taunts.
For the first time in forever, Sam wanted nothing more than to move on to someplace where no one had ever heard the name Winchester.
The next day Dean was waiting for Sam as the lunch bell rang. This usually only happened on Sam’s birthdays or those other occasions when Dean got an urge to ditch school early and jumped ship collecting Sammy along the way.
This time was different. Dean was waiting in the hallway outside Sam’s classroom. Lounging back against a row of lockers sucking a lollipop, head as bald as a baby’s, as if half the school hadn’t just stopped dead to watch the Winchester family freak show.
‘Who loves ya, baby?’ Dean asked with a smirk, tossing him a cellophane-wrapped candy.
Sammy just wanted to scream until his hair grew back because:
a) Dean wasn’t Kojak
b) Agggggghhhhhh!
c) Dean looked cool
d) It just wasn’t fair!
e) Dean still looked cool
f) It still wasn’t fair!
g) Some days he loved his brother so much it Goddamn hurt.
‘Hey, bald pride, man!’
In the end he unwrapped the candy, tried to ignore the stares and did his best to saunter coolly out of school side-by-side with his brother.
The next day five kids in his class turned up with shaven heads. The day after that it started spreading throughout the school. By the end of the week both Sam and Dean were awarded a month’s detention for “creating a disturbance” and some of the girls’ parents were rumoured to have been heard in the principal’s office demanding the head of Dean Winchester on a platter.
Their father just gave them both one long hard look when he got the note, then he reached for his own razor.
‘Mah rith …,’ Sam started to say before scrunching up his face in annoyance.
‘A … rith … met … ic,’ Dean said slowly. ‘Maths, Dude! Repeat after me. One, two, three. Ow! What did you do that for?’
‘Ki yah … aaaagggggghhhhhhh! Keelya uhn tuh tree!’ Sam tried to promise. He did a better job of getting his hands around Dean’s neck and attempting to strangle him in front of one amused nurse and an emergency waiting room full of startled patients.
‘Don’t mind my kid brother,’ Dean said with a conspiratorial grin at the nurse as he twisted with annoying ease out of Sam’s grip and clamped him securely under one arm. ‘Anaesthetic always makes him regress. The bill’s fine. Gretel here has a thing about arguing our fine state’s right to levy extra taxes that’s all. We’ll just whack that on Mr. MasterCard, shall we?’ He slid Hans Grimm’s plastic across the counter to the smitten nurse.
Sam glared at Dean before shrugging apologetically at their audience. While Dean filled out the exit paperwork, Sam found the time to grab a bright pink breast cancer awareness leaflet and shakily scrawl, “You are so DEAD!” on it. It took him a little longer to slip it surreptitiously into the side pocket of his brother’s denim jacket.
‘Happy seventeenth, Sammy!’ Dean said, disgustingly cheerfully as they left the hospital. ‘So, did you have a good time?’
Sam took a moment to think about it. Dean making him skip school for the day was pretty much their annual tradition. Becoming wasted was a more recent addition to the festivities that he was getting better at with practise. Flipping out when someone called him Dean’s toy boy in the skeesiest dive in Austin and watching his brother’s eyes ice over at the insults that followed? Not so good. Kneeing the asshole in the balls before slamming a barstool over his head? Priceless.
‘Suh uh id,’ he answered honestly.
‘At least I remembered to pick up your tooth before we got the hell out of there,’ Dean said smugly. ‘Come on, let’s get you home before Dad realises you aren’t still stuck in the library celebrating over a good book again.’
Dad. ‘Uhg!’
‘Forgot about him for a minute, didn’t you, Princess?’ Dean shook his head sadly to himself before making Sam lie down in the Impala’s back seat, whacking a stolen icepack on his jaw for good measure. ‘Well I guess it comes with old age.’
Sam wished he had an ounce of energy left to punch Dean out. In the end he figured it was simpler to save it for the next time his brother was stuck in hospital. He was a great believer in the old adage of “what goes around, comes around,” or what Dean in his drunker and more philosophical moments liked to call, ‘the bitch of cosmic payback.’
Sam likes to talk. He’s the one Dean insultingly calls ‘The Friendly Winchester,’ like he was Casper the freaking ghost or something.
Dean’s always sworn that Sam’s eyes weren’t the only evidence of a strand of canine DNA somewhere in the twisted Winchester family tree.
So, he has a tendency to bounce up to people and smile. What’s wrong with that? He’s not a puppy. He hasn’t ever been one. Not after the age of three anyway. He’s certainly not one now. He’s six foot, four inches, for Pete’s sake! He’s just … No!
No matter what he’d seen, Sam always preferred to believe the best of people. Until proven otherwise.
Denial was a dominant trait in all three Winchesters.
Sam’s a talker, and as he’s said, ‘he’s met a lot of interesting people over the years.’
Sam’s talked to each and every one of them.
What he’s said over those years is another matter entirely.
Mrs. Patrick was his most favourite teacher.
Every day she picked someone special to stand before the chalkboard. Someone who got to say something to everyone in the class.
Sammy had been practising for days. He just knew his turn was coming, and he was ready.
‘Samuel Winchester.’
Hah. He was special, whatever Dean said.
Sammy stood up straight and tried not to be scared. It was hard. They were all looking at him. And Carol Madden wouldn’t stop giggling. She was such a girl. Dean would have stapled her plaits to the desk for that. Sammy thought about that for a minute. It made him feel a lot better.
‘Tell us something about your family, Samuel.’
What? She’d asked Peter Buckley about his pet; Diana got to talk about her new bike; the Thomson twins didn’t shut up about the time they went on a stupid pony ride. Sammy had practised those questions. He’d made up the best answers. Perfect answers.
‘Samuel?’ Mrs. Patrick was smiling. She was trying to be nice; he could see that. ‘You can just pick one person you know. What about your brother? You’ve got a brother, haven’t you? I’ve seen him waiting for you after school. Tell us about him.’
Dean?
Sammy was confused. What did she mean?
‘Tell us all about your big brother.’
‘He’s…’ He’s ten. And he’s tall, and strong, and he can do everything. He tells awesome fart jokes, and he never misses the centre of the target when Dad takes us shooting. He hits me on the head, and calls me a dork. He never lets anyone hurt me, and once he ate three hamburgers in a row before he threw up, and he’s…
Sammy shrugged helplessly. What could he say?
‘He’s … Dean.’
‘Oy, kid!’
‘Me?’
‘Yeah, you.’ The shopkeeper was holding a squirming Dean firmly by the back of his belt. ‘You came in right before this delinquent. You see him take anything?’
Sammy widened his eyes innocently, and tried to ignore Dean’s wink. ‘No, Sir. Never seen him before in my life.’
‘This is … Tom Chrysler … Bruce Harwood … Matthew Green … Elvis King … He’s my … partner … friend … supervisor … brother … We’re … students … interns … policemen…’ whatever we have to be.
‘Come on, Sam. You never say anything about anything, or anyone.’
Sam laughed across the table at her. ‘Yes I do.’ Don’t bring this up now. Not here. Not in a run-down diner where he was already getting too many flashbacks to his life on the road.
‘No. You don’t.’ Jess was frowning and stabbing her straw into the ice cream at the bottom of her milkshake as if she could suck the truth right out of him.
I talk all the time. We talk about class, and our friends. We talk about sports, or what groceries we need. We talk about the fucking weather, and the doggie in the window! We talk when we’re making love. Don’t tell me I don’t talk.
I know how to talk. Dean taught me that.
‘Tell me something about you, Sam. Anything. Something from outside of us, and Stanford. Home. Growing up. Your family.’
I told you the facts. I had a mother. I have a father. I … have a brother. I told you that much. More than I’ve ever told anyone.
‘Just one thing, Sam. Tell me about your brother.’
No.
‘Dean, right? Tell me about Dean.’
Ask me anything else.
‘You don’t even have a single photo of him, do you?’
Yes I do.
‘It’s okay. I get it if your family isn’t the Waltons. You ever think it might be better to talk about it, especially if you’re not close to them.’
‘No, Jess. I can’t. We’re not...’ close.
Sam’s only ever really talked to one person about his brother.
Possibly he justified it to himself by saying that he had to give a little to get a little. He’d done a lot harder things during the course of a hunt before. Fine, physically and ethically harder things. This was tougher.
And maybe talking brought too many things to the surface. He couldn’t blame temporary possession by a mad psychiatrist for everything he did afterwards, could he?
So, Sam talked. And talked.
But in the end, what he said couldn’t even begin to encompass any part of what he felt for his brother.
Here’s the thing about Dean, he was eminently distractible, unless focused on a hunt. That could be good or really bad. A lifetime of familiarity had taught Sam how to find a way to work that to his advantage, most of the time.
‘I am so gonna kill you after this,’ Dean spat the pillow from between his teeth to promise grimly.
‘Sure,’ Sam answered calmly as he laid down the third in what promised to be a very long neat line of stitches in Dean’s naked ass.
‘Ow! I mean it, Sam. You were supposed to be cutting off their escape route, not charging into the middle of it screaming like a mother banshee protecting its young.’
Sam kept on suturing, trying hard not to recall how he’d felt crouched on the other side of the graveyard when he’d heard Dean yell, ‘Holy shit!’ over the sound of gunfire. ‘You screamed first,’ he said mildly. ‘I just went to Plan B.’
Dean stifled another groan as Sam moved onto the next deep laceration. ‘I wasn’t screaming, and that wasn’t Plan B, Plan B was … oh fuck.’
‘It was my Plan B,’ Sam said gravely. ‘Besides, look who’s talking. You shouldn’t have thrown yourself between me and that last zombie when I had to reload, should you?’
‘I didn’t know it was going to start chowing down on my butt like someone rang the dinner bell, did I?’ Dean protested, as if that would have made any difference to his usual gung-ho “Save Sammy” intervention.
‘I’m bored,’ Dean whined again with all the petulance of a three-year-old whose toys had been taken away for their own protection.
‘Dean, even this crappy motel has enough soap and sports channels to keep you going for a few more days.’
‘But you turned on the parental override to block the porn.’ Dean glared somewhat fuzzily down at the gadget that had become permanently attached to his right hand before pushing a few more buttons and aiming it pointlessly at the set that Sam had dragged into Dean’s limited line of sight the previous night.
‘Still trying to work out my code are you?’ Sam asked with what he knew was an irritating grin. A sixteen digit P.I.N. was going to tax even his brother’s cunning criminal mind.
Dean just slanted him a look that promised retribution in the not too distant future and refused to comment, which was just as well as there was no way Sam wanted to have this particular conversation with him again any time soon.
Sam prised the remote from Dean’s clutches and switched over to the programme guide. ‘Look, you’re saved! Oprah’s on in two hours.’
‘TV Nazi,’ Dean growled, despite obviously perking up at the news. ‘But I’m bored now,’ Dean finished with a forlorn huff.
He was pouting as he idly unravelled threads in the motel’s worn blankets, carefully keeping his gaze off Sam. That more than anything shouted a warning to Sam. A hurt and slightly woozy Dean suffering cabin fever in the end meant only one thing.
‘Do you want to … talk?’ Dean eventually offered gingerly.
Sam tried not to flinch. They were always on opposite sides of an emotional seesaw. Usually he was the one wanting to talk things through while Dean did everything short of putting his fingers in his ears singing, ‘I can’t hear you.’ The rare times Dean asked were almost guaranteed to coincide with when Sam wanted to shut some thoughts away where they wouldn’t be able to get out unless he put the key in that lock himself. Now certainly wasn’t the right time to be keeping this particular door open, and he doubted Dean was with it enough to remember anything in the morning anyway.
Dean wasn’t that badly hurt that he didn’t immediately pick up on Sam’s giant ‘No’ vibes.
‘About the game,’ he continued quickly, flapping his injured hand vaguely at the television. ‘I’m sick of being stuck inside. I want to hit the road in my baby,’ he said even more petulantly with a quick glance to see if Sam was going to let the line run loose on that verbal red herring.
‘You’re going to be lying there on your stomach for the next few days. Get used to it,’ Sam replied as callously as he could, trying desperately to think up solutions to the nightmare that was being trapped in a confined space with the world’s worst patient.
There was only a limited list of things you could do while your face was squished sideways into a pillow and Dean had drawn the line through card games after Sam had refused to allow him alcohol during the poker match, and then soundly beaten him six times in a row at Go Fish.
Sam slid back into their room the next morning awkwardly juggling multiple bags containing a protein-heavy breakfast, and what he hoped would be his lifesaver over the next week.
‘Mmm … eh?’ came an indistinct mumble from the hump buried beneath the blankets on the bed closest to the door.
‘Ssh, ‘s’okay,’ Sam answered reassuringly, glad he’d managed to convince his brother to take enough strong analgesics when he woke up in the middle of the night to blunt the edge of Dean’s normally well-honed reflexes. The last thing he needed was a pain-befuddled Dean waving his Beretta 92 at him or Sangita, the complex’s elderly overworked maid who’d probably have a heart attack on the spot, either from the sight of a naked, albeit heavily bandaged, Dean Winchester, or from having a gun shoved in her face.
‘Umm,’ Dean replied intelligently before he subsided back into sleep once more.
Sam tiptoed around the room unpacking his purchases; he needed to get everything set up before Dean woke up for real, and the smell of the food and coffee was undoubtedly going to cause that to happen soon enough.
He quietly placed a wooden chair within arm’s reach of the bed, measured the distance again mentally, and shuffled it a judicious three inches closer. Yup, just one more vital ingredient and he’d be all ready. Sam moved into the bathroom to complete the last stage of his secret plan.
Turned out caffeine was a good olfactory alarm clock for Dean.
‘Sam? What are you doing?’ Dean’s voice called out a few minutes later, sounding blearily confused and needy even over the noise of the running water.
Sam sighed, Dean hated it when he wasn’t in control, and each and every time he’d been sick and injured in his life he’d demanded Sam’s constant attention as if letting him out of his sight made his little brother instantly vulnerable to a world of evil just waiting to prey on a Deanless Sam.
‘Nothing,’ Sam answered innocently as he manoeuvred the heavy plastic tub out from under the spout and down onto the tiled floor for a moment while he switched the cold water tap off.
By the time he’d adding the final touch, backing out through the doorway wasn’t as easy as he’d thought it would be.
‘What the fuck?’ Dean’s voice said behind him, to the accompaniment of a series of bitten off moans that were a sure sign that he was trying to move without help.
Damn. ‘Close your eyes and don’t move!’ Sam ordered, wanting everything to be in place before he unveiled his surprise.
‘I’ve brought you something to take your mind off the boredom,’ Sam said with complete satisfaction as he sloshed his way across the room to cautiously set his creation on the chair seat.
‘Don’t peek!’ He warned, turning around and waiting till Dean scrunched his eyelids even more tightly together. ‘On the count of three. One. Two. Two-and-a-half.’ He hit the on switch. ‘Three!’
‘Dude!’
‘Quack,’ Sam said happily as he watched Dean blink a second time in pure amazement before carefully stretching out his damaged left arm to encouragingly prod the maniacally singing yellow rubber ducky radio into swimming another lap.
Sam’s spent his life watching Dean go down in front of him.
Once upon a time, the knowledge that Dean was always there-at his side, standing back to back against all comers, stepping in front to intercept a fatal blow-had been a comfort. More than that, he accepted it as automatically as breathing.
He’d grown up fighting as one part of a trinity. Each Winchester knowing how, and when, to compensate for any of the other’s weaknesses.
In a fight, and in life, that can be an advantage. You always know what the others are thinking and why, and you can almost always predict exactly what they are going to do, and need at any one time. That’s a blessing when you know which way to turn, whom to cover, when it’s safe to let your guard down to concentrate on one enemy while someone else covers you.
It can also be a fucking nightmare. You expect it. You allow for it. You, rightly, trust them more than you trust yourself. You don’t-can’t-imagine a time when one of them isn’t going to be there.
Going it alone is incomprehensible. Together you’re a team. Apart, you’re broken. But you’re drowning and you can’t breathe, and even though they’re the only things that are holding you up, you just need to … go.
And you shatter and leave, and learn and grow. And it’s not enough. And Fate may be a cruel bitch, but she knows it too.
The last thing Sam was ever going to do was watch his brother die again.
Sam was used to getting his own way.
You can blame Dean for that if you want to.
Sam’s spent his life watching Dean go down in front of him. Too many lifetimes.
And you know what? It’s starting to piss him off.
Dean used to say that S stood for Sammy.
He also said it stood for Stupid, Sasquatch, Simba the White Lion, Silly Putty, Shortstop, Slowpoke, and Samantha.
Sure, sometimes Dean was a dick, but that was okay because every now and then Sam admitted that occasionally Dean was right when he called him an emo princess.
But here’s the thing. Sam’s the only one who gets to call Dean a dick or a jerk, or whatever else comes out of his mouth in the heat of the moment. And Dean fucking well owns naming rights on him too.
It’s a brother thing, and a Winchester thing. If you’re not either of those you’d better not call them anything but Sam and Dean-ah, or whatever else fits the current ID-or criticise what they call each other. You’d be surprised how quick a certain bitch and jerk can take you down.
Dean’s always saying, ‘Let’s go.’
‘Let’s go build a fort.’
‘Let’s go watch Belinda Murphy make out with the Captain of the football team under the bleachers!’
‘Let’s go get wasted.’
‘Let’s go see the largest ball of twine.’ So, it ended up being the second largest, but Dean still thought it was awesome.
‘Let’s go bang Lindsay Lohan.’
‘Let’s go to Vegas… to the Grand Canyon… Let’s go… Let’s go… Let’s go…’
Dean always talked the dream, but unlike Sam he never left.
With Dean it is never I; it is always we.
Dean’s the one who stays. The one who gives up everything, and he never, ever, lets go.
Winchesters never look away from the truth, even when it is written in blood.
But there are moments in life so unthinkable that the soul is never ready for the pain, no matter how much warning is given. Splintered fragments of time you desperately try to blank from your memory. Realities you will do anything to change.
All Sam could hear was his own voice still screaming out Dean’s name. But, for the space of one single moment he’d thought time had paused, listened, and answered his prayer.
Maybe it had.
Sam placed his right hand on the tattoo that was mirror to his own, used his own pain as a bridge, closed his eyes, and reached…
…and in the infinity of that missing beat Sam felt his brother’s hand brush against his, feathers turning endlessly to ash…
Time hadn’t stopped, and nothing had changed. He was still holding onto the body of the man: the boy, the brother who had raised him and taught him everything.
Dean was gone.
Nothing was the same. Sam hugged Dean tighter to himself, and let his tears lay a final promise to rest on his brother’s face.
I’m going to fix this, I swear.
It’s my turn now.
In the Winchester lexicon S will always stand for sacrifice.
S is for Winchester
Let’s call it fate - Coming soon
Rating: R, Gen, Het
Characters: Dean, Sam/Jess, John, Bobby
Word Count: 5,782/11,342
Disclaimer: The characters are sadly not mine. I’m just sticking pins into Winchesters for fun and angst. Sorry about the holes!
A/N: Coda to 3.16 No Rest For The Wicked.
The first in The Hollow Hours series
A birthday fic for the wonderful trulybloom who requested “a weeChesters story, young Dean teaching wee Sammy a new word (or words).” I may have got a little carried away with the request. Sorry it took forever to write.
Thanks to secret-seer for chalking up another great banner and amping up the contrast in my flash cards.
Setting: Damn nigh everywhere stateside (1984-2008)
Summary: People tell a lot of stories about the Winchester brothers. Some of them are true; some of them we only wish they were. What is fact is that Dean Winchester taught Sam almost everything he knows, even if sometimes Dean didn’t realize it at the time.
Part 1 | Part 2
Part 2
The one thing Sam couldn’t get used to was how sex seemed to be the least part of living together.
Dean would have snorted if he knew that his brother kind of liked that situation. Not that there wasn’t a lot of sex, there was … Sam tried not to blush about exactly how much sex he was getting, and where, and oh my God, for how long …
‘Sam?’ Jess’s tawny mane of hair drifted along his chest and tickled its way up his neck before shaking itself wildly at him as his girlfriend pounced on his lips and began to devour him with a mock growl.
Sam let her have her wild and wicked way with him for quite some time (turned out women loved sensitive guys despite what Dean said) before he gathered her up-those miles of tanned California legs locking around his waist as she giggled and almost put paid to his stamina there and then-to dump her down onto a hopefully sturdy chest of drawers to christen the last remaining surface in their new apartment.
It wasn’t the sex; it was the sharing.
Jess brushed her hand gently along the top of the frame that Sam had only just had the courage to put out after two months of living together. ‘She’s beautiful.’
Her choice of the present tense was only one of the many reasons Sam loved her. ‘Yes, she is.’
‘Her name’s Mary.’
‘She has laughing eyes just like you.’ Jess was looking back and forth between the photo, comparing features.
She looks like Dean. You both do.
He had everything he’d ever wanted. He had a gorgeous girlfriend whose heart was bigger than her smile. He had friends, a life, and a future he’d mapped out in the tiniest detail. He came home to the same place every night. He had normal. And yet...
No one had ever told Sam that normal didn’t mean perfect.
Kansas was always called home.
It was one of the first things he learnt-Dean, his own name, Dad, a picture of Mom, the car, and the words ‘Lawrence, Kansas.’
Dean used to point it out on a map for him when he was younger. Kansas was the first state that Sam memorised the position of. That didn’t stop him asking Dean to show him though.
In the end it got to be a habit. They’d roll into yet another town, and while Dad filled up with gas, Dean would show Sammy where they were, where Lawrence was, and Sammy would insist on Dean working out exactly how many miles they were from home.
'Welcome to Atoka, Tennessee' the sign said. The sign looked bigger than the town.
‘Dean?’
‘518 miles, Sammy.’
Plentywood, Montana? 1,064 miles of blacktop.
Cottondale, Florida?
‘Dean?’
‘Deeeeeean!’
‘Not talking, Sammy.’
‘Why?’
‘Hate fucking Florida.’
‘So? You really must know how far we are from home then.’
‘Sixteen hours and twenty-two minutes, Sammy. You don’t count the miles out of Florida. You count the hours, and the freaking seconds if you have to.’
Dean really did hate Florida.
Turned out Dean was a human GPS before there ever was such a thing.
Sammy was very tempted to blindfold his brother one day, spin him around and watch him walk all the way to Lawrence. Sammy never doubted that Dean knew where home was.
Sammy asked why they didn’t go home. Once.
Kansas has always been called home. It took Sam years to truly understand why.
Locks, it turned out were all about ropes, and ropes were all about knots. Well, not really, but in Sammy’s head it all got a bit confused. He was only ten after all.
‘It’s easy, Sammy. Locks have defects. We’re just exploiting those faults.’
Sammy just looked all the long way up at his father. Huh?
John looked back down and sighed. ‘Dean. Your turn, kiddo.’
‘Sammy it’s all about being cool,’ Dean said with a smirk.
It was right then that Sammy realised there was no hope for him.
‘Maybe we should just start off with bobby-pins,’ Dean said with a pointed look at Sammy’s shaggy hair.
‘Not cars?’ Sammy asked, face dropping with disappointment. It wasn’t that he had any intention of ever majoring in burglary, but cars seemed like a reasonable goal to aim for. And Dean loved cars.
‘For that you need packing tape and…’ Dean’s voice trailed off as Sammy’s frown started to morph into a pout. ‘We can do cars next week; we just need to work up to it, okay?’
‘kay,’ Sammy said. He didn’t see why there wasn’t a book on this that he could study, but if Dean thought he could do it, Sammy was going to ace this for him.
‘Good. Let’s start with basics. Paperclips are your friend.’
In the end it wasn’t the lock picking that was hard, it was having your father stand there critiquing you with a stopwatch in his hands.
‘So, which do you want to do, Sammy? Your choice, MVT or GTA? Pick an acronym, any acronym.’
‘What?’
‘MVT or GTA, dumb-ass.’
‘I heard you the first time, Dean. I wasn’t asking what the letters were; I wanted to know what they stood for.’
Dean sighed, ‘And I thought you were the bright one. You’re going to fail B&E 101, Sammy, unless you study harder.’
Sammy flipped his brother the bird. Unfortunately, with Dean that turned out to be less of an insult and more of an encouragement.
‘Ooh, naughty!’
It never took much to excite Dean.
‘Acronym, Dean?’
‘Motor Vehicle Theft or Grand Theft Auto.’
‘Uh, Dean?’
‘Yeah?’
‘They both mean the same thing.’
‘Duh! I know that. But it’s what you call what you do that’s important. Grand Theft Auto is so much grander and cooler. What you have to remember about B&E, Sammy, is that half of it is attitude.’
Strangely enough Sammy turned out to be a natural. He didn’t have his brother’s mechanical intuition, but he had a damned good analytical brain, and he was a lot more patient than Dean.
The first time Sammy beat his brother’s time on a lock Dean almost fell off his chair in shock.
The second time he thumped him on the shoulder, said ‘that’s my baby brother-Super Thief! Told you, Sammy. It’s in your freaking genes.’
Then he bought him pie.
Sam once thought that his mother was the person that held the family together, even in death. She was after all, the reason for everything.
Their mother was the one topic they did and didn’t talk about.
For eight years all Dad had said to Sammy was, ‘She died.’
For eight years Dean told him everything else, except why.
Sammy knew not to ask. It didn’t stop him asking himself though. The answers he came up with varied over the years.
When a car hit Sonya Kim’s cat, Sammy thought about car crashes for the next month.
In Boise he watched a whole wall of cereal boxes come down on a woman while her kids screamed from their shopping cart. The woman crawled out with nothing but a few bruises and some Fruit Loops scattered through her hair while Sammy bit his tongue to stop his voice joining her kids.
When Dean threw popcorn at the Perils of Pauline on TV all Sammy could see was his Mom tied to the railroad tracks. Sammy ended up throwing his popcorn up all over Dean.
At the age of seven years, three months and four days he stood next to Gerry Youngman while Mr. Youngman drove their sick Labrador to the vet. Diego never came home.
Gerry never believed his Dad about it being painless. Neither did Sammy. He wondered if that was what you did to Moms too.
The next time Dean got sick, Sammy pushed a chair under the doorknob while his Dad was out at the drug store getting ‘medicine.’
Sammy nearly smothered Dean by lying on top of him to protect him while their father kicked the door in.
Turned out they didn’t do that to Moms or brothers.
It didn’t stop Sammy thinking though.
Of all the things he ever imagined about his mother, he never expected her to be a ghost.
Missouri tried to explain to him why his mother stayed.
Part of Sam understood what she was saying; the rest of him just couldn’t accept the fact that their mother hadn’t stayed with them.
Sam once thought that his mother was the person that held their family together.
That was another thing he got wrong growing up. But then, of them both, Dean was the most like Mary.
There were only so many ways to keep yourselves entertained on long car journeys across the country. Games of I spy; Rock, paper, scissors; License plates; or Hangman-Dean was infamous for giving his victims particularly realistic death grimaces.
‘Daaad! He’s doing it again.’
‘Dean. Stop torturing your stick figures. You’re scaring your brother.’
The day after Dean’s first terrifying run in with a vindictive poltergeist Sammy finger-painted ‘I’m back!’ in sugar water on the bathroom mirror.
It worked a treat in a steamy bathroom and Dean literally fell out of the shower and ran through the motel room naked yelling, ‘Dad! Gun!’ at the top of his lungs.
Sammy wished they could afford a camera.
A week later Dean dyed all Sammy’s underpants bright pink-the very day before he went on his first, and last, sleepover at Timmy Burton’s.
Sammy favourite form of revenge always involved glue. Very strong glue.
In Odessa Dean carefully painted a big red S on the front of each of Sammy’s t-shirts.
‘So you don’t forget who you are, dumbass!’
Big, red, waterproof, S’s.
After that their pranks got increasingly more creative. They did have a lot of time between their father’s hunts after all.
In New Hampshire Dean demonstrated his fondness for woad and the colour blue. Sam was still working on the perfect revenge for that expression of brotherly love.
Unfortunately for Sam, his brother always was just that little bit quicker off the mark.
‘DEEEAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNNNNNNN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!’
‘Daaad?’
Sam had to use a razor on the tattered clumps of what was left of his hair.
He used Dean’s; leaving it lying, clogged and rendered impotent-hopefully for life-and dripping wet, in the middle of his brother’s pillow.
Sam might love studying, but even he had to admit that school could often be Hell.
Especially on kids who’d never grown up locally. Whatever happened you never let the new kids in. Ever. It was a rule that was written in indelible ink on the walls of every school toilet block that Sam had been in.
Three weeks in DeBeque and that rule was still unbroken.
Walking through the school corridors with his shoulders hunched and his naked, tragically glaringly white, head temporarily covered in unseasonable beanie, fighting back stupid fucking juvenile tears, Sam couldn’t have been more obviously out of place if he’d stripped off a few layers of camouflage to reveal the five weapons he had tucked away, not to mention the scars of a childhood spent fighting more than books and other kid’s taunts.
For the first time in forever, Sam wanted nothing more than to move on to someplace where no one had ever heard the name Winchester.
The next day Dean was waiting for Sam as the lunch bell rang. This usually only happened on Sam’s birthdays or those other occasions when Dean got an urge to ditch school early and jumped ship collecting Sammy along the way.
This time was different. Dean was waiting in the hallway outside Sam’s classroom. Lounging back against a row of lockers sucking a lollipop, head as bald as a baby’s, as if half the school hadn’t just stopped dead to watch the Winchester family freak show.
‘Who loves ya, baby?’ Dean asked with a smirk, tossing him a cellophane-wrapped candy.
Sammy just wanted to scream until his hair grew back because:
a) Dean wasn’t Kojak
b) Agggggghhhhhh!
c) Dean looked cool
d) It just wasn’t fair!
e) Dean still looked cool
f) It still wasn’t fair!
g) Some days he loved his brother so much it Goddamn hurt.
‘Hey, bald pride, man!’
In the end he unwrapped the candy, tried to ignore the stares and did his best to saunter coolly out of school side-by-side with his brother.
The next day five kids in his class turned up with shaven heads. The day after that it started spreading throughout the school. By the end of the week both Sam and Dean were awarded a month’s detention for “creating a disturbance” and some of the girls’ parents were rumoured to have been heard in the principal’s office demanding the head of Dean Winchester on a platter.
Their father just gave them both one long hard look when he got the note, then he reached for his own razor.
‘Mah rith …,’ Sam started to say before scrunching up his face in annoyance.
‘A … rith … met … ic,’ Dean said slowly. ‘Maths, Dude! Repeat after me. One, two, three. Ow! What did you do that for?’
‘Ki yah … aaaagggggghhhhhhh! Keelya uhn tuh tree!’ Sam tried to promise. He did a better job of getting his hands around Dean’s neck and attempting to strangle him in front of one amused nurse and an emergency waiting room full of startled patients.
‘Don’t mind my kid brother,’ Dean said with a conspiratorial grin at the nurse as he twisted with annoying ease out of Sam’s grip and clamped him securely under one arm. ‘Anaesthetic always makes him regress. The bill’s fine. Gretel here has a thing about arguing our fine state’s right to levy extra taxes that’s all. We’ll just whack that on Mr. MasterCard, shall we?’ He slid Hans Grimm’s plastic across the counter to the smitten nurse.
Sam glared at Dean before shrugging apologetically at their audience. While Dean filled out the exit paperwork, Sam found the time to grab a bright pink breast cancer awareness leaflet and shakily scrawl, “You are so DEAD!” on it. It took him a little longer to slip it surreptitiously into the side pocket of his brother’s denim jacket.
‘Happy seventeenth, Sammy!’ Dean said, disgustingly cheerfully as they left the hospital. ‘So, did you have a good time?’
Sam took a moment to think about it. Dean making him skip school for the day was pretty much their annual tradition. Becoming wasted was a more recent addition to the festivities that he was getting better at with practise. Flipping out when someone called him Dean’s toy boy in the skeesiest dive in Austin and watching his brother’s eyes ice over at the insults that followed? Not so good. Kneeing the asshole in the balls before slamming a barstool over his head? Priceless.
‘Suh uh id,’ he answered honestly.
‘At least I remembered to pick up your tooth before we got the hell out of there,’ Dean said smugly. ‘Come on, let’s get you home before Dad realises you aren’t still stuck in the library celebrating over a good book again.’
Dad. ‘Uhg!’
‘Forgot about him for a minute, didn’t you, Princess?’ Dean shook his head sadly to himself before making Sam lie down in the Impala’s back seat, whacking a stolen icepack on his jaw for good measure. ‘Well I guess it comes with old age.’
Sam wished he had an ounce of energy left to punch Dean out. In the end he figured it was simpler to save it for the next time his brother was stuck in hospital. He was a great believer in the old adage of “what goes around, comes around,” or what Dean in his drunker and more philosophical moments liked to call, ‘the bitch of cosmic payback.’
Sam likes to talk. He’s the one Dean insultingly calls ‘The Friendly Winchester,’ like he was Casper the freaking ghost or something.
Dean’s always sworn that Sam’s eyes weren’t the only evidence of a strand of canine DNA somewhere in the twisted Winchester family tree.
So, he has a tendency to bounce up to people and smile. What’s wrong with that? He’s not a puppy. He hasn’t ever been one. Not after the age of three anyway. He’s certainly not one now. He’s six foot, four inches, for Pete’s sake! He’s just … No!
No matter what he’d seen, Sam always preferred to believe the best of people. Until proven otherwise.
Denial was a dominant trait in all three Winchesters.
Sam’s a talker, and as he’s said, ‘he’s met a lot of interesting people over the years.’
Sam’s talked to each and every one of them.
What he’s said over those years is another matter entirely.
Mrs. Patrick was his most favourite teacher.
Every day she picked someone special to stand before the chalkboard. Someone who got to say something to everyone in the class.
Sammy had been practising for days. He just knew his turn was coming, and he was ready.
‘Samuel Winchester.’
Hah. He was special, whatever Dean said.
Sammy stood up straight and tried not to be scared. It was hard. They were all looking at him. And Carol Madden wouldn’t stop giggling. She was such a girl. Dean would have stapled her plaits to the desk for that. Sammy thought about that for a minute. It made him feel a lot better.
‘Tell us something about your family, Samuel.’
What? She’d asked Peter Buckley about his pet; Diana got to talk about her new bike; the Thomson twins didn’t shut up about the time they went on a stupid pony ride. Sammy had practised those questions. He’d made up the best answers. Perfect answers.
‘Samuel?’ Mrs. Patrick was smiling. She was trying to be nice; he could see that. ‘You can just pick one person you know. What about your brother? You’ve got a brother, haven’t you? I’ve seen him waiting for you after school. Tell us about him.’
Dean?
Sammy was confused. What did she mean?
‘Tell us all about your big brother.’
‘He’s…’ He’s ten. And he’s tall, and strong, and he can do everything. He tells awesome fart jokes, and he never misses the centre of the target when Dad takes us shooting. He hits me on the head, and calls me a dork. He never lets anyone hurt me, and once he ate three hamburgers in a row before he threw up, and he’s…
Sammy shrugged helplessly. What could he say?
‘He’s … Dean.’
‘Oy, kid!’
‘Me?’
‘Yeah, you.’ The shopkeeper was holding a squirming Dean firmly by the back of his belt. ‘You came in right before this delinquent. You see him take anything?’
Sammy widened his eyes innocently, and tried to ignore Dean’s wink. ‘No, Sir. Never seen him before in my life.’
‘This is … Tom Chrysler … Bruce Harwood … Matthew Green … Elvis King … He’s my … partner … friend … supervisor … brother … We’re … students … interns … policemen…’ whatever we have to be.
‘Come on, Sam. You never say anything about anything, or anyone.’
Sam laughed across the table at her. ‘Yes I do.’ Don’t bring this up now. Not here. Not in a run-down diner where he was already getting too many flashbacks to his life on the road.
‘No. You don’t.’ Jess was frowning and stabbing her straw into the ice cream at the bottom of her milkshake as if she could suck the truth right out of him.
I talk all the time. We talk about class, and our friends. We talk about sports, or what groceries we need. We talk about the fucking weather, and the doggie in the window! We talk when we’re making love. Don’t tell me I don’t talk.
I know how to talk. Dean taught me that.
‘Tell me something about you, Sam. Anything. Something from outside of us, and Stanford. Home. Growing up. Your family.’
I told you the facts. I had a mother. I have a father. I … have a brother. I told you that much. More than I’ve ever told anyone.
‘Just one thing, Sam. Tell me about your brother.’
No.
‘Dean, right? Tell me about Dean.’
Ask me anything else.
‘You don’t even have a single photo of him, do you?’
Yes I do.
‘It’s okay. I get it if your family isn’t the Waltons. You ever think it might be better to talk about it, especially if you’re not close to them.’
‘No, Jess. I can’t. We’re not...’ close.
Sam’s only ever really talked to one person about his brother.
Possibly he justified it to himself by saying that he had to give a little to get a little. He’d done a lot harder things during the course of a hunt before. Fine, physically and ethically harder things. This was tougher.
And maybe talking brought too many things to the surface. He couldn’t blame temporary possession by a mad psychiatrist for everything he did afterwards, could he?
So, Sam talked. And talked.
But in the end, what he said couldn’t even begin to encompass any part of what he felt for his brother.
Here’s the thing about Dean, he was eminently distractible, unless focused on a hunt. That could be good or really bad. A lifetime of familiarity had taught Sam how to find a way to work that to his advantage, most of the time.
‘I am so gonna kill you after this,’ Dean spat the pillow from between his teeth to promise grimly.
‘Sure,’ Sam answered calmly as he laid down the third in what promised to be a very long neat line of stitches in Dean’s naked ass.
‘Ow! I mean it, Sam. You were supposed to be cutting off their escape route, not charging into the middle of it screaming like a mother banshee protecting its young.’
Sam kept on suturing, trying hard not to recall how he’d felt crouched on the other side of the graveyard when he’d heard Dean yell, ‘Holy shit!’ over the sound of gunfire. ‘You screamed first,’ he said mildly. ‘I just went to Plan B.’
Dean stifled another groan as Sam moved onto the next deep laceration. ‘I wasn’t screaming, and that wasn’t Plan B, Plan B was … oh fuck.’
‘It was my Plan B,’ Sam said gravely. ‘Besides, look who’s talking. You shouldn’t have thrown yourself between me and that last zombie when I had to reload, should you?’
‘I didn’t know it was going to start chowing down on my butt like someone rang the dinner bell, did I?’ Dean protested, as if that would have made any difference to his usual gung-ho “Save Sammy” intervention.
‘I’m bored,’ Dean whined again with all the petulance of a three-year-old whose toys had been taken away for their own protection.
‘Dean, even this crappy motel has enough soap and sports channels to keep you going for a few more days.’
‘But you turned on the parental override to block the porn.’ Dean glared somewhat fuzzily down at the gadget that had become permanently attached to his right hand before pushing a few more buttons and aiming it pointlessly at the set that Sam had dragged into Dean’s limited line of sight the previous night.
‘Still trying to work out my code are you?’ Sam asked with what he knew was an irritating grin. A sixteen digit P.I.N. was going to tax even his brother’s cunning criminal mind.
Dean just slanted him a look that promised retribution in the not too distant future and refused to comment, which was just as well as there was no way Sam wanted to have this particular conversation with him again any time soon.
Sam prised the remote from Dean’s clutches and switched over to the programme guide. ‘Look, you’re saved! Oprah’s on in two hours.’
‘TV Nazi,’ Dean growled, despite obviously perking up at the news. ‘But I’m bored now,’ Dean finished with a forlorn huff.
He was pouting as he idly unravelled threads in the motel’s worn blankets, carefully keeping his gaze off Sam. That more than anything shouted a warning to Sam. A hurt and slightly woozy Dean suffering cabin fever in the end meant only one thing.
‘Do you want to … talk?’ Dean eventually offered gingerly.
Sam tried not to flinch. They were always on opposite sides of an emotional seesaw. Usually he was the one wanting to talk things through while Dean did everything short of putting his fingers in his ears singing, ‘I can’t hear you.’ The rare times Dean asked were almost guaranteed to coincide with when Sam wanted to shut some thoughts away where they wouldn’t be able to get out unless he put the key in that lock himself. Now certainly wasn’t the right time to be keeping this particular door open, and he doubted Dean was with it enough to remember anything in the morning anyway.
Dean wasn’t that badly hurt that he didn’t immediately pick up on Sam’s giant ‘No’ vibes.
‘About the game,’ he continued quickly, flapping his injured hand vaguely at the television. ‘I’m sick of being stuck inside. I want to hit the road in my baby,’ he said even more petulantly with a quick glance to see if Sam was going to let the line run loose on that verbal red herring.
‘You’re going to be lying there on your stomach for the next few days. Get used to it,’ Sam replied as callously as he could, trying desperately to think up solutions to the nightmare that was being trapped in a confined space with the world’s worst patient.
There was only a limited list of things you could do while your face was squished sideways into a pillow and Dean had drawn the line through card games after Sam had refused to allow him alcohol during the poker match, and then soundly beaten him six times in a row at Go Fish.
Sam slid back into their room the next morning awkwardly juggling multiple bags containing a protein-heavy breakfast, and what he hoped would be his lifesaver over the next week.
‘Mmm … eh?’ came an indistinct mumble from the hump buried beneath the blankets on the bed closest to the door.
‘Ssh, ‘s’okay,’ Sam answered reassuringly, glad he’d managed to convince his brother to take enough strong analgesics when he woke up in the middle of the night to blunt the edge of Dean’s normally well-honed reflexes. The last thing he needed was a pain-befuddled Dean waving his Beretta 92 at him or Sangita, the complex’s elderly overworked maid who’d probably have a heart attack on the spot, either from the sight of a naked, albeit heavily bandaged, Dean Winchester, or from having a gun shoved in her face.
‘Umm,’ Dean replied intelligently before he subsided back into sleep once more.
Sam tiptoed around the room unpacking his purchases; he needed to get everything set up before Dean woke up for real, and the smell of the food and coffee was undoubtedly going to cause that to happen soon enough.
He quietly placed a wooden chair within arm’s reach of the bed, measured the distance again mentally, and shuffled it a judicious three inches closer. Yup, just one more vital ingredient and he’d be all ready. Sam moved into the bathroom to complete the last stage of his secret plan.
Turned out caffeine was a good olfactory alarm clock for Dean.
‘Sam? What are you doing?’ Dean’s voice called out a few minutes later, sounding blearily confused and needy even over the noise of the running water.
Sam sighed, Dean hated it when he wasn’t in control, and each and every time he’d been sick and injured in his life he’d demanded Sam’s constant attention as if letting him out of his sight made his little brother instantly vulnerable to a world of evil just waiting to prey on a Deanless Sam.
‘Nothing,’ Sam answered innocently as he manoeuvred the heavy plastic tub out from under the spout and down onto the tiled floor for a moment while he switched the cold water tap off.
By the time he’d adding the final touch, backing out through the doorway wasn’t as easy as he’d thought it would be.
‘What the fuck?’ Dean’s voice said behind him, to the accompaniment of a series of bitten off moans that were a sure sign that he was trying to move without help.
Damn. ‘Close your eyes and don’t move!’ Sam ordered, wanting everything to be in place before he unveiled his surprise.
‘I’ve brought you something to take your mind off the boredom,’ Sam said with complete satisfaction as he sloshed his way across the room to cautiously set his creation on the chair seat.
‘Don’t peek!’ He warned, turning around and waiting till Dean scrunched his eyelids even more tightly together. ‘On the count of three. One. Two. Two-and-a-half.’ He hit the on switch. ‘Three!’
‘Dude!’
‘Quack,’ Sam said happily as he watched Dean blink a second time in pure amazement before carefully stretching out his damaged left arm to encouragingly prod the maniacally singing yellow rubber ducky radio into swimming another lap.
Sam’s spent his life watching Dean go down in front of him.
Once upon a time, the knowledge that Dean was always there-at his side, standing back to back against all comers, stepping in front to intercept a fatal blow-had been a comfort. More than that, he accepted it as automatically as breathing.
He’d grown up fighting as one part of a trinity. Each Winchester knowing how, and when, to compensate for any of the other’s weaknesses.
In a fight, and in life, that can be an advantage. You always know what the others are thinking and why, and you can almost always predict exactly what they are going to do, and need at any one time. That’s a blessing when you know which way to turn, whom to cover, when it’s safe to let your guard down to concentrate on one enemy while someone else covers you.
It can also be a fucking nightmare. You expect it. You allow for it. You, rightly, trust them more than you trust yourself. You don’t-can’t-imagine a time when one of them isn’t going to be there.
Going it alone is incomprehensible. Together you’re a team. Apart, you’re broken. But you’re drowning and you can’t breathe, and even though they’re the only things that are holding you up, you just need to … go.
And you shatter and leave, and learn and grow. And it’s not enough. And Fate may be a cruel bitch, but she knows it too.
The last thing Sam was ever going to do was watch his brother die again.
Sam was used to getting his own way.
You can blame Dean for that if you want to.
Sam’s spent his life watching Dean go down in front of him. Too many lifetimes.
And you know what? It’s starting to piss him off.
Dean used to say that S stood for Sammy.
He also said it stood for Stupid, Sasquatch, Simba the White Lion, Silly Putty, Shortstop, Slowpoke, and Samantha.
Sure, sometimes Dean was a dick, but that was okay because every now and then Sam admitted that occasionally Dean was right when he called him an emo princess.
But here’s the thing. Sam’s the only one who gets to call Dean a dick or a jerk, or whatever else comes out of his mouth in the heat of the moment. And Dean fucking well owns naming rights on him too.
It’s a brother thing, and a Winchester thing. If you’re not either of those you’d better not call them anything but Sam and Dean-ah, or whatever else fits the current ID-or criticise what they call each other. You’d be surprised how quick a certain bitch and jerk can take you down.
Dean’s always saying, ‘Let’s go.’
‘Let’s go build a fort.’
‘Let’s go watch Belinda Murphy make out with the Captain of the football team under the bleachers!’
‘Let’s go get wasted.’
‘Let’s go see the largest ball of twine.’ So, it ended up being the second largest, but Dean still thought it was awesome.
‘Let’s go bang Lindsay Lohan.’
‘Let’s go to Vegas… to the Grand Canyon… Let’s go… Let’s go… Let’s go…’
Dean always talked the dream, but unlike Sam he never left.
With Dean it is never I; it is always we.
Dean’s the one who stays. The one who gives up everything, and he never, ever, lets go.
Winchesters never look away from the truth, even when it is written in blood.
But there are moments in life so unthinkable that the soul is never ready for the pain, no matter how much warning is given. Splintered fragments of time you desperately try to blank from your memory. Realities you will do anything to change.
All Sam could hear was his own voice still screaming out Dean’s name. But, for the space of one single moment he’d thought time had paused, listened, and answered his prayer.
Maybe it had.
Sam placed his right hand on the tattoo that was mirror to his own, used his own pain as a bridge, closed his eyes, and reached…
…and in the infinity of that missing beat Sam felt his brother’s hand brush against his, feathers turning endlessly to ash…
Time hadn’t stopped, and nothing had changed. He was still holding onto the body of the man: the boy, the brother who had raised him and taught him everything.
Dean was gone.
Nothing was the same. Sam hugged Dean tighter to himself, and let his tears lay a final promise to rest on his brother’s face.
I’m going to fix this, I swear.
It’s my turn now.
In the Winchester lexicon S will always stand for sacrifice.
S is for Winchester
Let’s call it fate - Coming soon