Chapter Text
Sam starts out small, with a bag of peanut M&Ms from a podunk gas station just south of Memphis. He’s six at the time, and already an expert at using that wide-eyed, puppy dog stare of his to avert suspicion.
John catches him with the bag forty miles down the road—too far to turn back, even if he’d wanted to. There’s a schedule to keep, after all. They have to be in Birmingham before dark.
He does take the bag away and give Sam a stern talking to about taking things without paying.
“How’s it different?” Sam demands stubbornly. “You don’t pay for stuff all the time!”
That’s Dean’s little brother, all right. Six years old, and he already gets that credit card fraud isn’t exactly on the up and up.
“It isn’t stealing if it’s something you need,” John answers, and then tosses the M&Ms out the window.
Sam sulks all the way to Alabama.
When John pulls over for a restroom break, he leaves them in the Impala—“under no circumstances are you boys to leave this car”—and Dean waits just long enough for him to vanish inside the McDonalds before unbuckling his seat belt and kneeling up over the seat to peer down at Sam where he’s sulking in the back.
“Next time,” Dean says in the practiced, superior tone of an expert. “Swipe the plain ones. I mean, peanuts, Sammy?”
“I like the peanut ones,” Sam mutters mulishly.
Dean rolls his eyes. “He likes ‘em. Well shit, maybe I just oughtta start calling you Dumbo.”
“Shit’s a bad word,” Sam points out. “Dad’s gonna spank you.”
“He won’t if you keep your trap shut,” Dean replies sagely, and then turns frontward again and sits back down.
He isn’t worried about Dad. He isn’t pleased by pricking Sam’s pride.
As he sits quietly and waits for his father to get back in the car, Dean Winchester doesn’t feel much of anything.
It’s pretty much par for the course.
Peanuts doesn’t come close to describing Dean’s first take.
He’s five at the time; John’s been gone over a week and the babysitter flaked after the first day. Dean somehow senses that her defection is his fault. He hasn’t quite mastered the words and actions needed to blend in with the rest of the grayed out world yet. He can point to all of the moments when he does or says something wrong because John marks them for him. Sometimes, John looks at Dean with an uneasy, unhappy expression—like he isn’t sure Dean is human, let alone his son.
Dean doesn’t like that look. It makes his stomach flutter oddly and puts thoughts of their burning house firmly into his head. It makes him think that maybe John regrets saving him from the fire.
Better—safer—to learn his cues. And when he gets things right, and John smiles at him, Dean can almost believe the world around him brightens a bit.
At first it’s fine being home alone with Sammy, even if changing Sam’s diapers is difficult and the smell makes Dean’s eyes water. Then the food runs out—no more soup in their kitchenette, and no money for groceries. Dean would call for help, but he doesn’t know John’s number, and anyway he isn’t quite sure how to operate a phone.
Sammy needs to eat, though, so Dean makes his way over to the nearest motel and waits for the guy working the desk to hit up the bathroom. Then he walks around behind the counter, climbs up onto the vacated chair, and starts hitting buttons on the register until the drawer pops out.
He takes all ten twenties, then checks underneath the draw for good measure (John is always telling him not to take anything at face value), and removes the hundred he finds there as well. Then he pushes the drawer shut, tears the register tape from the till, and lets himself back out of the office.
He breaks the hundred by buying three large pizzas from a trusting and not-too-bright Papa John’s employee, buys a few cans of Spaghetti-Os from the corner store, and then brings everything home.
Dean thinks he might get a spanking when John comes back and finds him sitting on the floor in a pizza coma with crumpled bills strewn over the floor around him and Sam with mashed Spaghetti-Os all down his face, and John does look pissed at first. After Dean explains what happened, though, John’s face gets pinched in a weird, uncomfortable way.
For a moment, Dean is sure that he’s done it again—he’s been wrong instead of right; he’s let his inner blankness out for John to see. Instead of berating Dean or smacking him a few good ones on the rear, though, John hauls him in for a hug.
“You did good, son,” he whispers as Dean confusedly but agreeably hugs him back. “You did real good.”
Sam is twelve when he makes his first kill.
It’s a mall rent-a-cop, in the wrong place at the wrong time. He comes up behind them while they’re helping themselves to the necessaries in the sporting goods store—Sam grabbing the ammo while Dean cleans out the safe in the back office.
The rent-a-cop is forty-something, balding and completely out of his element. He treats Dean like a threat and Sam like someone who needs protecting, putting Sam at his back without a second thought. He finds out how stupid a move that was moments later, when Sam uses a convenient aluminum bat to take out his left kneecap.
Dean has his gun back in his hands in a heartbeat, while Sam collects the rent-a-cop’s from the floor. His hands are steady on his Glock as the rent-a-cop screams and cups his shattered knee with both hands.
“Get the stuff and go wait in the car,” Dean says, taking care to speak loudly enough to be heard over the rent-a-cop’s cries.
“No,” Sam answers.
Dean frowns. He thought they were past this, thought that Sam understood that they can’t afford to leave witnesses—fuck the police; if John finds out what his sons are up to when he’s away or asleep, he’ll look at Dean with that expression again. The one that says he doesn’t know him. Dean’s aware he’s deficient in a lot of ways, but there must still be a few cylinders firing, because he’d do pretty much anything to make sure that doesn’t happen.
Instead of protesting, though, Sam says, “I want to do it.”
Dean blinks, aware that the uncomfortable, weird tightness in his chest is surprise. Sam is always prodding unaccustomed responses from him. He lights things up. He brings color into the world in a way that only John has ever done before him.
He’s real.
“You sure?” Dean checks.
The shift of the gun in Sam’s hands as the safety comes off says he is.
Some small part of Dean wants to forbid it—stealing is one thing, murdering another. If John catches Dean letting Sam do this, then he might actually kill Dean. He might kill Sam. Dean doesn’t really think he will—John has issues with killing people, grey and dull and difficult to keep track of as they are—but Dean isn’t a hundred percent sure.
Still, the thought of having Sam in with him on this completes a circuit in Dean’s chest that he never knew existed. Excitement, warm and coppery, trickles into his mouth. His heart beats quicker, and his fingers tingle faintly.
Distracted by the rush of sensations, Dean holds his tongue as Sam steps up close behind the still-screaming rent-a-cop. Without any visible delay, Sam sets the muzzle to the back of the rent-a-cop’s head and squeezes the trigger. The rent-a-cop’s screams cut off immediately, leaving their momentarily deafened ears nothing to hear but the echoing roar of the shot.
Dean couldn’t have done it better himself.
Sam lowers his arm to his side and stands quietly over the body with his head bowed. For a moment, Dean thinks that his brother is going to cry. He thinks that maybe it was too soon for this. Maybe he should have insisted on handling it himself the way he usually does.
If Dean brings Sam home crying, Dad is going to know for sure that something’s up.
Dean wavers where he is, unsure of what to do—how to correct his mistake—and then takes a step forward, meaning to go to his brother and at least lift the gun from his hand. He stops again as Sam asks, “That’s it?”
There’s no uncertainty in Sam’s voice. Nothing that sounds like the guilt or remorse that Dean hears from John sometimes. There’s just vague surprise and the blurry edge of disappointment.
As the last, lingering echoes of emotion fade back into stillness within him, Dean licks his lips. “That’s it,” he confirms.
Sam looks down at the body a moment longer and then lifts his head, looking over at Dean from beneath shaggy bangs. “Huh. I thought it’d be… you know. Something.”
Dean shrugs as he turns to head back into the office so he can retrieve the money the rent-a-cop made him put down when he surprised him there. “Life’s full of little disappointments, Sammy,” he says over his shoulder as he goes. “Make sure you get the ammo. And wipe down the counters this time, for fuck’s sake.”
All told, their score for that night’s work is ten boxes of shotgun shells, fifteen boxes of .45s for Dean’s Glock, and about two thousand dollars in cash. Sam wants to keep the rent-a-cop’s gun for some reason, but Dean talks him down to a single bullet from the chamber. Easier to hide from John.
“Freak,” he mutters as Sam palms the bullet on the drive back to the cheap motel where they’re staying on their way through to Colorado.
Sam’s squirming and too worked up to mind the insult, and he only flips Dean the bird before swinging his feet up into Dean’s lap and announcing. “I want ice cream. Can we get some ice cream?”
Dean raises one eyebrow as he glances over at his brother. “What’d you do, drink a couple liters of Coke before we left?”
“Huh?”
“You’re, like, bouncing off the walls.”
“Oh,” Sam says, and tips his head to the side thoughtfully as he rolls the bullet between his hands. “I dunno. I guess… I guess it was maybe kind of exciting. Back there.” He peers over at Dean with a shrewd, conspiratorial look on his face. “Don’t you ever get, I dunno, like, a rush? Afterwards?”
“What, after we rob somewhere?”
“No,” Sam says immediately, swinging his feet back down into the passenger well and frowning. “When you pull the trigger. It doesn’t…you don’t ever get pumped up.”
“Oh,” Dean says, belatedly remembering the rent-a-cop. He considers that brief, almost jazzed jolt that hit him when he realized Sam was serious about wanting to do it, but that doesn’t seem to be the same thing as what Sam’s asking, so he answers, “Nope. But hey, man. Whatever floats your boat. If you’re happy, I’m happy.”
“You mean that?” Sam asks. His hand closes around the bullet and holds it tight.
A joke is on the tip of Dean’s lips, but something tells him that Sam is deadly serious right now—that his answer actually means something. He can’t ever be himself with Sam—it isn’t safe; Sam might look at him like John. He might tell John. But Sam is looking for honesty right now, and Dean judges that it’s at least safe give him that.
“Yeah,” he says simply—and then, when Sam’s face splits into a wide grin, instinct prods him to add, “I mean, you’re a weirdo freak, but I love you.”
“Jerk,” Sam replies, leaning over and shoving Dean’s arm. He’s looking up at Dean just like he always has, with what Dean has come to recognize over the years as love and something like hero worship.
Good. That was the right response, then.
“Bitch,” Dean says, drawing on the worn response easily as he turns right into the parking lot of a darkened, deserted Friendlys. “Okay,” he adds as he pulls around to the back door, “What kind of ice cream do you want? Cookies and Cream or Rocky Road?”
In the end, they end up helping themselves to a scoop of everything and all of the cash in the safe. After all, there’s no point in wasting a trip.
Dean is seven.
John is trying to teach him how to handle the buck of a pistol by bracing his entire body for it before he pulls the trigger, but Dean hasn’t been able to master the trick yet. He sees how much John needs for him to do this, though—almost as much as John needed him to learn his masks—so he waits for his dad to drink himself asleep and then helps himself to one of the guns he’s been practicing with. Then, after checking in on Sammy to make sure he’s asleep, he lets himself out of the apartment.
It takes two hours to walk himself far enough away to be sure the shots won’t wake John or Sammy, but when he has gone far enough, he breaks away from the road and heads into a patch of trees. Then, lifting the gun, Dean braces himself and pulls. When he finds himself flat on his ass, he gets up and tries it again.
He gets off three more shots before a voice from behind him says, “Drop it, sonny.”
When Dean turns around, he sees an old man coming toward him through the trees with a flashlight in one hand and a gun in the other. The old man is wearing boots and a long nightshirt and a ratty bathrobe. His eyes widen when the flashlight falls full on Dean, and his jaw slackens.
“Well, I’ll be damned!” he exclaims. “You ain’t nothing but a baby!” Frowning, he lowers his gun and starts forward. “Here now, give me that afore you hurts yourself.”
He’ll tell Dad, Dean thinks, already imagining the sheen of disappointment in John’s eyes. He brings the gun up without thinking, braces himself, and pulls the trigger again.
This time, he stays standing through the buck.
John doesn’t find out about Dean’s nighttime excursion, and when Dean keeps to his feet the next time they practice, he claps Dean on the shoulder in a way that makes Dean’s chest warm pleasantly in something that’s almost, but isn’t quite, happiness.
“See, son?” John says. “I told you, enough practice and you can do anything you set your mind to.”
Dean thinks fleetingly about the old man in the grove of trees, and of the old man’s wife who came out to check on him after that last shot. Dean barely even felt the buck that time, and it occurs to him now that John is right. Practice does help.
The memory of the old man and his wife grays and fades out again, blurring into nothingness.
“You’re a good shot, too,” John adds, lifting one arm to point at the bullet hole near the center of the target. “Got a natural eye and a steady hand. You’re going to make a fine hunter when you grow up.”
Dean draws on years of experience, works his face into a pleased expression, and beams.
At thirteen, Sam has Dean figured out.
He pins Dean with his eyes one night on their way home from a job and announces, “You aren’t fooling me, you know.”
Dean, who was busy bobbing his head in time with the radio, pauses mid-bob and says, “Excuse me?”
“The whole bad boy, glib talking thing,” Sam clarifies.
“Glib?”
“Yeah, it’s like—you’ve got this mask you put on for people. But it isn’t you, Dean. I’ve seen you. Tonight, at that gas station? That was you.”
Dean thinks back and remembers stepping over the clerk’s body to get to the register. He remembers casually shooting the girl who stopped by to get gas—he was busy in the drawer, so he glanced up long enough to aim and pulled the trigger and then went back to what he was doing. Sam was giving him a weird look when he came back around the counter, but Dean didn’t think much of it until now.
The thing is, Sam isn’t wrong. Dean knows he wears a mask—he needs it for his daily interactions with people. He learned early on that it made John uncomfortable when he was just himself. There were shrinks involved and everything, back when he was four. That babysitter who ditched them when he was five.
Then Dean learned to mimic, and he learned to mime, and everything smoothed out again. It’s gotten so that he doesn’t really have to think about plastering a smile on his face and charming a pretty waitress. Or wise-mouthing to a cop or pain-in-the-ass witness.
Television has been a great help. Lots of role models and examples to follow.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dean says, sliding his hands around the steering wheel as he comes to a stop at a red light.
Sam snorts. “Please. You suck at lying. How can you be so good at faking it and so bad at lying to me and Dad?”
The light turns and Dean doesn’t move. His chest is too tight—not quite fear, but as close as he’s ever really come.
“Sam,” Dean starts, and then shuts his mouth as Sam’s hand closes around his arm.
“It’s okay, Dean. I won’t tell. I just—”
Dean glances over out of the corner of his eyes and sees Sam lick his lips ponderously as he chooses his words.
“I just wanted you to know that you don’t need to pretend for me.”
The tension leaves Dean’s chest in a rush of expanding warmth that he hasn’t ever felt before. The strength of the sensation leaves him a little dizzy.
“Okay,” he says in an oddly tight voice, and gets the car moving again.
After a few minutes, Sam says, “Dean?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you—I mean, you still love me, right? Even if you don’t feel things like most people?”
Dean blinks, glancing over and not even bothering to hide the faint flutter in his heart. “Dude. You have to ask?”
The nervous frown on Sam’s face melts into a smile and he beams the whole ride home.
For once, Dean is slower on the uptake.
He doesn’t get Sam—really and truly get him—until Sam is kneeling in a puddle of intestines and laughing as he draws out more. Dean is twenty-six at the time, and nursing a beer up at the bar. He watches Sam slowly take the bartender apart and lets the understanding of his brother sink in.
Sam gets off on killing. He likes it. The messier, the better.
It seems like a waste of time and effort to Dean, but he supposes he doesn’t mind. Watching Sam’s joy in his work warms Dean’s insides, and the after party…
Well, it’s always worth the wait.
Sam is eighteen the first time he has sex. Dean can’t believe it when he finds out.
“Wait, never?” he demands, sitting up in the bed. “You’ve never fucked anyone before? Not even a girl?”
“Have you?” Sam shoots back, cocky even now, with his hair all mussed and his ass leaking Dean’s come all over the sheets.
Dean huffs and drops back down onto the bed, splaying one hand over his brother’s chest. “That’s different,” he says. “I just never felt like it.”
How could he have, when the world is so washed out and dull? It’s like some kind of dream he’s living in, peopled by him and John and Sam and the countless bit part actors who roll in and out through Dean’s life like wisps of smoke.
There’s a moment of silence between them, and then Sam says, “You know, for your first time, that was pretty good. I mean, you know. Not a complete waste of time.”
Dean sees immediately what Sam is fishing for and sees no reason not to oblige. At any rate, it’ll be another opportunity to practice his new, unexpected skill set. Growling in mock anger, he rolls over and blankets Sam’s body with his own again.
“I’ll show you ‘waste of time’, Bitch,” he says, and Sam wraps his legs around Dean’s waist and purrs.
When Dean is twenty-two, he and Sam kill four people in a diner. Sam says he needs the money, although Dean isn’t sure what he needs it for. They shoot the cook, the waitress, and the young couple who popped in for a bite—likely on their way across country on some sort of road trip.
Sam takes his time with the young man, he has this obsession with drawing things out, which Dean doesn’t understand but tolerates all the same. It gives him time to properly count their take and to dismantle the cameras over the register—lots more places with this sort of equipment, lately, which means that sooner or later they’re going to get caught.
Dean isn’t sure what John will do when that happens. He isn’t sure what he’ll do.
Sam is flushed when he finally finishes, and when he stands up from the mess he made on the floor, he sways uncertainly. He’ll be like this for a few hours—jittery and almost high—and Dean, sitting on one of the counter stools, watches him come closer with a neutral expression.
“They’ve got pie,” he offers—Sam’s usually hungry after, and Dean’s feeling peckish himself.
“I don’t want pie,” Sam says—growls, really—and then he grabs Dean’s face with both hands and mashes their mouths together with more hunger than he’s ever shown for food.
Dean blinks, taken aback, and then jolts as that circuit in his chest snaps open again. He hasn’t ever seen the attraction of fucking before, but he can now. Suddenly, as though seeing through his brother’s eyes, he can see everything. The world’s grays are overly bright, exploding rainbows.
He brings his own hands up, hungry for more, and gets hold of Sam’s hair. Wrenching his brother’s head back, he sets his mouth to Sam’s throat and bites down, cock swelling for the first time and filling him with urgent, needy impulses he isn’t even sure what to do with.
“Dean,” Sam pants, letting go of Dean’s face and grasping his shoulders instead. “Fuck, Dean.”
Dean tears his mouth from his brother’s throat in a painfully strong swell of confusing emotion, then grabs Sam’s ass and says, “I want—Sam, I want—”
“Yeah,” Sam agrees as he hauls Dean up from the stool and toward the diner’s door. “And you better get us back to a motel room soon, because otherwise I’m going to make you fuck me in the car. I don’t care whether Dad smells it tomorrow or not.”
Dean isn’t sure he really cares himself, but his cautious habits are strong enough to keep him in check until they’re three miles distant. He makes Sam wait in the car while he rents a room—Sam got messy when he was finishing the young boyfriend in the diner—and then drags his brother inside their room and shoves him up against the wall and sets about taking everything he can.
If Dean had known sex would feel this good, he would have done it a long time ago.