Work Text:
I.
Two weeks after leaving Stanford, Sam playing some game on his phone in the passenger seat, Dean put in one of his Blue Öyster Cult tapes. BOC was one of the groups he didn’t get from his dad; John had never cared for prog, but Dean actually kind of liked Rush and BOC and sometimes even groups like Yes or Marillion.
The tape played the first song, and everything was fine until the chorus started, and it said, “A fire of unknown origin took my baby away,” and Sam choked and dropped his phone.
Without a word Dean punched the eject button, rolled the window down, and threw the tape out onto the road.
Chuck liked the moment a lot, but he couldn’t find a good spot for it in the story, so he left it out.
II.
Around San Francisco, Chuck was surprised to realize Dean didn’t actually like coffee. After that he paid better attention and realized Dean was probably a supertaster, unable to tolerate overly bitter flavors, which would explain a lot about why he didn’t like most of the commonly-available green vegetables. Dean himself, of course, probably had no idea; Chuck knew Dean wasn’t stupid, but he also wasn’t intellectual, and that kind of thing wasn’t something he’d ever have had an interest in looking into.
The writer wondered for a while why Dean didn’t doctor his coffee to taste better, until he caught a conversation about “If I put stuff in the coffee, then I have more coffee.” Dean drank coffee as a convenient vehicle for caffeine, apparently. Of course it didn’t occur to him to drink tea instead, because his father hadn’t, and also Chuck suspected Dean thought of tea as “girly”.
Chuck didn’t think disliking coffee really fit the picture of Dean he’d built up, but he was kind of proud of himself for having such multilayered characters.
III.
Sam knew all the verses of “O Come All Ye Faithful” in Latin, and really liked traditional carols like “The Holly and the Ivy”; he had a pleasant if untrained baritone. He and Dean watched Die Hard at least once every December, because they agreed it was the best Christmas movie ever.
Knowing how Sam felt about Christmas in general, Chuck didn’t put any of that in. By then he was thinking of them as people with their own motivations and personalities, which was weird but fun.
IV.
Dean was standing before the rack, razor in his hand, when the light burst over him, bright and terrible and holy in the flame-licked darkness.
Chuck thought it was cruelly unfair that Dean never remembered his first sight of Castiel, so he didn’t include it in the final draft; it was wrong for the rest of the world to know that, if Dean himself didn’t.
And he put in the little present-tense dream flashbacks, which implied instead of describing, because he couldn’t bear to tell anyone what Hell was really like. Even before he knew it was real.
V.
Sam spent the entire year ashamed of how much he missed Ruby—not her blood, Ruby herself. It was a small shame, in the grand scheme of things he felt he should be ashamed of, but he really had cared about her, and he was actually pretty sure she’d cared about him too. At the time he’d been too stunned to notice, but when he thought later about her last speech to him, as he lay on the chapel floor, he remembered that she’d taken care to reassure him and even try to make him happy.
Chuck, who knew a little something about loving inappropriate people (see: his entire high school career), didn’t fault him for it, but he thought maybe that’d be a bit much for the fans.
The thing he did
They did have a home. It was each other.