Work Text:
Dean Winchester is four years old and he wants to be a firefighter when he's older.
He runs around their garden in Lawrence, Kansas with a bright red and white fire truck, making the engine noises as he waves the toy in the air. His mother, Mary, stands in the doorway to watch him, a baby in the crook of her arm and a smile on her face. When Dean notices her his grin widens and he runs to her side with the truck still in his hands.
His toy is outright abandoned in favour of his little brother, Sam, because despite his young age Dean is enamoured by him.
That night Dean goes to bed after helping his mom tuck Sam into his crib, and wakes up to his father, John, shoving Sam into his arms and telling him to run. The house goes up in flames, and a week later they're moving out of Lawrence.
The next few years go like this:
Dean raises Sam, because John grows distant and recluse and suddenly, they're hopping from motel to motel across states. John spends time writing in his journal and comes home after long hours 'working' covered in bruises and cuts and smelling like gunpowder and smoke.
Dean is five years old, when his father tells him the harsh, horrifying truth of the world; That monsters told in folklore and myths are all real, and John has become a Hunter to try and find and kill the creature that killed his mother.
Dean is five, and he's alone in a motel room and Sam will not stop crying. He's colicky and crying almost constantly, and the pressure is enough to make himself sick. The motel room has been paid two days in advance, the only food left is a box of granola bars and Sam's formula, and Dean is under strict orders to never leave the room.
He's completely alone, begging his baby brother to please stop crying because he's trying goddamit. By the time John Winchester comes back, Sam is no longer sick and Dean begs his father to never leave them again.
A week later, another motel room, and Dean is in tears when John gets ready to leave. John, taking one look at his sobbing child on the verge of a breakdown, scowls and says 'Winchesters don't cry'.
Dean Winchester is eight years old when his father takes him on his first hunt - a Rawhead in Montana; A hairy humanoid creature with leathery skin, sharp teeth, and clawed hands and feet that likes to prey on children. It's only later that he realises he was brought as bait, when John leaves him in the basement of the abandoned house where the monster had made it's den. He leaves shaken, with a harsh pat on the shoulder from his father, and the Rawhead's tooth that had embedded itself in his arm as a trophy.
He's nine years old the first time John Winchester hurts him. They're in Wisconsin and John leaves Dean in charge of Sam to hunt a Shtriga, an Albanian Witch that feeds on children's lifeforce.
The problem was, that they had nothing. John had been gone for a day and a half and Sammy, five years old and not understanding why they only had cardboard cereal to eat, complained and cried he was hungry. He begged Dean for actual food, and Dean - a sucker for his little brother - ventured outside the motel room to find something.
Something came in the form of a man wandering around street corners asking how much Dean charged. Now - Dean was not stupid. He spent enough of his life on the road to understand what the man was asking, wanting. Dean is nine, and he gives a handjob to a random man in an alleyway for twenty bucks to buy Sam a pizza.
When he gets back to the motel room, feeling dirty and guilty but proud that he's finally got Sam something he would enjoy, he's greeted with the sight of the Shtriga over the sleeping body of his brother. He grabs the shotgun his father had left for him, aims, but freezes as the monster looks at him.
John Winchester bursts through the door, shoots the Shtriga but it retreats. Sam, woken from the chaos, is crying in his bed as John comforts him and scolds Dean. An hour later, after Sam eats the pizza Dean had gotten him and goes back to sleep, John beats Dean for almost getting his brother killed.
The man in the back alley should have been the last time but it isn't. Ohio, Missouri, Pennsylvania; Dean stands on street corners as John goes on hunting trips and Sam is tucked away in bed with a shotgun next to him. He loses what's left of his childhood when he's fourteen to have sex with a man to buy Sam a birthday present - a sketchbook and some fancy colored pencils because you only turn ten once and Sam's been on an art-kick lately. Eventually, those street corners leave him feeling hollow and it becomes routine to leave Sam with a weapon whilst he worked in the night.
He's got enough afterwards to buy a slice of cherry pie and to stick a candle in it to surprise Sam when he gets back from school. It's the most accomplished he's felt in a long time, but of course John has to ruin it by dragging Dean to hunt a pack of werewolves.
Dean is arrested for stealing bread and peanut butter to get Sam to eat, and sent to a home for troubled boy's. Sonny, the man running the home, asks about the scars and bruises on Dean's body but he never answers. He spends two months there in New York, and selfishly, it's the best time Dean's had in a long time.
He finally gets to act like a normal teenager, worrying about school and girls rather than anything lurking in closets or who he was going to have to blow in order to keep food on the table.
Then it all comes crashing down when John comes knocking on the door and Dean looks out the window to see Sam looking out the back window of the Impala, shirt sleeves unbutton and hair a mess. He realises that whilst he had been having the best time of his life since he was four years old, Sam had probably been having the worst.
The guilt eats at his insides, and he leaves Sonny's home with a sour taste in his mouth that sweetens slightly at the sight of joy on his brother's face as he sits in the car next to him.
Dean is seventeen when John catches him with a twenty-something man he had met in the bar. In the long run, it's not the worst beating he's received from his father, but it's the hunt John sends him on that breaks him a little more. A couple of nuns that killed themselves because they were so in love, that they would rather die together than live apart; they haunt a church and Dean is sent to get rid of them.
They're not violent -a far cry from all previous hunts Dean has been on- and he breaks down in tears at the sight of them.
They both look at him sadly, as he salts their bodies and their hands are still clasped together as he lights their bodies aflame - letting them burn together.
When he arrives back, Sam wants to know all about it (childish wonder, because John had never let Sam as close to hunts as he did Dean) but Dean can't bring himself to speak of it. John leaves the next morning without a word to him, and Dean finds himself thankful of it because if he spoke to the man he was sure he would make a comment that would end with him having a concussion.
By the time Sam turns eighteen, tension between his brother and their father runs high. Sam has always been free-spirited and Dean knows from personal experience their father wants obedience from his kids. No matter how much John favoured Sam when they were younger, those feelings did nothing to stop the arguments the two began to have. Fights brewed between them and Dean found himself stepping between the two more often than not to ensure John never hit Sam.
The hits never came, even on their worst arguments, and Dean found himself growing a bitter feeling in his stomach at the thought that John's physical abuse was preserved for him alone.
Then, after a verbal fight between Sam and John, Sam storms out the motel door with a duffel bag and an acceptance letter to Harvard in his hand.
No placates from Dean stops John from trashing the motel room, or the punches that gets thrown his way.
Dean stays by John's side for almost half the year, before he wakes up one morning to find his father missing and the vague newspaper clippings for a potential hunt on the bedside table, and the keys to the Impala.
Alone, Dean drives for what seems like days before he stops outside a Navy recruitment centre and thinks fuck it.
The Navy SEALs recruiter gives him a particular look, and Dean realises that he must look like hell. He's got bruises still healing on his face, hands marks around his neck that are still purple, and burn marks on his arms from a hunt he and John had gone on a week prior.
He looks like he's running from something (someone) and he comes to the stark discernment that he very much is.
"What's your name, son?" The man asked, voice oozing confidence and authority. Before, Dean would have no doubt cowered back, all too used to the same tone coming from his father when barking out orders to be obeyed no matter how dangerous or impossible. Now, Dean feels a little like he's been hollowed out and all earlier fear he's harboured all these years has been replaced with empty.
He doesn't want to go back to John. The thought is immediate, and overwhelming. It encompasses his entire body until the very image of seeing John again feels him with panic. No - Dean would not see John again, not whilst he was still breathing. But John was ex army, honourably discharged after years of service with friends still high-up.
His hand goes to the pocket of his jacket and he pulls out one of the many IDs he keeps on him.
"Evan. My name is Evan Buckley."
+++++
Evan Buckley, becomes Buck. He finds he likes it more than his birth name, so much so that he can't think of himself as anyone but Evan 'Buck' Buckley.
Buck, is the energetic and joyful kid who is fiercely loyal and strangely amazing at being a sniper, despite the fact he can hardly sit still for more than a couple seconds without bouncing off the walls. Buck is the kid who never calls or writes home, who gets cagey when asked about family but has mentioned his 'baby brother Sammy' and left the conversation rather quickly.
Buck is the best sniper Team 6 has ever seen, and after three years of never-ending service, he's put on reserves after a particularly hard mission that resulted in half of his team's death.
He gets dropped off in a base in Wisconsin, buys a jeep and drives it across state lines until he reaches a bar in no-where Ohio, where he meets Maddie Kendall.
There was something to be said about like recognising like - and boy, did Buck recognise the look on Maddie's face.
The fear, the bruises that decorated her jaw and arms, it was familiar to Buck in a way that he's not had to remember in years.
Maddie must see it on his face too, and maybe it's because they're just strangers in a bar in dumb-fuck no where, but she tells him everything. Her absent parents after losing her younger brother to Leukaemia, and Doug, who had showed up at a point in her life when the attention he gave her was enough for her to leave everything behind to be with him; How Doug, once doting and sweet, turned sour when they married and began hitting her.
In turn, Buck gave sparing details of his little brother Sam, who he raised moving across the country with an absent father who could never settle.
Buck doesn't know how long they spend talking but it's enough to form a type of bond with Maddie that he could only relate to trauma-bonding. So, in a fit of momentary madness, he ignores every lesson John gave him about making false identities believable - and offers her a new name.
"Maddie Buckley?" She asks, eyebrows pulled together. The glass of water on the table in front of her dripped condensed water to make a ring on the wooden table.
"Is it even possible for me to get a new identity so quickly?"
Buck shrugs, nursing his beer in his hand. "I did it," he replies simply, and it seems to stump her for a moment.
"Your real name isn't Evan Buckley?"
"No. I named myself that just before I joined Navy SEALS training. My dad...He was pretty paranoid and was big on having false identities on hand. I had the ID on me at the time and I was desperate to get away so --" Buck trailed off with another shrug.
"It's not exactly legal, but I've got a contact that can forge documents to make it look real. If you agree, I can make it so Maddie Buckley exists before the sun rises in the morning."
Maddie looks shocked at the offer, mouth agape. She contemplates for a moment, before shaking herself from her stupor. "If I do this...What happens to Maddie Kendall, if I become Maddie Buckley?"
"As far as documents go, Maddie Kendall will just - disappear, I guess. Any record of you will stop at you checking into whatever motel you're staying in right now." Buck gave her another second to take this in, before warning her, "But you've got to understand - you have to start with nothing. If you want to leave Maddie Kendall behind it's gotta be all of you. I can make it so you have any qualifications you had, but as far as money - it's going to be wiped."
Maddie shakes her head. "I have nothing anyway. I left Doug with the clothes I have on, and fifty dollars and it's gotten me here."
She looks at him squarely, running a finger down the glass of water. "Are you sure about this? We can get into a lot of trouble, can't we?"
Buck nods. "It's illegal, but I'd get in trouble for doing it for myself anyway, why not add you onto the list too?"
Maddie chuckles. "So … I'd be Maddie Buckley? How would that work for us?"
Buck bites his lip. "I miss having a sibling. It gets pretty lonely being the only Buckley."
She gets teary-eyed. "And I missed being a big sister."
It's agreed, that Maddie Kendall disappears after checking in a dingy motel in Ohio. There is no search party, no missing-person fliers - only the ghost of a woman escaping her abusive husband.
Maddie Buckley begins in the middle of March, in the passenger seat of Buck's jeep as they drive over state lines, a fresh ID in her pocket and a passport in her bag that's newly printed.
They arrive in Los Angeles two weeks later, where Maddie applies for a dispatcher job and Buck enrols in the Fire Academy.
Buck flies through the training easily and graduates at the top of his year, and the day of his ceremony he gets an email inviting him to join Station 118 from a Captain Robert Nash.
His life settles, a new found-family in the members of 118 and he gets what he's dreamt of since he was little.
But not everything can stay perfect. Buck really should have known it would crumble eventually.