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“So are you, like, gay now?” Sam asks as casually as he can, watching Dean clean his gun as if nothing happened. As if the hickey on his neck is from some cute waitress and not the muscular, male bartender.
“What?” Dean grumbles, before going back to nursing the mother of all hangovers, clicking the safety off.
“Uh, nothing.” Bad idea to ask when he’s holding a gun.
They have this exchange, or a variation of it, more times than Sam can count over the years. Dean always finds some way to blow him off, or change the subject, before Sam can really learn anything.
“You just gotta be patient,” Bobby tells him gruffly whenever he brings it up, “he’ll tell you whatever there is to tell when he’s ready.
So Sam waits.
*
Dean’s never been much for lore.
He gets too damn much of it in his life and it’s all unnecessarily complicated and, when you stop to think about it, stupid. This goddess can only be killed with that tree; this monster needs to be decapitated then stabbed 5 times in these places; this spell only works if it has the bones of a virgin who never farted, who decided this shit was a good idea? Honestly he doesn’t know why they were so surprised to find out God had been a shitty fantasy author all along: who else would come up with so many arbitrary rules? Such is the life of a hunter, he supposes, but he'll be damned if he lets it interfere with anything else.
So yeah, it’s probably at about the time Dad dumps him at Bobby’s next to a stack of books taller than he is and tells him to dig up everything he can about Wendigoes that Dean decides he’s done with intricate world building and deep fantasy.
Sam’s the opposite of course: the kid loves lore. His favourite Tolkien book is the Silmarillion for fuck’s sake and he hates Vonnegut and the other pulp sci-fi and loud action movies that Dean devours.
“It makes no sense,” he complained to Dean in the car once, on a long journey when he’d read everything else in the Impala. “How does Billy even come unstuck from time in the first place? And why doesn’t he care enough to find out?”
Dean just shrugged. “So it goes Sammy.”
*
Cas used to be the same as Dean.
“Angels don’t even have bodies,” he pointed out, “so it’s not of much concern to us.” He’d called it a ‘profound bond’ and left it at that.
(Humans are nothing but bodies, really. Why do they always have to complicate matters?)
Lately, since his first stint at humanity, he’s been more and more like Sam. Not that it’s a bad thing, Dean supposes, as long as they don’t bother him about it.
When Cas is back at the bunker now, and when there isn’t an apocalypse distracting them, he collects and classifies. Flowers, leaves, feathers; anything he can find in the forest. He brings it back to his room, sticks in a notebook and finds it in the biology books that the Men of Letters have for some reason, before carefully writing it down, Latin name and all. Sometimes, he and Dean will go for walks, and he’ll point out what tree is what, and do his best to identify the birds by their songs. Dean just likes the noise.
Back in bed, Cas asks “What am I to you Dean? What is this?”
“You’re Cas,” is all he can think to say, “And this is ours. Is that ok?”
“Yes,” Cas says, but with a wistful sadness. He wants something he can write down, Latin name and all, in his notebooks: some way to categorise this part of human experience. Dean can’t give him the language though, can’t provide the appropriate lore.
Actually, when Dean thinks about it, of course the Men of Letters have books about the local wildlife: they were big ones for lore.
Actually, now Dean thinks about it, Cas was like this with his bees too: naming them, making sure the hives didn’t mix too much, keeping track of how different flowers affected the honey.
So maybe angels do care a little.
*
He’s 14 when he kisses a boy for the first time. It’s round the back of the movie theatre they’d been thrown out of for lying about their ages. His name is Emil, and he’s tall, with a big nose and a crooked smile. They have math class together. Emil offers him a cigarette and they both pretend that they’re enjoying it, trying not to cough. Dean can’t tell if it’s the nicotine or the kiss that make his lips buzz.
Their hunt finishes before the end of the weekend so he doesn’t get a chance to say goodbye.
He doesn’t kiss a girl until he’s 16 and he wonders if maybe he did it backwards. He didn’t have some earth-shattering moment where he realised he wasn’t ‘normal’ (and what’s normal when you live in a motel and kill ghosts?), no crisis of identity when that waiter with the strong arms made him hard.
He remembers Charlie talking about the relief she felt when she realised she wasn’t alone: when she logged on and discovered that there were other girls out there just like her, that they had a name and a flag and parades and poets (lore). She’d looked at him expectantly then, waiting for him to give his own version of her story.
But all he remembers is gradual comprehension and surprise that not everyone likes everyone: that Sam, his father, Bobby just didn’t feel how he felt when they looked at men. He didn’t start out alone.
He’d told Charlie that and she’d looked at him with sympathy. “You don’t need to be alone now either,” she tells him, taking his hand like someone’s died, “your people are out there. You’ll find them.”
But Dean’s never really been alone and he’s always had people. Benny, Jo, Cassie. Kisses and blow jobs in the back alleys of bars; numbers and addresses slipped into his hand by servers and police officers; sweaty, drunken fumbling in the backseat of the Impala. Hell, even the odd threesome, when a disagreement with a boyfriend or girlfriend (pissed off that their ____ was flirting) had ended with a fuck instead of a fight. Lisa had been one of those, though he’d ended up outlasting the girlfriend: who’d’ve guessed?
They don’t have names or flags or historical figures, they don’t meet monthly in the basement of a liberal church and they don’t have internet forums, but they’re there when he wants them.
Charlie just shook her head. “It’s more than just sex Dean: it’s love, community, history. It’s about being able to point to a word and say: ‘that’s me, that’s who I am, that’s who we are, this is where we’ve been, this is where we’re going.’”
“I dunno if that’s me Charlie. It sounds like a lotta work.”
(Being a Winchester comes with a whole lotta Lore already)
“That’s fine too: it’s ok to not like labels.”
“That sounds a hell of a lot like a label to me.”
Charlie laughed. “I guess it does. But if you do decide there’s a word for you, me n’Sam – we’ll be there. It won’t change anything.”
“It feels like it already has”
*
So maybe he’s lying a little bit about feeling alone.
He’s 19 and in the car with his Dad, driving to some city with an unusual murderer plaguing its bars.
“This might not be our sort of thing,” John warns him, “it’s only been queers that have died so far, so it might be some new sex thing they’re all getting into. Still, worth checking out just in case: we don’t want this spreading to normal society. You watch yourself though,” he casts a sidelong look at his son. “There’s no telling what they’ll try and do to you.”
“Yes Sir.”
Luckily John never really notices Dean’s comings and goings: not on that hunt (it was a hunt, not a sex thing) or anywhere else. As long as Sam’s safe, and as long as Dean wins more on pool than he spends on drinks (an easy feat as he rarely has to buy his own) and as long as he can hunt, his dad mostly leaves him to it.
*
He knows that Sam and Charlie love to talk Lore. He’s sat through enough of their endless discussions on everything from the metallurgic properties of silver (‘there must be something about the chemical composition that makes it lethal to monsters: werewolves are pagan so why would they be affected by Judeo-Christian curses?’) to Westerosi seasons (‘if the planet’s on a tilted axis of rotation then irregular seasons would be the norm’) to know that by now. So really, he shouldn’t be surprised that Sam’s been digging into the lore, or that Sam knows where to start. It’s just that Charlie’s long dead by the time Sam gets around to asking (again).
“Dean you know you can just come out and say it right? You know it won’t change anything?”
“What won’t?” He is genuinely confused.
“I don’t care that you’re Gay, ok?” Sam says, giving him a meaningful look over the top of his laptop.
“But I’m not gay.”
“Sorry. Then are you, Bi?” Sam squints at the screen, “or do you prefer Pan?”
“What? I don’t know what that is. Look Sam,” he really doesn’t want to have this conversation. Not again, not with Charlie gone and definitely not with Sam. “I don’t really want to label –”
“Ok,” Sam is unbearably eager, “so you’d describe yourself as Queer?”
Dean flinches. “No!” It comes out angrier than intended.
“Then what are you?”
“I’m an Aquarius.”
“Dean, be serious.”
“I am being serious, Sammy, I just don’t know what you want from me.”
“I just want you to be open with me, Dean. I’ve seen you go off with strange men for god knows how many years and I haven’t said anything because I’ve been waiting for you to be ready, but goddamit I can’t wait any longer.”
Dean spreads his hands. “I don’t know what to tell you Sam. There’s nothing for me to say.”
“You’re not honestly trying to deny that you f-fuck men are you?” If the situation was different, Dean might laugh at the way his brother stutters over fuck. “’Cos it’s a little too late for you to go back into the closet. Especially now that you and Cas –”
“And when exactly was I in there to begin with, huh?” Dean challenges. “I’m not tryna hide anything Sam, I swear. But if you’re waitin’ on some tearful confession where I tell you what letters of the acronym describe me so you know what colour glitter to break out during pride then you’re not gonna get it.” Sam’s not the only one Charlie sent Lore to.
“But you must be something, Dean. Everyone’s something.”
“I’m me, Sammy. Just me. I just fuck whoever feels right; I don’t overthink it or put names on it. That’s not me.”
“Ok but you know that, whatever you are, I’m ok with it right? You can talk to me about it, you know that right?” Sam presses.
“I know,” Dean assures him, “I know.”
“And it doesn’t change anything either. You’re still my brother no matter what.”
But everything’s already changed, Dean wants to say but doesn’t. No going back now brother: you’ve marked me, put me away from you, and declared me other. And what choice did I get in the matter?
“Thanks Sammy.” Dean smiles.