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You weren’t surprised when they finally gave up on you. Your brothers, Sam and Dean, had been caring for you ever since your parents had died.
They even continued to care for you after they found out that it had been you who’d set the fire in your house all those years ago, killing both of your parents.
You didn’t really mean to tell them that, but when you were on one of your babbling sprees, words would just tumble from your mouth unguided. Many secrets were spilled in those moments, including one of the darkest ones of your life.
Your case was what helped Sam decide to go into psychiatric medicine, hoping to understand the imbalance of chemicals in your brain. He used you as an example in many of his research papers throughout the years, knowing that nature, not nurture, was the reason for your insanity and wanting to know why.
No matter what medicines doctors would prescribe you, you never seemed to get better.
Dean stayed home with you most of the time, running a specialty car mechanic shop out of the detached garage. He’d set you up on the front porch with a snack and a book, or something else to occupy your hands and mind, where he could see you from across the yard.
Dean was forever grateful that you weren’t a runner.
No, rather, you’d sit quietly for hours, not telling either of your younger brothers what was going through your mind. It would sometimes take them hours to snap you out of a daze, but they figured you were safer in your mind than running around, potentially hurting yourself or others.
You hadn’t hurt anyone since the fire.
That was a dark day, not just for you but for your entire family. You didn’t know the details anymore. Many times when you zoned out, no memory would remain from that time. That’s what happened the day of the fire.
The room was in flames around you when your mother had come inside, screaming for you to get out. You had slowly done as she said, feeling the heat on your face and enjoying it. She went to your brothers’ rooms, getting the two of them up and out.
You’d been sixteen, old enough to know better. But your mind didn’t know better, and that was the problem.
Dean was fourteen, Sam ten, and they had both taken your hands and led you down the stairs. Even at their age, they understood that while you were older than them, your mind wasn’t. At that point, Dean had already been taking care of you for years.
You think your mom had gone to find your dad, who was in the basement tinkering with this or that. You didn’t know.
All you knew was that neither of them had come out of that fire, and the three of you went to live with Uncle Bobby and Aunt Ellen.
Dean was in charge of you from then on, not because Bobby and Ellen didn’t care, but because they couldn’t put their lives on hold the way your mother had to take care of you. When Dean turned eighteen, you twenty, he’d gotten an apartment for the two of you. Then when Sam went to college, the two of you followed, always staying together as a family.
Things were as good as they could be, until they weren’t.
On your thirtieth birthday, Dean drove you to the Clarence Center. He’d filled the paperwork out, pushed you around in a wheelchair, and pointed out all of the ‘fun’ things they had there.
An hour later, he’d left.
You didn’t see the tears streaming down his face in the car, but you wouldn’t have understood them anyways. It wasn’t until years later that you knew your brothers had given up on you, leaving you at the center to be taken care of by strangers.