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"Come on, Sammy!" Dean yells, and six year old Sam launches himself fearless from the edge of the pool, tucks his knees and cannonballs into the water to come up laughing. School's just started and Dean's already in trouble, but right now he doesn't care. Dad finally relented and paid for the pool pass, and he's out of town this weekend so he doesn't know that Dean got sent to the principal's office for fighting - not that it was his fault. Someone has to stick up for the little runts. So he and Sam have the run of the place, and they're taking full advantage.
"Hey, hey," Sam says, pushing water at Dean. "Hey, how long can you hold your breath?"
"I don't know," Dean says. "A couple minutes?"
Sam snorts. "No way. Prove it."
Dean grins. "Count for me," he says, and takes a breath, and sinks beneath the surface.
The world is instantly quiet. Quieter than anywhere. Quieter than their room at night, with the tick of the clock and Dad snoring, quieter than the bus stop in the morning before the other kids get there. He has to paddle a little to stay under, and he looks up at the other swimmers, the bright ripples their bodies make of the water. Sammy's floating right above him, and sunlight licks around him like fire.
***
Every time they move, it happens all over again, until John starts threatening to keep them out of school altogether. "Home schooling, is that what you want?" he asks, tight-voiced with frustration, and the chorus of "No sir," comes fast and sharp, the boys obediently providing the answer he wants. As they get older, though, it starts to get grudging, and then sullen, until Dean's saying, "You can teach us more than those fat fucks anyway, Dad, why are we even going?" and Sam's got his arms crossed over his chest and his chin tucked down, doesn't answer at all, doesn't even look up when John threatens to smack that language right out of Dean's mouth. John doesn't know whether it's because he agrees with Dean or because he won't nay-say his brother. Dean thinks it's because Sammy's with him on this like he is on everything, but Dean's wrong.
***
"Sammy Samantha, Sammy Samantha," the sing-song voice twisting a knot in Sam's stomach as the yellow school bus pulls away from the stop, and here comes Jake Addison loping up behind him and tossing a sideways kick towards Sam's knee. Sam dodges without thinking and hitches his book bag higher on his shoulder, and he doesn't even slow down. "Your brother got sent home for fighting again," Jake says, coming around to walk backwards in front of him, toothy grin and eyes too little for his face. "Your brother's a big freak, you know that, right?"
"Shut up, Jake," Sam sneers. "God, you're such a loser."
"I'm not the one about to get expelled," Jake shoots back, like Sam even cares. Anyway, Dean never gets expelled. He's always been able to sweet-talk and plea-bargain his way out of anything, except with Dad. Sometimes Sam wishes he would get kicked out, or that Dad'd get sick of the fighting and the parent-teacher crap and take Dean out of school after all, and then Sam's life might get a little easier. It's hard enough to make friends always changing schools in the middle of the year, and when your brother's Dean freakin' Winchester - "yeah, like the rifle," - it's damn near impossible.
"He's gonna grow up to be a serial killer," Jake says. "Get his shit-eating grin plastered all over the front page when he climbs up on top of the Costco and opens fire. Bam!" he shouts, miming a gun, "bam! Bam!"
"Yeah, right," Sam says, sidestepping Jake and his invisible shotgun. "You're just still pissed about when he beat up your brother for shoving Raymond's head in the toilet."
"Am not," Jake answers, skipping to catch up. "And anyway, that little ferret totally had it coming to him."
"Yeah, for what?" Sam snaps. "Being smaller?"
"Being a grody little coward with stupid glasses," Jake says. "What do you care anyway? What's your freak brother care?"
"Shut up, Jake," Sam says again, and shoves past him, walking too fast with his eyes on the ground. He kicks a pinecone and it careens forward, bounces off Joey Haverson's mailbox. There are still balloons tied to it from Joey's birthday party on the weekend, that Sam only knew about because he'd walked past it on his way home from the library. Through the windows he'd seen a dozen faces from his class, and the reflections of candles in the double-paned windows. He could hear them laughing, the sound muffled and distant, and he'd hurried his steps to get past before they saw him, embarrassed to be alone.
Behind him Jake's laughing, and firing. "Bam! Bam bam bam!"
Sam slings his bag to his other shoulder and stuffs his hands in his pockets, fighting down a sick feeling. "You probably can't even lift a gun, you dumb fuck," he mutters.
Sam is eleven years old.
Sam spends a lot of time watching the other kids. In class, on the playground, in the quad, in the lunchroom, he's usually paying more attention to them than to what he's supposed to be doing. He's always way ahead anyway, waiting for the rest of the class to catch up and just hoping no one notices. So he watches: watches the way they move around each other and with each other, the little power-plays and humiliations, and filing away what's different from one group to another, which ones are loners and which ones are just outcasts.
Kids are like animals, it doesn't take much watching to see that. Anything different, anything weaker, is at risk, can't be tolerated. He watches, and he tries to figure it out, to see the trick in it like watching Dad teach Dean how to pick a lock. You just have to slot it in right, and then work it 'til it clicks.
Dean doesn't even think about it, not that Sam can tell. Dean could run any school they went to if he wanted - he's got all the things that make a pack leader, a popular kid, a class president. He's smart, and smart enough not to show it off; athletic, he's even run track at a couple of their schools 'til Dad pulled them out again. Dad never let him go out for football or wrestling or any of that - "and what happens if you get injured, Dean? You gonna back me up on a hunt with a couple of broken ribs or your arm in a cast? How'll you look after Sammy if you're hurt?" - but Sam's sure Dean'd excel at all of it if he ever got the chance. He'd make quarterback for sure. And the way the cheerleaders already look at him even when they think they shouldn't, think he's beneath them, he wouldn't have any trouble dating the prom queen.
And it pisses Sam off that Dean just doesn't bother. Sam's lurking around the edges when if his brother weren't such a freak, he could be right there in the middle of it. Could be making friends, going to birthday parties, having something that at least looks like a normal life from the outside, even if Sam would always know he was faking it. They wouldn't know, and that's what matters.
"What do you care?" Dean asks, annoyed, bouncing a rubber ball off the side of the house. Dad's not home yet, and Sam and Dean are sprawled on sagging front porch with a bag of Cheetos and a couple of cans of Cheerwine. "You really care what those asswipes think?"
"What's wrong with wanting to have friends for a change, Dean?" Sam scowls, kicking out at the ball as it rebounds back to Dean. It bounces off his toe and Dean lunges for it, catches it before it goes over the railing into the bushes.
"Bitch," Dean says, and lobs a Cheeto at Sam's head.
Sam bats it away. "Jerk."
"Anyway, you've got friends," Dean says, tossing the ball from hand to hand. "You've got me and Dad."
Sam doesn't tell him that that's not enough. For Dean, it is. Sam doesn't know why, or why it's not for him.
"You dork," he says instead, "you're never gonna teach yourself to juggle like that."
"Who says?" Dean answers, his eyes on the ball. "Just watch me."
"Well for one thing you're supposed to have more than one ball."
Dean smirks. "Oh, I got balls, baby. Anyway, I'm working up to it."
Sam huffs a long-suffering sigh and scoots lower in his chair 'til he can barely see Dean's face over his own knees. "And you're supposed to focus past the ball," he adds.
"Past it? What kinda sense does that make?" Dean asks. But he tries it, his gaze going to the middle distance as he tosses the ball from one hand to the other. "How come you know so much about juggling anyway?"
Sam shrugs. "I checked a book out of the library. It's due back next Monday, though, so make notes or something."
Dean catches the ball and looks at him.
"Hey, you said you wanted to learn."
They move again at Christmas while school's out, further south, down to Louisiana where the only coat Sam needs between the duplex Dad rented and the school is Dean's old denim jacket. It doesn't even feel like winter here.
The folks in the other half of the duplex have a boy Sam's age named Sterling and a girl named Brandy who's a year younger than Dean, and Sam can see Brandy's dad giving Dean dirty looks every time he and Brandy come within twenty feet of each other. All it does is cement her in Dean's brain as the girl he's got to have before they leave again. Sterling tells Sam he doesn't give a rat's ass what Brandy does with Dean - he thinks Dean's cool, thinks Sam's lucky to have a brother.
"Dude, having a sister sucks. Maybe Dean'll marry her and she'll move in with you, and then you'll see what it's like."
Sam laughs, and Sterling laughs with him, but Sam doesn't tell him he's laughing at the idea of anyone ever getting inside the circle of him, Dean, and Dad.
When school starts up again he and Sterling are in the same class, and Sam finds out that Sterling is one of the popular kids. Or at least, more popular than anyone Sam's ever hung out with before. And because Sterling's hanging out with Sam, suddenly Sam's one of the popular kids too. Everyone in this town is poor, it's barely even a matter of degree, so the fact that Sam's wearing patched Levis and his brother's hand-me-down jacket doesn't matter much - just the fact that Sterling likes him, and everyone else likes Sterling, and suddenly Sam's surrounded by someone else's friends.
It makes him nervous for about the first week. Every time he opens his mouth, he's sure that whatever he says is going to come out stupid and dorky and every one of Sterling's friends will laugh, and Sterling will laugh, and they'll all sound just like Jake Addison.
It doesn't happen that way, though. Sam's careful, he's watched this for so long, he knows all he has to do is act right, act the way they do, and he'll slip into it like slipping a lock.
Dean's still Dean, of course. Nothing ever changes him. He's exactly who he is, all the time, and it's just like that here. Before the end of January he's already been sent to the principal's office for punching a guy who'd backed this tiny little slip of a freshman girl up against the lockers and was grabbing her ass. "She looked like she was gonna cry, Dad, I swear to god," Dean says that night at home. "No one was stopping him, what was I supposed to do?"
Dean's voice is tight with wanting to help, wanting to fix it, to make things right, and John looks at Dean for a minute and then nods. "Just try not to make a habit of it, son," he says, but they all know he doesn't mean it. This is what they do - of course Dean's going to make a habit of it.
Sam figures he's lucky that the first person Dean saw getting picked on was the pretty little daughter of the local Baptist preacher, because this time? This time instead of people kicking Sam's knee and telling him his brother's a freak, people are saying man, where'd your brother learn to fight like that? You know that guy's on the wrestling team? This time when Dean says, "Yeah, like the rifle," people don't laugh like he's a dork, they laugh like he's said something cool.
Dean either doesn't notice or doesn't care, but it's a blessing for Sam. By March, Sam's not even riding Sterling's coat-tails anymore. His dimpled grin and his cockeyed sense of humour and even the fact that he's smart are all working in his favor, and now he's getting invited places all on his own, not even having to wait for Sterling to come knocking on the door saying, "Hey, we're going to Pizza Hut, wanna come?" or "Mandy's having her birthday party at the skating rink Saturday, ask your dad if you can go." Sam doesn't even know how to skate and he's still one of the cool kids. Dean's slid all the way back down to the bottom on his slippery good intentions, spending more Saturdays in detention than out of it and not even hanging out with the stoners or the car thieves that everyone assumes are his natural allies. Dean's just Dean; he does what he thinks is right and doesn't care what happens after, or what anyone thinks of him besides Dad and Sam.
But Sam cares. And when Sam cares about something, he figures it out.
"So how do you like being Mister Popular?" Dean asks one night the summer after Sam turns fourteen. They've been in this new town for almost five months, long enough for it not to be new anymore, plenty long enough for Sam to get it figured and make his place. Most of his friends are out of town on family trips, though, so Sam and Dean are in the minuscule back yard throwing a baseball back and forth for the first time in months. It's weird, how much he's missed it.
"I like it just fine, freak," he answers, pitching the ball hard to Dean's mitt.
Dean laughs and pitches it back. It stings in Sam's palm when he catches it, and he sends it back just as hard. "You want me to put in a good word for you?" he asks with a grin.
"Hey, I've graduated, buddy," Dean shoots back, "yee-haw. I think I can live without the adoration of the eighth graders."
"Ninth graders," Sam says. "We just finished eighth grade. We're ninth graders now, get it right."
Dean lobs the ball back and doesn't argue the point. "I've about got that Cindy chick on the hook," he says instead. "She's got a thing for bad boys."
"So what's she want with you?" Sam asks, and pitches it back. It hits Dean's mitt with a smack, and Dean laughs again.
"Yeah, I don't know," he says. "Maybe my good looks."
They throw the ball a while longer, until the night starts to close over them and they're losing the light, and Dean tosses it to Sam and lopes towards the house, ruffling Sam's hair as he passes. "Bedtime soon, sport," he says.
"Yeah, not yet though," Sam answers, following him onto the porch.
He shoves in beside Dean on the porch swing, a leftover from the last people who lived here, and it squeaks as they push it into a slow rock. They sit in silence watching the sky go from deep blue to black, stars pricking out until they cover the sky and nothing making noise but crickets, and the squeak of the chain and the rusted old frame, and the soft muzzy sound of the television in the living room. Yellow light spills over their feet through the open kitchen door.
After a while, Sam glances over at Dean. "Does it bother you that I've got friends now?" he asks.
Dean shoots him a look, one eyebrow cocked up. "Bother me? Sammy, what? 'Course not. Where'd that come from?"
Sam shrugs. "I don't know," he says. "You just - you always act like this is enough." He gestures towards the house, taking in John and Dean and the crappy little house and every crappy little shithole they've lived in for the last fourteen years.
Dean shrugs. "It is for me," he says. "You and Dad, and hunting, looking out for people. Helping people. That's what matters, what do I care whether someone else likes it? or me?" He grins again and wraps his arm around Sam's neck, and Sam scowls and pushes at him and Dean laughs. "But that doesn't mean I want you to be a geeky little dork all your life. You oughta have friends if that's what you want."
And Sam thinks he hears something in Dean's voice, but he can't be sure. Something hollow. Something that sounds like he's just saying it for Sam, not because it's true. Like when the tornado sirens go off, or when Dad's gone longer on a hunt than he should be and Dean says It's okay, Sammy. It's gonna be fine, don't worry.
"It's fine," Dean says. "They're nice kids," and Sam bristles a little bit. They're not kids, they're almost in high school. "Just don't let me catch you hanging out with any of those pretentious fucks who think they own the place. Then I'll have to kick your ass."
"Yeah, you and what army?"
"Me and my army of one," Dean grins. "Go on now, go brush your teeth and get to bed."
Sam stands up. "You coming?" he asks.
Dean nods. "Yeah, in a minute," he says. "Go on."
But Sam's in bed and almost asleep before he hears the kitchen door close and his brother's boots on the hardwoods. He slits his eyes open to see Dean silhouetted in the doorway, just standing there. Just watching him.
He almost opens his mouth to speak. But then Dean's gone, and Sam wonders if he was dreaming after all.
***
The day Sam leaves for Stanford, Dean spends the morning sitting on the front steps with him, tossing a ball in his hand and not saying much. Sam's next to him, shoulder to shoulder, and Dean's struck by how big he's grown. Broad, and muscular, and if Dean's honest about it he'll admit Sam's almost as good a hunter as he is. By all rights he should still be the gangly thirteen year old bitching about having to skip a party to do weapons training, but he isn't. Grown big enough to face down John Winchester.
"You think Dad'll change his mind?" Sam asks quietly. "Say goodbye, at least?"
Dean shakes his head. "I wouldn't count on it Sammy." His chest is tight, and his heart feels beaten down, bruised sore and strung up on a wire between Sam and John.
"He had to know this was going to happen," Sam says. "Why's he so dead set against it?"
The frustration and hurt in Sam's voice cut through Dean like a dull knife. "I don't know," he bites out. "Maybe because he knows it'll never work. You can't have 'normal', Sam, none of us can, you know what's out there, you know - you know."
Dean rubs his face with one hand, the ball clenched in his other.
"I can though," Sam insists, "I have. Okay, yeah, so I had to fit it in between hunts and moving around like an army brat, but I've had it." He turns to Dean, and his voice and his whole body are begging Dean to say he understands. "What's wrong with wanting to keep it?"
Dean's fingers are white-knuckled around the ball. "Because it was never real," he says. "Sammy, it was never real. None of those people knew you, not you. What do you think they would've said if they'd found out what the golden boy's little weekends 'hunting with Dean and my dad' really were, huh?"
"No," Sam says, shaking his head and his voice going hard, "no. Dean. That's not all there is to me."
"Not all," Dean says, "but it's a big part of you, a big part of what makes you who you are, what makes us--"
"No!" Sam shoves himself to his feet. "It's just a thing we do - a thing you and Dad do, that's all, and I'm tired of it - I'm sick to freakin' death of it. I can do normal, Dean," he says, facing him and pushing his hands through his hair. "Maybe you can't, maybe you never wanted to or maybe you just didn't care enough to try, but I can. And I'm going to."
Dean drives him to the bus station in silence. He tries to say something, to make some kind of attempt at conversation, but every time he opens his mouth the only thing that'll come out is don't leave. Please. Don't leave.
He parks the Impala in the passenger unloading zone and he and Sam get out. Dean comes around the front of the car and Sam's standing on the curb, his duffel slung over his shoulder. "Sam," he says, and he can hear his voice start to break. "Sammy."
"Dean." Sam shakes his head. "Don't."
Dean looks at him, both of them squinting in the bright sun, and it's like looking at Sam through water, Dean on the bottom of the pool looking up at Sammy floating above.
He feels like he's drowning.
He doesn't wait with Sam at the station. On the way home, driving down Highway 9, he has to pull onto the shoulder because he can't see the road. He sits there for a long time, blow-by from trucks shaking the Impala, and the only thing he can hear is Sam's voice. Which is strange, because the only sound in the car is his own.