Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The road was beckoning and Dean had nowhere to go. Baby was the last thing he had left in this world and so he was driving for the sake of hearing her engine purr, the dull roar of her tires a soothing addition to Led Zeppelin’s greatest hits. He didn’t have a destination in mind. No new case had caught his attention so far, and Dad wasn’t here to guide his path. 

It’d be too pathetic to drive to Palo Alto again so soon, and California was way too far away, anyway. It’d be nearly a day on the road for only a glimpse of Sammy.

Like the well-trained hunter that he was, Sam inevitably sensed when he was being watched. Dean's little brother could play pretend all he wanted, but none of the other kids he was surrounded by ever tensed up like he did and started suspiciously surveying the area. How’s being normal working out for you, Sammy?

Dean always had to hightail it out of there well before Sam’s hunter senses started tingling which led to never getting to see Sam as much as he really wanted to. He had to keep it to quick inspections. Stupid haircut? Check. Looking healthy? This better be a check. Surrounded by new friends? More often than not, check.

The best visits were when “Is Sammy smiling?” got checked off the list.

The number of visits this year was threatening to climb into the double digits and it was only March. Already? Dean was losing it. He was a man dying in a desert crawling back to an oasis that could only provide the smallest of sips. Dean knew it was not enough, he was only postponing the inevitable.

The end was nigh, he could sense it, and for someone in his profession, this was no exaggeration.

He wasn’t even sure what he was postponing it for. There was no reward in sight for staying on this particular ride. Driving, driving, driving, and then an endless string of shitty motels and blood and guts and monsters and stalking his little brother when he found the time. This was just gonna be the rest of his life now, repetitive and boring and nothing to look forward to.

The Grand Canyon, Dean decided. He wanted to see the Grand Canyon. 

Baby handled herself like a dream when he reversed course, finally with a destination in mind. Dean smiled, pictured driving over the edge of the canyon, and the mental image filled him with a strange glee. Maybe that’d be better than ending up as monster chow. Real cinematic.

Hm. Although.

Dean didn’t usually fantasize about driving Baby off a cliff. Flinging himself off, yes, just wondering what it’d be like to feel the rush of the air, that’d been happening for years. But not Baby. He frowned and patted the dashboard. “You know I wouldn’t do that to you.”

The Impala didn’t answer but Led Zeppelin did, launching into the next song on the tape. Dean, intimately familiar with every track in his collection, laughed at the lyrics he knew were coming.

Communication breakdown

It's always the same

I'm having a nervous breakdown

Drive me insane

“Maybe,” Dean said, still chuckling, though this wasn’t really all that funny considering he was alone, talking to his car, and trying to divine meaning from communing with ancient mixtapes. “Maybe this is a sign I should go to a shrink.”

A shrink, huh, a voice in Dean’s head commented, dripping with contempt. It sounded a lot like John Winchester. Dean could easily picture the disapproving look on his dad’s face. 

Dean had never been to a shrink. Therapy just wasn’t made for folks like him, that was for people with white picket fences and more money than sense. But therapy was supposed to make you feel better, and Dean could really use some of that. You were supposed to go to a shrink when shit got real bad, or so he heard, and Dean–

Well, shit was getting bad. Had gotten bad. For a while now, really. Started when Sammy left for college. Worst day of his life. Got worse when Bobby chased Dad off with a shotgun because he no longer had a reason to tolerate Dad’s shitty temper. 

Yeah, his dad had a shitty fucking temper, alright, Dean could admit this, at least in the privacy of his own thoughts. And now, he could even do it out loud. Could have done this all along, really. Wasn’t like his thoughts and opinions had ever mattered to anybody even back when there’d been someone around to hear them. 

That was the thing Sammy had never understood as he’d endlessly tried to lecture Dean on all the ways Dad was flawed, like Dean didn’t understand that man better than anyone else in the world did.

Sam was always preaching to the choir and getting angry that Dean didn’t act like Bible study 101 was some profound revelation. He wasn’t some heathen who needed to be converted into believing that yeah, John Winchester was not a very good dad. Hallelujah, what daring insight. Please tell me more, Sammy, I hadn’t realized. 

Did Sam ever even notice just how much he was insulting Dean’s intelligence when he got up on his high horse? Yeah, sure, Dean wasn’t exactly the smartest guy around. In their little family of three, Sam was the undisputed number one champion when it came to IQ and Dean was the one who took the bronze. 

But that didn’t mean he was completely stupid.

John Winchester had a shitty temper and was an absent father. So what? He was still a hero who saved countless people’s lives and Dean admired the man despite his flaws. Everyone in Dean’s life sucked in some way, none more so than Dean himself. For example, Sam was a selfish whiny bitch and yet Dean still felt the need to compulsively check up on his brother's safety and wellbeing.

Even Bobby, who was the sanest man Dean knew, had pulled that move with the fucking shotgun.

Bobby was a crotchety old guy whose favorite word for Dean was idjit. Unlike when Dad and Sam heaved that quiet sigh that meant there goes Dean, being an idiot again, when that word came from Bobby, it never made Dean feel small and stupid. From Bobby it seemed almost fond, like it was their private in-joke that meant the opposite. Come on, Dean, you’re a smart guy. You’re better than whatever foolishness you’re up to.

Hard to feel smart with a guy like Sam around for comparison, but Bobby somehow managed it - and he did it without ever putting down Sam. His little brother was an important part of the calculus by which Dean decided whom to trust. If someone couldn’t see that Sam was a talented kid, even if he was a pain in the ass sometimes, then that someone clearly had bad taste. 

So what Dean also really appreciated about Bobby was that the guy adored Sammy. Those two nerdy peas in a pod spent a lot of hours together in Bobby’s library. Dean would leave them to their geeking out and go outside to tinker with the cars in the junkyard outside. Sometimes Bobby came out to join him and they talked about nothing and everything. 

So yeah, it was nice at Bobby’s, not just because of Bobby himself, but because he had a gift for bringing out the best in Sam.

From the moment puberty had transformed his once gentle brother into a moody teenager, Sam had always been bitching about something. Constant, constant screaming matches with Dad, all day, every day the man was around. Fucking exhausting. And then Sam had the audacity to complain that Dad liked to make himself scarce to avoid that, like Sam was the one suffering from Dad’s absence. 

But it was never Sam who picked up the slack when Dad was gone. No, that was Dean. Dean was the one who had to hustle for money and think about what to feed the two of them and look over Sam’s homework as if Sam hadn’t already surpassed Dean’s smarts at age thirteen.

By contrast, weeks spent at Bobby’s were a blissful daze, peaceful and content and just… really nice. Bobby took care of everything, Dean could unwind and Sam was on his best behavior, all smiles. Hey Dean, so get this, he’d say with one of Bobby’s books in his lap and a gleam in his eyes, reminding Dean why he put up with all his little brother’s shit.

So after Sammy had run off to college and Dean had not been coping so well, Dad had decided the two of them should go to Bobby’s to cheer Dean up. Historically, that pretty reliably worked, and John’s method of taking Dean to bars, getting drunk, and patting him on the back a lot wasn’t really doing anything to make either of them feel better about Sam.

Props to Dad for doing that, honestly. Dad barely tolerated Bobby and only ever swung around to drop Sam and Dean off because he knew it was good for them. They’d been butting heads for years now but Bobby kept a tight grip on the reins of his temper while Dad looked deep within to dredge up the last of his manners to be downright civil. Everyone was on their best behavior since nobody wanted to be the one to upset the cart.

Granted, Dad also had this whole oh no, I’m being replaced by another father figure complex about it, so he never let them stay too long. It had taken Dean years to wrap his mind around that one, but apparently grandpa Winchester had skipped out on Dad without a second glance and now Dad made it a point of pride to never fully leave the raising of his sons to someone else. 

So for Dad to set his ego aside and admit Bobby might provide better support to Dean was no small thing. They’d gone to Bobby’s about two weeks after that first semester at Stanford had begun. 

But Bobby’s warm welcome had turned into narrowed eyes and a harsh, “Where’s Sam, John?” as soon as they’d walked through the door.

Please don’t, Dean remembered thinking, not now, don’t do this now, Bobby, come on, when Dad had laid out the cliff notes version of that whole ugly affair and Bobby had started yelling at him. Insults were thrown, years of pent-up anger at Dad finally exploding out of Bobby, and before Dean could even process what was happening, Bobby was cocking a shotgun.

“Don’t you ever darken my doorstep again, John Winchester,” he had said.

Dad, fury written on his face and lips pinched tight, had nodded and turned on his heels without a word.

And Dean had followed his dad outside, not looking back even when he’d heard Bobby call his name. “Yeah, I got it, message received,” Dean had hollered over his shoulder because, yeah, he had indeed gotten the message.

Bobby had held his temper and tolerated John Winchester’s bullshit for years and years. But that had been for Sam’s sake. Or maybe the both of them together. Point was, Dean by himself wasn’t worth the same effort. The second Sam was gone, “the satisfaction of telling John Winchester off” rose above “check how the boys are doing first and act accordingly.”  

Because Bobby had looked Dean right in the eyes and seen the desperation to please not fight right now, and he’d cocked that shotgun anyway.

And hell, Dean couldn’t even blame the man. Yeah, Dad wasn’t that pleasant to be around most of the time and Bobby had a right to be mad at him, and he really had fucked up with Sammy. 

But. 

That day, on that particular day when Dad had been smarting as much over Sam leaving as Dean was, he had actually been trying to do right by his son and put Dean first. Bobby had done the opposite. And so Dean couldn’t abandon Dad, even though he hadn't even been ordered to follow. Dean could have stayed at Bobby’s and let himself be comforted, except he couldn’t. Not while his father was out there alone, drowning himself in booze, probably thinking something along the lines of that kid always did love Bobby more than me.

Dean usually went where he was most needed and he really didn’t understand why his family insisted on constantly making him choose like this. Dean swallowed a lot of shit to keep the peace, why couldn’t they? For a while, it had been Sam’s favorite game to wind up Dad somehow and then look at Dean with an expectant expression on his face, as if to say, well? Aren’t you going to protect me, big brother?

Except Dean had seen right through Sam. He could tell just fine which arguments were the real ones and which ones were just Sam stirring the pot to see which way the tiebreaker went. For the latter, he sided with Dad out of sheer spite because he’d been sick of this and he didn’t understand why Sam was doing this to him.

He’d only realized the purpose of that particular game the night Sam left. 

Dean has been so unspeakably angry that Sam had resorted to testing Dean’s loyalties like that. Hadn’t he done enough for that stupid kid? How many days had he spent with hunger gnawing on his insides so Sam could have enough to eat? He’d fucking left Sonny just to keep this brat safe and this was his thanks?

So Dean had exploded and said some things he didn’t mean, then Dad had exploded even worse, and yeah, now Sammy was at Stanford and not returning his calls. 

Dean hadn’t spoken to Bobby since that shotgun incident either, and didn’t really know where he stood with the man now and whether that shotgun had maybe been aimed at him as well. 

He shook that melodramatic thought out of his head as soon as it crossed his mind. Bobby would never bust out the shotgun for Dean. But he still might slam the door in Dean’s face now if he dared show up there by himself because being the most sane of a bad lot was not actually the same as Bobby being a saint who’d put up with anything, as the shotgun proved. Bobby was an alcoholic whose temper could run hot, and there was a chance he'd taken Dean’s choice of John over him there rather personally.

Dean was pretty sure the last thin threads holding his sanity together would snap if Bobby of all people ever slammed the door in his face. So. Better not risk it and relegate Bobby to the memory of better times.

So that was two down and one to go, one last person Dean thought he could count on, and that was Dad. And really, the funny thing was, Dean didn’t know why he hadn’t seen this coming. When had Dad ever not fucked him over? 

It was like Sam and the Stanford thing all over again. Dean had seen the warning signs - the brochures, the applications, the way a restlessness had taken hold of Sam and how he’d snarled at the very idea of the family business - but that night Sam had left them for good had still felt like a punch to the gut he hadn’t seen coming.

His mistake was obvious only in hindsight. 

But Jesus H. Christ, Dean really hadn’t seen that secret second family coming, and a river in Egypt hadn’t even been involved this time. 

Yeah, he’d abstractly known that Dad hadn’t lived like a monk after mom’s death, and these things sometimes happened. It wasn’t Dad’s fault he’d fathered another kid with a one-night-stand and only found out when the kid was twelve, a few months after Sammy left. Okay. That he could live with.

But Dean had only found out about Adam on the kid’s 14th birthday. 

Two years – two years! – of watching Dean pine for his little brother and it had never crossed Dad’s mind to mention that there was another one out there. And Dad would have continued sneaking around behind Dean’s back, taking Adam out for baseball games and birthday parties and playing the loving Dad that Dean never, ever got to have…

Worst part was that Dean had found out by complete accident. This could have gone on for years, Adam never knowing he had brothers until he was grown, if he ever found out at all. Dad wanted him to never find out. 

See, Dean was the dirty little secret who wasn’t allowed to get his grubby hunter hands on the Milligans’ white picket fence because there was too much blood on them. But the real kick to the nuts was this: Sam might have been told at some point, depending on whether this whole “being normal” thing worked out for him. 

Dad apparently had a letter written out, to be sent on Sammy’s successful graduation, but only if they managed to kill that thing that killed mom. Dean wasn’t quite sure what Dad’s revenge had to do with any of this, but alright, the man just brought that up sometimes out of nowhere because it was all he really cared about. 

Anyway, the ultimate plan was to have Sam and Adam skipping off into the sunset together, finally some normal family for Sam to connect with, like some demented apology courtesy of John Winchester’s regrets. Sorry I ruined your childhood, Sam, here’s a new brother who’s actually compatible with your chosen lifestyle. I tried really hard not to ruin this one, and I did it all for you. Love, Dad.

Dean would have been off hunting monsters, living and dying in ignorant bliss because knowing about any part of this insane plan would hurt like a motherfucker.

Which it did.

Dad had tried telling him some more but Dean hadn’t really been able to hear his explanation over the ringing in his ears and the hot fury rising up like a tidal wave. Adam got to have a normal dad and Sam got to have Adam and Dean got the pleasure of John fucking Winchester and his insane mind games for the rest of his life.

I chose you, he’d thought, dazed. I chose you over Bobby and this is what you give me.

Well. Dean had dug deep into that pit of anger inside of him and tried to find the most hurtful, vicious words he could think of, the ones he knew would impale John fucking Winchester on a blade and hopefully twist it a little, too. 

“Sam was right about you,” Dean had said, and he’d walked away and Dad had not followed.

Thing was, Dean didn’t actually believe Sam was right. Sam had selfishly abandoned them all to chase a dream and no matter all his many, many, many flaws, their Dad had done the best he could with what little he had and he’d saved countless lives doing it. At the end of the day, John Winchester’s problem was that Mom’s death had broken his brain, and you couldn’t really blame a rabid dog for biting. 

Sam meanwhile was out for number one, so smart and ambitious and making the conscious choice to not give a shit about the people around him when he definitely had the capacity to know better. Yet this self-righteous bitch really thought he had the right to judge Dad just because Mom’s death had knocked a screw loose. 

Well, not one. It was admittedly a lot of screws.

See, here was John Winchester, planning some grand apology to Sam instead of picking up the phone and just saying the words Sam actually wanted to hear. Like Sam wouldn’t resent Adam for having the normal childhood he’d craved so badly but never got to have. 

But hey, at least the right impulse was there, no matter how twisted it came out. 

Dad’s doing his best, Sam. Dean had told this to his little brother over and over again, and Sam had never heard what he was trying to say. Stop defending him! Sam had yelled, but that wasn’t a defense, it was a bleak truth you had to accept when John Winchester was your father. Dad is a raging lunatic not capable of making rational decisions but he truly has people’s best interests at heart. What’s your excuse for hurting people, Sammy?

Because the way Dean saw it, you could be bitter and angry at the world and scream at the unfairness of it all, like Sam did, or you could shut up, learn to live with the world being a cruel place and do your best to make it a little better wherever you went. That was the saving people part of the family business, but Sam did like to fixate on the hunting things instead. Because then he could act all aggrieved that life was so unfair to him, didn’t see why he should have to fight monsters when other people didn’t. And some guy got eaten while Sam was busy feeling sorry for himself.

To Dean, it was about being able to sleep at night, and he didn’t know how Sam did it.

Now Dean himself was no saint, either. He was a dick, he knew that, and hunting was the only way he knew how to do good in the world. And he wanted to do good. 

Well, now that he thought about it, he actually did know how Sam did it. Sam just had the potential for other ways of doing good that Dean lacked, so who could blame the kid for choosing to do something that involved less monster guts. Lawyers could do a lot of good in the world, too. That way Sammy would live past thirty, at least.

Once, Dean had viewed their little family unit as a superhero team. Saving the day and killing monsters, and dysfunction was the price you had to pay for being a hero. Their family was a little cracked, a little tarnished, but ultimately good.

Then the cracks kept spreading and deepening, no matter how hard Dean tried to keep up with nothing but sheer willpower and a roll of duct tape.

Well, point was, Dean was a solo hunter now and he’d long since stopped being able to sleep at night, which was how he knew this was all gonna end badly for him soon. And no matter how upsetting all this was for Dean on a personal level, he knew Dad had made the right call when it came to Adam. 

That kid was only fourteen years old and surprisingly well-adjusted for a Winchester. Smart, top grades, no behavioral issues, not a star athlete but decent enough. 100% Kate Milligan’s work. Dad had picked a classy lady for his romp in the sheets, and wasn’t that a mental image Dean never wanted to have again. 

So yeah, Adam didn’t know shit about how cruel the world really was and might still stand a chance to spend his life sleeping soundly, so Dad had decided to put in the bare minimum of showing up for birthdays and whatnot while Adam’s mom did the actual child-rearing that Dad wasn’t able to provide, as Dean knew from bitter experience. There was no place for Dean in that arrangement, he’d just be the troubled big brother. It’d be a catastrophe if Adam went and did something stupid like latch onto him as a role model.

“He’d take Sammy’s place, son,” Dad had said gruffly, and they both were smart enough to know why that wouldn’t be a good thing.

Say what you will about John Winchester, but that man knew where Dean’s buttons were. After all, he was the one who put them there, and he liked to slam them as needed. But Dean also had buttons that John couldn’t touch. They were labeled Sammy . With Sam gone, Adam could play him like a fiddle just by vaguely looking in his direction, looking young and innocent. Dean’s dumb broken brain would cry baby brother at the sight and then he’d ruin that poor kid by dragging him into this life.

Dad had known, and had spared Dean the pain of knowing there was a second little brother out there he wasn’t allowed to go near.

So no, Sam wasn’t right about Dad at all, Dean had just said that because he’d known it would hurt. Dean had broken Dad’s heart, as he’d known he would when he’d taken aim at it, and that man didn’t have much heart to spare, not since mom died. Now he and Dad were not on speaking terms and it was Dean’s fault. As usual.

He could go apologize, of course, and be taken in. And he could go to Bobby, and maybe be taken in. And he could go to Sammy, too, and definitely not be taken in. Every single one of these options made Dean so angry he had to find the nearest evil critter to shoot rather than do any of that.

Why was it always up to him to reach out? Why was he forever running after other people begging for attention and crumbs of affection? Why did he always have to give so much and get back so little?

Why couldn’t Dad apologize first? Or apologize at all, ever, without making some grand gesture out of it?

Would it kill Bobby to reach out and let Dean know that he was still welcome?

And could Sam fucking pick up his phone or write an e-mail or do anything other than pretend his big brother didn’t exist and had never existed and all the shit he’d done for this kid had never meant anything at all?

Would any of them bother searching for him if Dean just up and disappeared and never came back? Because that option was looking more and more attractive by the day. Dean had nothing and no one, he was angry all the time and now he was even thinking about hurting Baby by daydreaming about some Thelma and Louise shit.

He should probably do something about all of that. 

So why not pay some stranger to listen to him whine about his problems and come out a couple hundred bucks poorer with a pat on the head and maybe some useful advice for what to do next.

Yeah, that sounded good. A shrink. Jesus, Dean was gonna have to find a shrink. And then money to pay for it. And then try to explain this mess in a way that made sense to a normal person while leaving out all the bits about the monsters in the dark.

~~~

Therapy requires radical honesty.

That was what it said on this hippy website. Radical honesty. What was that, honesty from the 80s? Yeah, it was gonna be so rad when Dean started talking about ghosts and shtriga and a woman burned on the ceiling by a yellow-eyed monster. He’d be in an asylum before he could say Poughkeepsie.

Trying to conceal uncomfortable truths is a counterproductive strategy that ultimately harms the patients themselves, as it might lead clinicians to a false diagnosis and a delay in appropriate treatment. In worst case scenarios, it might even lead to clinicians into taking an entirely wrong approach, resulting in detrimental effects on mental health outcomes.

Dean sat back in the rickety library chair and hated how much sense that made. Sometimes the key clue to solving a hunt was hidden in a seemingly small detail that witnesses saw no reason to mention. The devil was in the details, both metaphorically and literally, and so much of Dad and Sam was tangled up with mom’s death and everything going bump in the night. Dean couldn’t tell just one part of the story and expect anyone to suss out the problem when there was a second half of the full picture still missing.

So. No therapy for him. Wouldn’t work and only be a waste of money he didn’t have to spare. Great.

He was screwed. There was no one he could turn to for help. Not even a shrink, something that he’d always held in his back pocket as a last resort for when he finally lost the last shred of his pride. People who needed shrinks were broken. Dean didn’t know where he’d learned that, only that he knew it as an absolute certainty down to his very bones. Somehow, Dean hadn’t even made it to those lofty ranks.

Alright, okay. Time to stop with the self-pity and suck it up, Winchester. So he was extra-fucked, what else was new?

Shrinks had to learn this crap from somewhere, right? It was a trade, a profession, and the tools of a trade could be learned with a library card and a plucky attitude. His GED might lead people to believe otherwise, but Dean wasn’t all that bad at book learning when he put his mind to it. Sure, he was no Sammy or Bobby, but… well, he had a knack for figuring something out himself, as long as he could sustain his interest in the topic.

DIY therapy had a certain ring to it.

The Grand Canyon, Dean decided, would be his reward for following through on this. Maybe one day he would stand on that ledge, take in the view, and not feel tempted to do something stupid.

Chapter Text

Dean stared blankly at the monitor in front of him. The yahoo search bar seemed to be taunting him, waiting for input. All around him were the soft sounds he associated with small town libraries. The low murmurs of hushed voices conferring with each other, papers crinkling and pages being turned, all set to the rhythm of click-click-clickity-clack, his neighbor’s fingers tapping on a keyboard.

Sadly not the kind of place where he could just bring a bottle of beer and take a swig to brace himself. Not at barely past noon, anyway. God. Dean was going to have to do this sober and in public.

Gritting his teeth, he pressed down the first few keys.

effacts of

He backspaced to correct himself. 

For much of his childhood, Dean had been terrible at spelling, never quite able to catch up to his peers. But one summer Bobby had taken a look at his incomprehensible scrawl, shaken his head, and then put him through what could only be described as Spelling Bee Bootcamp. In their line of work, Bobby had explained, spelling a monster’s name wrong led to missing out on critical information regarding its strengths and weaknesses.

In other words, it led to a sloppy and dead hunter.

At the time, Bobby’s harrowing spelling lessons had seemed rather pointless. It had been evident even back then that Dean was the brawn of the family, not the brains, and he could always outsource research to someone else. Dad, Bobby, and eventually Sam.

Sam, the bitch, had been practically born with the ability to read and write. When Dean had been learning his ABCs, Sam had crawled into his lap and demanded to be taught as well. Despite the four year age gap, there had never been a time that his younger brother couldn’t keep up with Dean when it came to reading books. Indeed, for most of Dean's life, Sam's reading comprehension skills surpassed his older brother's.

effects of

Of course, Sam had someone to teach him to read and write, but Dean had just been thrown into the merciless jaws of ever-changing schools. Maybe if things had been different, Dean could have been different. He could have earned himself a scholarship, too.

Or not. 

Maybe he’d always been destined to end up a high school dropout with a GED and his unstable home life just provided a convenient excuse for why he was as stupid as he was.

But no matter what Sam thought, he was not that stupid.

He’d always known. Well, maybe not always, but for a long time. Teachers had whispered it, Sam had roared it, social workers had pinned him with a critical eye over it. What this thing was called, between him and Dad and Sam. 

Abuse.

But frankly, this was a word for normal people, not the Winchesters. The ones who grew up safe in homes untouched by fire and monsters, who couldn’t possibly understand why being raised this way was necessary. Why it had to be this way even if it resulted in all of them getting damaged, because it was better to be damaged than to be dead.

Words couldn’t capture the scope of it all, the complexity. Normal folk, they made labels out of singular desperate acts, no matter how justified. But it wasn’t as simple as saying that just because Sammy and he suffered aftereffects from neglect, that this made Dad… Dad, who saved lives and tried his best even though he was cracked in the head…

It wasn’t as simple as saying that just because someone told a lie, that they were a liar. Like that was all this person had ever been, like that word could capture the whole of a man. If someone told 99 truths and a single lie, were they a liar? How about 80 truths and 20 lies? 

Dean didn’t know where the line was, exactly. What he did know was that being aware of all the shit that was really out there punted that line somewhere where normal people wouldn’t draw it. Like Eve and the apple, once you knew, your sense of morality could never be the same as before.

But of course, normal people had found a word for this concept Dean was getting at, too, to instantly dismiss Dean’s thinking there. 

Two words, actually. Abuse apologist. 

Well fuck whoever had invented that term because Dean knew that what he was getting at was nothing but the truth. There was one set of morality for peace, and another for times of war. And his father had been at war since his family’s peaceful existence had burned up alongside Mom on that ceiling.

Fuck, but he hated to put this into words. He might not be on speaking terms with the man at the moment, but he didn’t want to pin this label on him. But Dean did it anyway, because a library computer’s search function was merciless like that and he knew that this was where he had to start looking, or he’d never find the answers he needed.

effects of childhood abuse

Dean paused, stared at those words, and after a moment added:

effects of childhood abuse older brothe

He backspaced to correct himself. 

effects of childhood abuse on eldest sibling

~~~

Parentification.

It drew his eye, that word, attention shifting like it was caught in a gravitational pull. Perhaps because Dean knew its meaning before he even read the definition. It was plain, honest language that made intuitive sense, which already put it above most of the jargon in this book, and gave name to what his gut had always been telling him. Sammy was his little brother, but he was also more. Or perhaps it was more accurate to say that Dean was more, had always been expected to be more than what he actually was.

Dean being an older brother wasn’t enough. Dad had thrust his own responsibilities on Dean’s shoulders, and then tossed Mom’s saintly corpse on top, too. Naturally, Dean had buckled under the weight of the three disparate roles he was expected to play. Mother, father, brother - he was meant to be all at once, and ended up being nothing.

So yeah.

Now he had a pithy label for that whole mess.

What good was the label, though? What was he supposed to do now that he’d been turned into this strange hybrid? The book in his hands held no answer to that. It described all his symptoms in loving, excruciating detail, all of Dean’s pain dissected and meticulously laid out right there on the page. But when it came to the whole point of this stupid exercise, the next section which Dean had been looking forward to, well. 

That was when the text suddenly grew sparse. 

Actually, it was a rather long section, it just had nothing at all to say. Pretty language that was all fluff, no substance, and Dean was beginning to suspect this was just their affirmation-jargon-filled way of saying you can’t do shit about it because the damage was already done. Jesus, the coddling in these books was like something straight out of kindergarten.

Could have just written incurable, nothing to be done, try not to drink yourself to death, good luck. But no, make Dean sift through five pages of nauseating bullshit first.

Find a way to honor your inner child, the book said, and Dean snorted. Who talked like this? Sure, he’d build himself a little shrine and burn some incense, then he’d feel better. Take responsibility for your emotions. Like Dean hadn’t been shouldering responsibility his whole damn life and wasn’t that the problem? Tell your story free of shame. To who? How was he supposed to get rid of the shame? Just snap his fingers, and boom, lifetime trauma solved?

Seriously, people paid money for this? Was therapy really just a scam where people sat around telling some guy their problems so they could answer with the dubious wisdom found inside a fortune cookie, and then got paid two hundred bucks an hour for that? 

Shit, maybe Dean should become a shrink himself. Sounded like a sweet gig. You lended some chump a willing ear so he could think through his problems out loud and pointed out some blind spots maybe, and then got paid the big bucks. Toss in a Confucious quote, too. As a treat. 

You could get that for free in any church, just find a priest and spill your guts. Maybe that was all that shrinks really were. Secular priests. That you had to pay for because secular meant capitalism, baby. We’re not trying to save souls here, we’re running a business.

Yeah, well, Dean and priests had never gotten along, and he liked this new version of them even less. God has a plan for you, Dean, Pastor Jim used to say, and, well, there was a reason he’d latched onto Bobby and not the only righteous man among John Winchester’s friends. Yeah, Dean didn’t need any more father figures with convoluted plans that fucked up his life, thanks. That this might all be according to God’s plan just tells Dean the dude’s sadistic. 

So Dean, a staunch atheist since the age of four, had run from Bible study and its talks of hellfire, and gotten attached to a crotchety old man who drank too much and spoke more wisdom in ten minutes than most people did their entire lives. Fuck, but he missed Bobby. He wanted to show this nonsense book to him and have a laugh about it together.

Above him, the solitary lightbulb flickered, casting the dingy hotel room in distorted shadows. Dean slammed the book shut, and added it to the growing pile next to him.

~~~

It was just Dean’s luck that a hunt would cross his path right when he wasn’t looking for one anymore. He dutifully stowed his therapy project and started researching the cold case of several children going missing in the area.

~~~

The therapy-speak was leaking into Dean’s thoughts and it was the funniest shit ever. When the rawhead slammed him against a wall, making his ears ring with the force of the percussion, the words I’m going to die floated through his head. They were promptly followed up with: Stop negative thinking. Catch yourself when you begin to think negatively.

For reasons known only to his demented brain, the therapy-voice was quite distinct from Dean’s regular thoughts, and it sounded like Sam at his most bitchy and pedantic.

Thankfully, that voice grew quiet past this point. Adrenaline flooded his body as thought fled, Dean’s instincts unerringly guiding him through the flow of battle. Fuck, but he loved this part of hunting, always had, when there was nothing but him and the enemy he had to tear apart, senses narrowed to pinpoints and the drumbeat of his heart pounding in his ears.

~~~

After that charming near-death experience, Dean decided to put hunting on hold for good, at least until he got his head screwed on straight. That had been cutting it way too close and it turned out he actually did manage to scrape together a little will to live to get out of there by the skin of his teeth.

Dean didn’t really know how to dig himself out of this hole and there still was no light at the end of this tunnel that he could see, but fuck, apparently deep down, so deep he couldn’t even feel it most of the time, there was still part of him that desperately wanted to live.

Hey, maybe it was that famous inner child he’d read so much about. Thing was, Dean Winchester had never really allowed himself to think he’d ever been a child. In his memories, he was always his current age, and that didn’t really make sense but maybe it was a coping mechanism or whatever. Because when he thought back to some of the shit he went through as a kid and tried to picture a child standing there in his place, just a stranger, a child that was not Dean Winchester, looking sweet and young and innocent and pushing that baby brother button in Dean’s head without actually being Sammy, then…

Well, it made him want to murder every son of a bitch responsible for that, and Dean would rather not add patricide to his list of sins.

He didn’t dare imagine Sammy in his place. Because wanting to murder John Winchester was one thing, that was the sort of reaction the man inspired in half the people he met, but then there was murdering Bobby, too, because he had just stood there and watched and offered that bit of kindness, yeah, but why hadn’t he shot John Winchester when he had the chance and then taken these two small boys in properly–

So yeah, good thing Dean had never really been an innocent child to begin with. That was a dark corner of Dean’s psyche best left unexplored. 

Didn’t mean he couldn’t explore some other corners. Project DIY Therapy was back on, which meant going back to the library. Well, Dean kept saying the library like it was a single one, but it was a series of small town libraries. They all had their unique charms and quirks, even if the selection could be limited, but they were similar enough to one another to blend together so that Dean called it going to the library, like going to the diner as if there wasn’t always a different one. 

Dean wasn’t actually trying to earn a degree here, the psychology 101 stuff was more than enough. He just made sure the town he stopped in for the week had a library with a mental health section. Then he steered clear of the obvious scams that marketed themselves as self-help and tried to find books about the underlying science of it all instead.

He hit the road when he started feeling restless, about once a week, a long drive with nothing but the road and Baby for company so he could process what he’d learned. Dean always did have his best epiphanies on the road, his subconscious mind wandering off into the boonies to play with all the new concepts in his head while Dean concentrated on driving. 

So he zigzagged his way across the midwest, going nowhere in particular and on some weird quest to find a reason to keep going. Trouble was, he was growing increasingly convinced that psychology as a field was largely pseudoscience and that the secular priests’ God wasn’t real either.

~~~

Hey Dean, so get this, said the shrink in Dean’s head. Children who grow up with emotionally unavailable parents are at risk for becoming codependent.

No shit, Sherlock. You put two scared kids into a run-down motel room all alone in a world filled with monsters, of course they were gonna have to cling to each other with all their heart. To let go would mean one or both of them got so much closer to being devoured by all that was out to get them. 

Healing from codependency, proclaimed the chapter title in big, glossy letters, the whole page tinted in soft pastels because some bold color choices for the font might be too overwhelming and give the fragile readers a case of the vapors. And there, phrased in the most clinical yet sickly-sweet language, the page laid out the most horrifying thing that Dean Winchester, professional monster hunter, had ever read and called it healing.

Now, Dean was not normally one to deface a library book, he really wasn’t, but there was a first time for everything and every man had his limits. He didn’t consciously decide to tear that page out and start shredding it into itty-bitty pieces, it just sort of happened to Dean’s body while Dean’s mind was off in la-la-land daydreaming about what it’d mean for him to heal.

Crunch, crunch. That would be the sound of Sam’s bones breaking while he was being eaten alive by something Dean wasn’t there to save him from because Dean had self-actualized and healed from his codependency. It was like the proverbial omelet, except the omelet was the improvement of Dean’s mental health and the eggs needing to be broken were Sammy’s bones. 

Had to be done. Self-care, baby brother. Time to draw some boundaries to keep the screams out. 

Sam would have been so proud of Dean for growing as a person. Sadly, Sam wasn’t there to confirm this for sure as he would die at the tender age of 23. It must have given him great comfort while he died crying for his older brother that Dean had finally gotten over their toxic enmeshment.

Rest in pieces, Sammy. 

It would be a good thing that Dean wasn’t codependent anymore, or this sort of outcome might have been devastating and leave Dean unable to function. But now Dean would mourn his brother in a healthy manner, being sad for exactly one month and two weeks and no more, and then he would find himself a job and a wife and finally became a productive member of society. Naturally, he would allow himself to mourn on the anniversary of Sam’s death as well. Perhaps he might even shed a tear or two. 

Oh, and one of his 2.4 kids would be named Samantha. 

She would die, tragically, at the age of 8 and Dean would not do maladjusted things like scream at the heavens and put a bullet through his brain at last. No, he would call his therapist—the one he would go to every week already, and this, too, would be healthy—and politely request some pills.

Like his love for his family was a disease he needed to recover from. Having a mission in life—hunting, saving people, taking care of the stupid broken remains of his family—was the only thing dragging Dean out of bed in the morning. When a vengeful spirit had him pinned to the wall, slowly choking the life out of him, it was Sammy’s face flashing before his eyes that had given Dean the desperate burst of strength needed to raise his shotgun and blast that thing full of rock salt more than once.

No, to let go of Sam now wouldn’t be healing, it would be death. For Sam, maybe, and for Dean, definitely. Because once he’d clawed every bit of Sammy out from under his skin and mutilated his love for him, cutting and cutting away until it was deemed small enough to be socially acceptable, there would be a stranger left standing after that whole process. That man would not be Dean Winchester and he would have a gaping hole where his heart should be.

Yeah, Dean knew that the intensity of his love for Sam was the result of abuse. But the damage was done. Trying to bend him back into a normal shape wouldn’t be healing, it would be torture. You couldn’t take a chainsaw to a tree that had grown crooked, curled around another tree’s stem, and expect two normal, healthy trees to emerge from that. 

Some shit you just had to live with and and frankly, that sense of responsibility was the one good thing that had come out of his nightmare of a childhood, so why were these fucking books trying to tell him that he was sick for wanting to keep it?

~~~

Spring slowly turned into summer until Dean opened his eyes one morning to find it was John Winchester’s birthday.

Dean tried to ignore it. Really, in their family, birthdays were no big deal, and Dad had forgotten his share of Dean’s birthdays over the years. 

Sam was the one who’d faithfully remembered every single one and given Dean presents. But seeing how they were poor as shit and Sam, being the youngest and neither in charge of the money nor given an allowance, didn’t have much to work with in terms of resources. So Sammy’s gifts had come in two flavors: handmade crap while he was young and practical gifts when he got older, like gun oil and ammo. 

Not a lot of those gifts had survived the years, either used up or lost to their constant moving around. The Winchesters didn’t have a fridge where they could have pinned that adorable drawing 7-year-old Sammy had given 11-year-old Dean, and 11-year-old Dean had not yet understood the value of such gifts and hadn’t given enough thought to how to preserve them. So the only one of Sam’s gifts that had survived to this day was the amulet 25-year-old Dean still faithfully wore around his neck.

Dean’s 23rd birthday had been a shock to the system. He hadn’t really expected a gift, though some foolish part of him had hoped for one, but he genuinely had expected a call. Or at least a text. If there ever was a day to break the radio silence Sam had maintained for half a year at that point, it’d surely have been on Dean’s birthday.

So Dean had spent his 23rd birthday grappling with the realization that Sam wasn’t just cooling off for a little while, no, it was quite possible he would never speak to Dean ever again for the rest of his life.

And, well. That was when Dad had suddenly started celebrating Dean’s birthdays. Though it wasn’t really a celebration, that wasn’t the right word for it. It was more like an annual funeral for their family, every year on Dean’s birthday. Dad made sure they had the day off and they drove somewhere nice to look at, and they’d spend the day drinking beer, shooting the shit, and being absolutely miserable but in a way that felt nice because they were stewing in misery together.

Though Dean tried to go through what might be generously termed his routine of breakfast at a diner and then hitting the library to self-actualize or whatever, part of self-actualizing was that it messed with his ability to repress and ignore, well, everything. So when evening rolled around and Dean thought about the next part of his routine - hitting a seedy bar, hustle pool, maybe picking up a chick - he was intensely aware that his dad was likely also in a seedy bar somewhere, doing the same. 

Felt creepy, somehow, though it was to be expected. Dean had learned at this guy’s knees, after all.

So he checked out a few new books and headed back to his motel room. Dean had started branching out into sociology these past few days, giving the psychology textbooks a rest. He was getting tired of navelgazing and thought maybe there’d be some answers to be found in looking at human group behavior instead of focusing so hard on himself it felt downright narcissistic.

But when he tried to start settling in to read, fuck, h e couldn’t stop picturing his dad. 

Because Dean was young and pretty, people still smiled at him in seedy bars. They thought him being there was a phase. Ah, youth, strangers thought when they saw him hustle, fully expecting that Dean was just there to have fun, living dangerously because boys will be boys before they grew out of it and became men and respectable members of society. Ha.

Yeah, no, Dean was a permanent fixture there, people just didn’t realize it yet. He would never amount to more than this. But those guys who had no more hope of growing out of it, who were permanently stuck just like Dean but visibly so, and who were still desperately trying to get laid just to not be lonely for one night, well. Those guys didn’t get smiled at, they got looks crossed between pity and contempt.

Dad deserved to get more than those looks on his birthday. And shit, yeah, Dean was mad at him but also not really, and he remembered what it had been like to hope for a text from Sam on his birthday. So Dean pulled out his phone and sent his dad a text, short and to the point, and hoped it’d cheer him up.

Forget what I said about Sam being right, I was angry and I aimed for where it hurt. Happy birthday, Dad. 

Ten minutes later his phone vibrated with an answer, and Dean couldn’t not look.

got a hunt lined up. haunting in texas. 

And Dean smiled a little, reading what was being said and what wasn’t, and answered:

good luck. flying solo in ohio atm, working a case

The case was Dean learning how to love the inner child he wasn’t sure he had, but Dad didn’t need to know that. It wasn’t two minutes before the phone vibrated again.

good luck son

Yeah, Dean would need it, because this was Mission: Impossible, the movie nobody wanted, starring Dean Winchester. It had zero action scenes, wasn’t really related in any way to the MI series beyond the title, and was just one long string of pathetic chick flick moments. Box office flop of the year and Tom Cruise was suing for copyright infringement.

Around three hours later, when Dad must have gotten well and truly sloppy drunk to be doing this, the phone vibrated again. Dean sighed, squeezing his eyes shut as he braced himself for whatever this was. His dad could be a mean drunk, real fucking mean, but sometimes he just got sad, and there was nothing worse than seeing your father sobbing his eyes out and calling out for his dead wife. This was a call, not a text, and he let it go to voicemail because nothing good would come of accepting that call.

Dean did not want to hear his old man drunk dialing him on his own birthday because that would be so pathetic it’d really test Dean’s resolve to keep his distance for a while. He waited until he was sure his dad wouldn’t call again, then picked up his phone to listen, because if a man fell so low, the least you could do was hear what he had to say.

Sammy had probably deleted that one voicemail Dean had once drunkenly left him without listening to it. Yeah, that one had been on a birthday, too.

So when his father’s raspy voice started speaking, it surprised Dean by being stone cold sober.

“I’m sorry, son. For everything. I should have trusted you’d be strong enough to stay away from Adam and I don’t know why I thought you wouldn’t be. You were strong when I was weak and you were only a kid. You’re the reason this family stayed together as long as it did. I’m proud of the man you’ve become, De–”

The beep of the voicemail reaching its end cut off Dean’s name, but it was clear that it was what Dad had meant to say. Dean's understanding of the world tilted on its axis, ended, and was reborn anew.

Oh.

So this was another of those hindsight things. An earth-shattering event, impossible yet an inevitability, really, that had been building up for so long it required hardcore denial on Dean’s part to have noticed every puzzle piece without putting together the full picture until that picture came together on its own and sucker punched him in the face. Like Stanford.

Because this was it. This was all he had ever wanted to hear, everything he ever needed from John Winchester to make this fucking shitshow all worth it. 

And how he could not have seen this coming, Dean didn’t know, because it was obvious in everything John Winchester said and did. This moment was coming from the day Dean had decided to take a page from his little brother’s playbook. 

Dean had sensed it over the last few years, a gut feeling that he was doing something wrong, that Dad thought he was a failure. He’d told himself that he was being paranoid, but he knew his family too well to shake it off. It was there in Dad’s hard eyes when he looked at Dean, mouth growing thinner and thinner with each passing year, as if Dean just kept fucking up and making it worse. Dean, frantic, had bent over backwards, been all yessir, no sir, how high should I jump sir, trying to find some way to please this man, and nothing had worked.

And the worst part was that for all that Sammy was convinced that Dad hated him, the man did nothing of the sort. No, even as they screamed the house down with their fights, during the sullen silence in between, Dad liked to sneak glances at Sam and in his eyes Dean could see that their old man was just about bursting with pride. 

Growing up well, isn’t he, Dad had once casually remarked, as they’d watched 17-year-old Sam practicing his aim on a couple of old beer cans in some woods.

And Dean had looked at the soft smile on Dad’s face, so rare Dean could count the number of times he saw it per year on one hand, and thought, why don’t you ever look at me like that anymore?

There was a reason why Dad had never gone to drag Sam out of Stanford by his ridiculously fluffy hair and instead let him do his thing. It was the same reason why Sam had a demented graduation gift in the works while Dean got fuck-all despite being the loyal son all these years.

It was because John Winchester detested nothing more than a man without a spine.

And that was what Dad had thought of him all this time.

Well, this was the part where Dean’s laughter tipped into the outright hysterical. 

Because here was the thing: Dean had a spine. His spine was made of fucking titanium, thank you very much, he wouldn’t have survived as long as he had if it wasn’t. Dean didn’t yield because his back was made of jello, it was because he gritted his teeth and made the conscious choice to bow. He loved his family, and no matter how much it hurt to love them sometimes, love them he did.

And all of it meant less than nothing. 

Those words weren’t for Dean at all, they were directed at a hypothetical Dean who’d made Dad proud and become more like Sam, like Dean lashing out was the result of personal growth and not of despair.

The very traits that his father had deliberately cultivated in Dean when he was young because they helped in raising Sam became a liability as soon as both of them were adults. All that devoted self-sacrifice Dean prided himself on meant nothing, nothing at all to a man like John Winchester. 

No, the only son he respected was the one who fought back and didn’t let himself get stepped on, who at every turn fiercely asserted his own worth and independence. The one who’d left because he was convinced Dad hated him. The one who probably didn’t even give a single shit about today being Dad’s birthday and even if he did, Sam would still never be tempted into throwing his father a bone.

Sam had broken Dad’s heart and kept breaking it every single day he maintained his radio silence. And Dad respected him all the more for it because that was what real men were supposed to do in John Winchester’s worldview - charge forward in single-minded pursuit of their goal with no regard for the carnage left behind.

Dean laughed until he cried.