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1999
At first, it’s just a dream.
Not a fantasy, but a nightmare. They’re in one of their blistering fights, Sam spitting at Dad and Dad getting louder and closer and louder, Dean all edge and nervousness in the middle. The same thing that’s replayed thousands of times, except this time, Dad’s lunging for Sam the way he does and Dean’s trying to calm him down the way he does and the white-hot feverish anger in Sam’s blood just heightens and heightens instead of fading to a stubborn, silent pulse like it normally does and making him back away, and there’s a knife on the countertop behind Dad, and Sam lunges for it just as Dad’s twists his hand in Sam’s shirt and his heart spikes, and it’s self-defence, or it would be if Dad had actually ever hit Sam, which he hasn’t, so it’s not, and the knife goes into his father’s t-shirt, clean as butter. Like ganking another monster. In the dream, Sam isn’t even upset. The blood spreads neatly, bit by bit, soaking his shirt. Dad gasps, shudders, jerks backwards, falling against the counter. Sam forgotten, Dean hurtles forwards, gripping Dad, shhing him, cradling the back of his head like he’s forty five and Dad’s twenty. Breath drains out of him along with the blood. Dad collapses on the floor, now just another body, and—
Sam wakes up. Dread descends. Dad’s still alive , he thinks. This is still happening . Half of him’s relieved. Half of him’s disappointed. And once he realises that part of him’s disappointed —that the dream isn’t necessarily a nightmare, just a scenario— well—
After that, he can never really go back.
At first, he puts it down to his hopeless and mildly fucked-up interest in serial killers. Stats and personality traits and circumstance, M.O., weapon of choice. He’s always found something so strangely alluring about anything that dark ; had an interest in the occult that goes a little beyond the research he does for hunts. A girl at the current school is really into astrology in a weird, intense way, that makes Sam think less of Dean quipping I’m an Aquarius and more of the witch they’d hunted a while back and her tarot card calling cards. She reads Sam’s chart with a funny look on her face, points out Pluto and Saturn and Moon conjunctions and oppositions that she says darkly spell bad news and awful luck and power struggles and conflicts , and tells him he has a Twelfth House stellium. Sun and Mars and Venus and Mercury all entwined. It means your life is defined by the unseen, your fears, subconscious, secrets, she tells him, and you might take some vicarious delight in dark things, taboos, be fascinated by them . He laughs.
Astrology seems mostly silly to him, but there’s probably some truth in it; if the ghosts and the monsters and the creatures they confronted on the daily are real, Sam guesses it makes sense the planets control their lives. So maybe she was right. Maybe Sam’s fixation on this idea of killing his father—something he could never, ever, not in a million years actually do, no matter how awful he is—maybe it’s just down to this.
And the same with the serial killer fixation, the way he’s fascinated by awful pop culture icons, famous people who kill themselves and each other. He replays In Utero and wishes he’d been older than ten when Kurt Cobain died, listens to Hole and argues with astrology girl, Jeanette, about whether or not she killed Kurt Cobain (Sam is firmly in the no camp). He rents the DVD of Sid and Nancy and is fascinated by the very concept of heroin; it seems like something from a science-fiction novel, something so good that feels so awe-inspiring and so fantastic that it whites out your pleasure sensors and you are left incapable of ever feeling that happy again, something therefore so dangerous that trying it once can leave you an addict. He checks out their biography from the library when Dad and Dean are off on a hunt and is most interested by the sections on their respective childhoods; Nancy Spungen diagnosed with schizophrenia when she was a year younger than Sam, threatening to kill a babysitter with scissors at eleven.
Dean thinks he’s crazy and kind of disturbed and ruffles his hair like he’s five whenever he talks about it. Hope you’re not planning anything, Sammy , he says, and Sam just shrugs like never you mind . “You want a Bonnie to your Clyde?” he says.
“You could be the Bonnie to my Clyde,” Sam says, mostly joking, even though he’s been having dreams recently where Dean helps him. “A serial killer brother duo.”
“Big talk for someone who doesn’t even like squishing spiders,” Dean says. Which is true, but Sam also kills monsters on a weekly basis, so the two aren’t equivalent. Spiders don’t do anything. “Besides, Bonnie and Clyde weren’t serial killers.”
“Actually,” Sam offers up, “it’s believed they murdered nine police officers and four civilians.”
Dean just laughs. He wouldn’t help me , Sam thinks, never . He’d stop me. I’d have to do it myself.
When Sam was a kid, before that fateful Christmas he found out about the world they actually lived in, he worried Dad was beating Dean. It wasn’t like he had much else to go on. The two would disappear for a few hours, and Dean would return all banged-up, arm in a sling or bruises across his face or, once, with a broken leg, and Dad got so angry sometimes, so what was Sam meant to think? He was seven; his thoughts went to domestic violence before monsters existing.
Sometimes Dean would be all cheerful bluster, swagger and pride radiating off him, and Sam would think no, no way, it’s something else. But, more often, he’d be quiet, subdued, a little on edge and a little jumpy, and incredibly quick to get annoyed if Sam asked what had happened, and then Sam would think, well …
When he found out about the hunting, he realised it was that, instead, and some tight, angry coil in his small stomach loosened. But that anger at their father never really faded, only started to grow, year after year.
As they got moved from school to school to school, as Dad drilled it into them that the only thing they could pursue, the only thing they were useful for, was hunting. As Dean got older and more militant and more anxious and turned into Sam’s jailer as much as his brother; as Sam got older and unhappier and more “defiant”, the problem child, the obvious least favourite.
Sam hates Dad because Dad’s short-tempered and bitter and quick to anger and prone to drunken rages Dean makes Sam try to sleep through and too controlled by his emotions. He hates Dad because Dad’s cold and detached and entirely unmoved by Sam’s pleas and prone to repressing all his emotions and only motivated by wanting to avenge a woman Sam never even knew . Most of all, Sam hates Dad because he’s so fucking tired .
He hates hunting. He hates missing soccer games to stay in the car with Dad on guard, ready to strike, while Dean plays wide-eyed hitchhiker by the side of the highway, worrying this’ll be the time Dean won’t come back, this’ll be the time Dad isn’t quick enough with the gun, this’ll be the time Sam watches everything crumble around him irreparably so much more than it already has.
He hates getting drenched in gore and viscera that never feels like it comes off no matter how hard he scrubs in the shower, that feels like it penetrates to his very core and leaves him permanently, irredeemably unclean.
He hates training, doing laps until he feels like he’s going to throw up and practising nine different ways to untie a knot with his hands behind his back and sparring with Dean, when he should be writing essays on Macbeth or studying for a Calculus test.
He hates spending his Sundays melting silver into pellets and getting home every night and cleaning blood off his hands.
He hates the fucking nightmares , the way that stopping a monster in real life doesn’t stop it from bleeding into his dreams, taunting him, letting him know he’ll never really be free. And he hates that no one cares .
The last fight, he told Dad, I’d rather die than keep doing this for the rest of my life, I’m serious . Dad didn’t even seem to hear him, it was just— don’t take that tone with me. This is what has to be done. Yelling louder like he could superimpose his own thoughts over Sam’s if he just talked loud enough, drilled something into his brain hard enough.
Yeah, Sam hates Dad. Maybe Dad doesn’t beat them, but Dean was still coming back from hunts with broken bones at age twelve, and maybe Dad says he’s trying to avenge Mary’s killer, but he’s still the one who took the normal life Sam could’ve had away and ripped it to shreds, then screamed at him for wanting pieces of it. So it’s the same fucking difference. He makes Sam so angry he can’t function; it just sits inside him, the rage, the violence of it. It scares him a little, at first. Then he stops being scared.
But, yeah. It’d scare Dean, who doesn’t seem to feel any resentment at all, who practically begs Dad to treat him like a surrogate wife and is upset when he doesn’t dump his problems on Dean. Who has always acted like being abandoned for days on end in shitty motel rooms is normal, even good fun, even when they were six and ten respectively, and who gets more upset at Sam for “provoking Dad” than at Dad for laying into Sam.
To Dean, anger at Dad is sacrilegious. It’d be like hating God, except Sam doesn’t even think Dean believes in God; probably doesn’t need to with that much faith in their father. Sam can see Dad more clearly than that.
The dreams about murder, then, him the perpetuator instead of the victim—they get to be a nice change from the nightmares. Even if they’re just that, then, at first. Dreams . Almost visions; viciously intense, visceral and upsetting, at least upsetting when Sam wakes up and realises what happened again. But when you keep dreaming about killing your father, and you’re never very unhappy in the dreams, it’s easy to think, well, there must be a psychological reason behind this, an esoteric interest in the matter. A hidden desire. So Sam starts to think about it during the day, too.
At first, it’s a compulsion. A thought he can’t quite stop and forces himself to follow through on; when Dad’s angry and a weapon’s around, and, hell, Dad’s always angry and a weapon’s always around. His eyes glance to the knife/pistol/sawed-off shotgun/axe nearby and it rushes through his head, for a second, the vivid picture of him stabbing/shooting/swinging and then—silence. Nothing. Freedom. Then, more than a compulsion, it starts to become a crutch, a comforting little thought, something to rely on when Dad’s being awful and Sam’s so angry he feels like he’s going to burn up and it takes everything within him not to the thought; I could always murder him . Do it quick, do it quiet, Sam’s sure he could manage it. Maybe not hand-to-hand, Dad’s stronger and bigger still even if Sam has the advantages of youth, but with the element of surprise—yeah, he could manage it physically even if not emotionally. Of course he doesn’t want to, not really, but he just keeps returning to the thought. Then it hits Sam. It’s not a bruise he keeps pushing on anymore, a fear he keeps testing. It’s a weird little daydream. Fuck , he thinks. Do I—
“I want to kill my dad,” Sam says, sitting on the roof of Jeanette’s car.
She’s smoking a cigarette, and in the dark, her long, white fingers look like the cigarette she keeps taking drags from. Sam refused her offerings, even though it’s true he used to steal Dean’s back when he smoked and always found something faintly appealing in the cool itching dryness they left at the back of your throat, the momentary second of calm before the world started to fade in again.
He tries not to indulge in this sort of thing; fantasising about patricide is already too far into teen angst territory, picking up smoking would be a little too cliche. But she has a Diet Coke, too, Large from McDonalds, and keeps passing it to Sam, so he sips that, the only thing either of them have digested all day: united in that particular teenage rebellion, that little method of control. When he focuses on the gnawing hunger in his stomach, it makes everything feel a little less real, for a moment. The murderous fancies and the fact Sam’ll be off again soon, new town, new life. Besides, he likes Jeanette. He’s thinking of asking her to prom, if Dad lets him go to prom. Maybe she can be the Bonnie to his Clyde.
Suitably, she says, “Yeah, yeah, don’t we all?”
“No, I mean, seriously,” Sam says. “I think about it a lot. I’m kind of worried, actually, that I think about it so much. I don’t think I’d ever be able to do it, but…”
She blinks at him. “What, does he hit you? You could probably get away with it, if so. Self defence.”
“No,” Sam says. “He wouldn’t. That’s not it.”
“Are you sure?” she asks. “You’re always pretty banged up.”
No, he just forces me to fight supernatural creatures every few days of my life with some regard for my life and little regard for my safety and moves us from town to town, state to state every few weeks while constantly stuffing it down my throat that I’m a failure and deserting the family and neglecting my dead mother who I never even knew if I don’t clap my hands in joy every time we spend a birthday digging up and burning graves. Sam shrugs. “I spar with my brother a lot.”
She takes one last thick drag of her cigarette, drops the Diet Coke on the roof of the car between them, where it free wheels down the front windscreen and off the hood and hits the dirt-trodden ground, busting open. Sam peers down at it. He’ll have to pick that up later. When he looks up, she’s closer to him, has somehow moved in the timeframe it took him to stare at the falling Diet Coke, her hair falling over her face and her hands inching her way over to him.
I wasn’t done talking , Sam thinks, but he likes Jeanette, so it’s okay.
“Run away with me?” she says. It’s a joke, but it’s not. With her? Probably not. Run away? Maybe. Wouldn’t be the first time. She moves closer to him still. For a second, in the dark, her eyes look black. Something turns over in Sam’s stomach, but he pushes it down.
It’s nice to feel wanted. It’s nice to be fucked-up, and indulge in depravity, pretend like the dirtier parts of himself he can feel lurking beneath the surface are okay and allowed and common, pretend like he’s normal and not some tainted freak. Pretend like the reason he’ll never be clean is because he doesn’t want to be; pretend like the reason his father hates him is because he always starts fights and won’t be told rather than what Sam can feel, which is that it’s just something in him.
It’s nice to talk about patricide like he means it, like he’d ever do it, like he’ll ever really manage to escape, and be treated like he could, and still be liked . Imaginary blood paired with future kisses. And Sam’s spinning out anyway, he can feel it, maybe this will ground him. Her dark eyes get closer, close to his, and they’re not black, they’re just very dark brown and her pupils are wide and blown out and the whites don’t really show, but they’re not black, so they never were, Sam’s going crazy.
Lips meet, seal. Her tongue forces her way in like an invasion, her hands are harder, all of a sudden, pushing on him. It’s a little weird. Sam doesn’t mind. At least, he doesn’t think he does. She tastes like ash and lip gloss and Sam’s split lip rubs up against her teeth and he tastes blood. It’s comforting, a little. And it’s not. That even this feels wrong.
Sam runs away. Thanks, Jeanette, for the idea . December 29th 1999; he wants to start the new millennium off right, far, far away.
He doesn’t make the same mistake as last time, fourteen year old Sam calling Dean from a payphone to tell him he was okay, or the time before that, twelve year old Sam only managing to get a few miles away before he settled down to order pizza with stolen cash and petting dogs. The issue with his runaway attempts is that they’re usually discovered before Sam has time to get anywhere far away, because everyone’s always watching over him. These days, Dad and Dean do often leave for hunts together, so Sam plans for one of those; but last minute, him and Dad fight, and Dad makes Dean stay behind. Which ruins the entire plan.
So he has to make sure Dean’s busy. This is hard. Sam’s never known any other twenty year olds, but he feels pretty certain Dean’s an abnormal one, doggedly loyal to Dad for some fucking reason and stolid and immovable when it comes to what he calls protecting Sam , which is actually just being his prison guard. Dad tells him to stay right there while he’s gone, and there he stays. But the only thing that can get Dean to disobey Dad’s orders is, well, different Dad orders. All it takes is a faked call from someone claiming to be working with John, and Dean’s off immediately, telling Sam he’ll be back tomorrow and not to stay up too late and to make sure he eats!!!
Sam doesn’t eat. Gone are the days of surviving off junk food in his runaway attempts; this time, he doesn’t need anything. This time, he takes the tenner he took surreptitiously from Dean, feeling bad, but not bad enough for it to stop him, buys a bus ticket to the next city over, and another bus ticket at the bus station there, ends up in Los Angeles. Los Angeles; Sam doesn’t like it, the noise and the dirt and the grime and the crime, he’s not used to cities, but it’s the best bet, chock full with sixteen year olds running from something, Sam will blend right in. On the bus he listens to the only cassette tape he has, Radiohead’s Pablo Honey , and feels like something new is happening, something different. The world is opening up to him and he’s no longer just a creep, a weirdo—
He’s sleeping on the street to catch a rest before he tries to get a job when they find him. Dean’s all frantic looking and beat to shit—which, what? Dean wasn’t even needed on the hunt so what happened there?—and Dad, Dad just looks angry. Sam’s barely awake but the real world comes in bright and violent when Dad hauls Sam to his feed by the crook of his elbow, shakes him, says boy, what the hell were you thinking? Lying to me, lying to your brother—
Sam looks at Dean. Dean’s barely moving, nostrils flared, body tense in a very obvious way. He looks—looks the way he does when a monster’s coming at them. What?, Sam tries to communicate to Dean. Dean looks at him back. Wordlessly, he says Sam, what the hell?
Sam says aloud, because he hasn’t really slept since two days ago now and he’s not thinking straight, “Can you two quit coming to find me?”
“Anything could’ve happened,” Dad shouts. It’s five am and the only other person in the alley is a junkie either still asleep or unconscious. Sam still looks around like someone else is there to hear. “Are you actually this fucking stupid, Sam, or do you just do it for attention? You don’t know what’s good for you, you know more than anyone what the hell’s out there and you still pull this shit—”
“Millions of people exist in this world and manage not to get attacked by monsters,” Sam says back. “I could be one of them—you can’t make me live in fear forever, I can’t live a life like this.”
“I don’t care ,” Dad yells. “You can and you will. I give you an order, you fucking follow it, Sam. The mission—”
“ Fuck the mission,” Sam snaps. “Mom’s dead . All you’re doing is killing us too.”
Dean’s trying to get between them, but Dad’s got Sam by the arm still and is only pulling him in closer. This is the moment, Sam thinks, but he doesn’t have anything, a blunt pipe or a sharp object or nothing, and they’re on the streets, anyway, maybe there are security cameras, and he doesn’t want to go down for it, Dean’d be devastated and it’d defeat the point. Dad wrenches a hand in Sam’s shirt, and Sam’s still sort of thinking through the murder plan and thinking stupid stupid how fucking stupid am I that I didn’t get further away , then how did they even find me , then why does Dean have a black eye the stupid hunt I sent him on was fake , that he actually doesn’t see it coming.
Dad slaps Sam. Hard across the face and there’s blood and it fucking hurts and Sam’s too in shock to take the opportunity, to do something back, and besides maybe he would end up killing Dad if he retaliated then and there. Sam’s certainly had worse but it’s Dad , he’s not meant to do this, he doesn’t do this, no matter how shitty he is and how much Sam hates him, and it feels like just another incurable crack in their relationship before the whole thing splits, if it hasn’t already.
He stumbles back, head spinning, and almost collapses against the wall of the alley. Dean’s there immediately, arms bracing Sam’s fall, propping him upright, getting in front of him. Dean . His face is in front of Sam’s, worried and serious and fucking—bruised—and whatever the hell Sam was going to say dies on his tongue. Dean. His stupid, protective, doggedly loyal and ultimately terrified big brother, who’s been getting in between fights between Sam and Dad for years, Dad who just hit Sam, Dad who did that now, Dad who might’ve always—
Sam shuts his eyes. His right eye throbs, feels numb, too big for its socket. Dean’s twenty. Surely he wouldn’t just—
“Don’t you dare,” Dad says, finally, heavily. “Don’t you dare .”
There’s quiet for a moment. Sam can still feel Dean’s body shielding his, doesn’t want to open his eyes yet and see the mess he’s created. Sam hasn’t heard Dean stand up to Dad in— years —but he thinks he hears a quiet, “You didn’t need to do that, Dad.”
“I’ll thank you not to tell me what I need to do and not do,” Dad snaps back. “Especially after your behaviour—”
That quiets Dean, but Sam’s so furious on both their behalfs he opens his eyes. Dean’s staring at the floor, and Dad— Dad looks both self-satisfied and stricken.
“Sammy—” he starts.
“What the hell did Dean do?” Sam says. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t care what’s good for him, he doesn’t care that Dean is silently and obviously begging him to shut the hell up, he doesn’t care if Dad hits him again. He can’t not reply, rebel, fight. It’s in his very being, it’s the fire that rages, always, near-constantly, whether he stokes it or not. Dad’s right. He’s defiant and he’s trouble and he doesn’t know what’s good for him . So what? Someone has to have a fucking backbone around here.
“Sam,” Dean says, like that means anything.
“Actually, no, fuck that question,” Sam says. “What the hell did you do?” This is directed at Dad.
Dad looks steadily at him. Not an inch of guilt in those eyes, even though Sam’s sure some tiny part of him, at least, must be feeling it. “What I should’ve done to you years ago,” he says. “Maybe if you had a little more discipline, you’d be more like your brother, wouldn’t pull this crap all the time.”
It doesn’t escape Sam’s notice that Dad is deflecting from actually having to answer whatever the hell happened between him and Dean. it doesn’t matter. Sam already knows . Some part of him’s known since he was six years old, and some other part of him found out ten seconds ago. Dean has this look when Sam glances back over at him, all frozen up, and suddenly Sam knows , sure as he does anything, that Dad does this, has been doing this when Sam’s not around, and Dean’s just been—taking it. Because of course he has. Could Dad do anything that’d be a last straw for him?
“Jesus fucking Christ ,” Sam spits. “Is this what you two get up to when I’m not around?”
Dean drops him. Sam doesn’t stumble, but only narrowly. He doesn’t look back at Dean—he can’t , he’ll be so angry at Dad he actually goes go for his throat—but he feels almost bad for a second, for phrasing it like that, instead of saying what the hell is wrong with you stop fucking hitting your fucking kid, especially your best behaved and essentially favourite one . But he’s angry at Dean, too, even though he knows he shouldn’t be. Why wouldn’t he have ever told Sam? Why would he actively keep it a secret?
“We’re going,” Dad says shortly. “Dean. Sam. Come on.”
Sam could not go. He could kill Dad, he guesses, though he doesn’t have a weapon and he just missed an opportunity to have it ruled as self-defence. Or he could turn tail and run, do the whole thing all over again. But they’d find him; they always do eventually. Sam’s never getting out of here. He’s never fucking getting out.
He goes.
Back in the motel, Dean patches up Sam’s cuts. Sam doesn’t want him to, doesn’t feel like he deserves it, but Dean insists. Guilt is written all over Dean’s features; at this point it's practically tattooed there. He dabs Sam’s now doubly-split lip with a rag and cleans off the blood, presses a wet paper towel over Sam’s slowly bruising eye. Sam would’ve preferred to ignore both, ignore the sinking feeling of failure, of victimisation running through his head.
Now Dad’s hit him, everything seems a little less noble. A little less like Sam’s crusade of freedom and moral rightness against Dad and Dean’s macho hunting obsession and desire to control every aspect of Sam’s life. A little more like some generic kid with a shitty generic dad.
Which— Sam doesn’t want to think that, can’t think that. He hates Dad and he wants to kill him, but—well, does he? Faced with actual physical confrontation, Sam didn’t even swing a blow in return. He’s been faking all along; he could never pull off patricide. It just goes to show you never know what you’re capable of, or, similarly, not capable of.
Now he’s just some kid whose dad hit him, and that feels wrong, too. John Winchester’s the antagonist of Sam’s story, sure, but they’re meant to be on even footing, always at blows, always one step behind each other. But he’s not really. He’s just Dad.
Sam doesn’t want to kill him. Not really. He wants to apologise and he never will, because Dad doesn’t deserve it, especially not after what he just did, what he’s been doing. He wants an apology and he’ll never get it, because Dad doesn’t work like that. He can admit wrong-doing, but he can’t admit it wasn’t justified.
Maybe I went too far , he allowed, when Sam asked him why the hell he’d hit Dean for Sam running away. But then he’d turned to Dean and gone but Sammy’s your responsibility, you know that. You should know better than to fall for the ministrations of a seventeen year old .
Dean had nodded. Yes, sir . Then Dad had left, and Dean had started in on Sam’s injuries, deflecting any talk of his own, even though they’re just as visible. Impulsively, Sam reaches out and touches his thumb to the bruise on Dean’s jaw, traces it.
“Has he done this before?” Sam asks carefully. Even though he’s sure he knows the answer.
Dean looks him in the eye, honest and trust-worthy and dependable, and says, “Not enough to matter.”
Liar .
“How much is enough to matter?” Sam says, letting incredulity bleed into his tone, jerking back. “Does this not matter?”
Dean sighs. “No, of course it matters. He shouldn’t have done that. He’ll never do that again, Sammy, I swear.”
That’s not what I’m worried about, Sam thinks. “So why does it not matter for you?”
Dean rolls his eyes. Actually rolls his eyes. The sheer nerve! “I’m an adult, Sammy, I can deal with Dad, don’t worry about me .”
“Why the hell do you stick around?” Sam says, coming dangerously close to treason, blasphemy in Dean’s eyes. “He can’t just hit you when he’s angry at me —”
“It barely happens,” Dean says, still like he’s trying to placate Sam. Sam is sure this is a lie. He shrugs, still maintaining the atmosphere of caring less about this than the tenseness still present in his body betrays he actually does. “And, besides, he doesn’t—hit me—because he’s angry at you, he just—resorts to it if I’ve fucked up. Not everything is about you, Sammy.”
Hit me is said with such awkwardness Sam almost laughs. Classic Dean. Fine with Dad hitting him, doesn’t like talking about it because chick flick moment . He’s like a fucking battered wife, Sam thinks. Accepting whatever treatment Dad dishes out because at least it’s attention.
“So, what?” Sam says. “He beats you when he can blame you for failing at a case, and that’s just meant to be—okay?”
“He doesn’t beat me at all,” Dean snaps. There’s more vitriol in his tone now. “And you know what, you don’t help acting the way you do. Winding him up, picking fights, leaving without telling anyone—what do you expect ? You think I don’t have to deal with the way he gets when you’re gone? You think he’s just meant to go around and let you act like that?”
There’s the Dean Sam knows and dislikes so well. Dad’s unpaid public defender, part Stockholm Syndrome and part the reassurances of the favoured child who knows that, whatever treatment he gets, at least he’s loved, liked, wanted around as something more than something to tame. It rings a little more hollow now, though, and Sam ignores him. “Then you should leave too,” Sam says.
Dean’s irritation fades. He just looks at Sam. “I can’t leave,” he says. “It’s Dad .”
“Most people grow up and leave their parents, Dean,” Sam says.
Dean just blinks at Sam like the words don’t compute. “It’s Dad ,” he says again. “He’d be alone. He’d destroy himself.”
Sam stares at Dean. “That doesn’t mean we have to sit around and let him destroy us too.”
Dean shakes his head. “No. He’s just—he wouldn’t know what to do without us here. He’d get himself killed on a hunt, or he’d drink himself to death, or he’d—” Then he stares at Sam. “You can’t seriously want to leave him.”
And here, Sam thinks, lies the eternal divide between the brothers, because since Sam was eight years old, he’s thought man, it would be so much better if it was just me and Dean , and Dean has always responded to this idea with nothing short of horror, like Sam was suggesting he take John Winchester and shoot him out back. Yeah. Dean would hate Sam’s so-common fictions about actually killing him. To him, it’d be heresy.
“That’s not our responsibility,” Sam says, finally.
“Yes, it is,” Dean says. “That’s what family is , Sammy. Or do we all mean nothing to you?”
The false equivalencies is a Dad Trick Dean’s using on him, one he thinks he won’t notice. Oh, you want to go to a Mathletes meet instead of going to slaughter a monster? So you hate me and your dead mother and you don’t want to be part of our family? Sam doesn’t even know how to respond to it. Dean’s past saving, mostly because he so fervently insists he’s in nothing he wants to be saved from. But Sam isn’t. He refuses to be.
It’s New Year's Day. Sam was meant to be living a new life, now. But he’s in another shitty motel, matching bruises with his brother.
He swears, this time next year, it’ll be different. He’ll get out. He has to. He’ll have a way out, somehow . Something permanent; something that’ll make Dad stop wanting him back, something that’ll let Dean see he has other options. He’ll be free . And he’ll stop dreaming about killing his father. He won’t have to anymore.
He doesn’t say anything back. He doesn’t have to. Dean knows what he thinks.
Dad does too.