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December, 1996
When Sam was thirteen, he came home from the school library late one evening to find his brother doing an alarmingly good imitation of a corpse, if corpses made a habit of lying sprawled across beds naked and covered in suspicious-looking fluids - which yeah, they sometimes did.
Sam did not panic.
At least not after the ten seconds it took for him to drop his backpack, rush towards Dean, and recoil sharply from the stench.
Drunk.
Sam let out a long-suffering sigh then held his breath before sidling over to place two fingers against Dean’s neck, while trying to avoid making contact with the rest of him. He relaxed, inadvertently letting out the breath he’d been holding, once he felt his brother’s pulse beating slow, but reassuringly steady under his fingertips. Then he realized that Dean had passed out on his bed.
Jerk.
He scowled but his irritation was quickly eclipsed by the satisfaction of knowing that when Dean woke up the next morning, hungover, he would be there to take advantage of it in all the ways only obnoxious little brothers could.
Sam grinned and pulled a bedsheet over Dean before leaving the bedroom to go to the kitchen to fix something for dinner.
He may also have emblazoned the words ‘BEER SLUT’ across Dean’s forehead in a red, waterproof sharpie with a sketch of a penis substituting for the letter ‘T’.
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Sam smirked when a freshly-showered, thankfully stench-free Dean shuffled into the kitchen the next morning. He was clad only in his amulet and a pair of thin, cotton ThunderCats pajamas featuring Tygra that may have been a couple of sizes too big for him once, but that he'd now clearly outgrown.
They had been a Christmas gift from Sam who had fancied their family being rather like the ThunderCats. Dean was clearly Tygra.
In his defence, he’d been eleven.
A surreptitious glance at Dean’s face coupled with the distinct lack of cussing directed at him told Sam that Dean hadn’t looked at himself in the mirror yet.
His smirk widened and he greeted Dean with a loud and cheery “’Mornin’ Tiger!”
Dean winced and jostled Sam’s arm in mute, disgruntled acknowledgement as he maneuvered his hand between the counter and Sam to snag the mug of steaming coffee Sam had just poured.
“Hey!” Sam exclaimed indignantly, grabbing at the mug. “That’s mine, jerkwad! Get your own coffee.”
Dean grunted and quickly licked sloppily around the rim of the mug eliciting a predictable “Gross, Dean” from Sam before he pulled out a chair and sat down at the tiny piece of furniture masquerading as a kitchen table.
“Too young for coffee, Sammy” Dean mumbled after he’d taken a couple of fortifying sips. He either ignored or missed Sam’s scowl.
“But not too young to come home to find my brother passed out from alcohol poisoning?” Sam bit out, a wave of anger suddenly surging through him. That had been happening frequently since he’d hit puberty, or perhaps, more accurately, puberty had hit him. His moods shifted like quicksilver and Dean responded by ignoring him at best or deliberately provoking him at worst.
A trifle mollified by the contrite expression that flashed across Dean’s face half-obscured by the mug, Sam turned back to the coffeemaker and away from his brother’s guilty gaze.
“Wasn’t alcohol poisoning” Dean muttered with an almost bitter undercurrent in his tone, but by the time Sam turned back around, another mug of coffee in one hand, Dean's expression was blank.
Sam watched as his brother rested his left elbow atop the table and rubbed a thumb in circles over his temple, looking wearier than any boy his age ought to be.
He sighed softly as the last remnants of his anger deserted him, lobbed the small bottle of Tylenol he had in his other hand towards Dean and said, “Here, I’m guessing you could use these.”
He smirked again as Dean cursed and fumbled to catch the bottle, knocking his mug over and spilling hot coffee over the side of the table and onto his thighs. The smirk turned into a snicker at the undignified yelp Dean gave as he jumped to his feet, then morphed into an all-out guffaw when Dean glared at him.
“What the fuck, dude?!”
Sam shrugged. “Not my fault your reflexes are shit.”
There was more glaring directed his way, followed by a litany of curses about pain-in-the-ass brothers as Dean left the kitchen, bottle in hand.
"Splash some cold water on your face. I hear it helps after a hangover" Sam offered blithely to his brother's retreating form.
Moments later he was grinning wide at Dean’s hollered “Sam, you little bitch! I’m going to wipe the floor with your scrawny ass!”
He mopped up the spilled coffee and replaced the empty mug with his own. He preferred orange juice anyway.
He was still chuckling when he decided he might as well do the laundry. It wouldn’t be quite as funny if he was reduced to wearing his, now also overly tight, My Little Pony t-shirt.
In his defence it had been the most comfortable sleepwear he had owned at the time, even if it had been a gift from Dean mocking his TV viewing habits.
April, 2001
When Sam was almost eighteen, he came home late one night to find Dean sprawled across his bed, a half-empty bottle of Jack sitting uncapped on the tiny table crammed between their respective beds. Flashing back to the last time he’d come home to find an inebriated Dean passed out in their room, he noted with some relief that at least, this time, his brother had apparently passed out before he could puke all over himself and Sam’s bed. That, and he’d kept his clothes on.
Sam huffed in exasperation before leaning over to check Dean’s pulse. It was unnecessary given the obvious, rhythmic rise and fall of his chest, but the steady thrum of Dean’s pulse under his fingers served to reassure him nevertheless.
He removed the boots Dean was still wearing and tugged the thin cotton bed sheet out from under him until it was covering him chest-down. As he drew away from his sleeping form, the moonlight streaming in through the narrow window opposite the bed illuminated Dean’s face and something glinted briefly on his cheeks before passing clouds obscured the light. Sam reached down reflexively and swiped at the lingering wetness his fingers encountered.
Something in his chest twisted painfully. He wondered what could have driven Dean to drink himself into a stupor and cry. He briefly entertained the idea of asking him the next day but knew with certainty, from precedence, that Dean would deflect.
No chick-flick moments for Winchesters.
He distracted himself from further pointless rumination on the matter by replacing the bottle of Jack with a glass of water and a couple of pain relievers, and then turned in for the night, flopping gracelessly onto Dean’s bed with a deliberately loud exhale.
Dean’s only response was to twitch slightly and mumble a barely audible “Sammy?”
“’Night, Dean” Sam murmured with a rueful smile and upon no further movement from Dean, drifted off into sleep as his mind wandered back to contemplating the goings-on with his brother that evening. Not for the first time, he wished that the Winchester code of communication allowed for emotional honesty.
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Two months later, the hypocrisy of that wish was driven home after the mother of all fights with his father who was none too pleased with Sam’s decision to go to Stanford in pursuit of a ‘normal’ life. John Winchester was blindsided by Sam’s announcement that he was done with hunting and was going off to college, leaving his family behind, although the latter was more an implication than outright admission. Dean, however, seemed unsurprised, the look of bleak desperation in his suspiciously bright eyes quickly replaced by blank resignation.
On the bus the next morning, an hour away from Palo Alto and a fresh start, the adrenaline high of the evening before having finally abated, Sam reflected over the last two months and came to the realization that Dean had been angry with him the whole time. It had been telegraphed in the way Dean didn’t hold his gaze for more than a few seconds, in the absence of his familiar touch, in the lack of anything but the occasional perfunctory response to Sam’s customary gibes, but mostly in his complete disinterest in the goings-on in Sam’s life. With the unapologetic clarity of hindsight Sam saw that he’d been so busy with graduation and college preparations amidst playing research-boy for his father’s hunts that he’d somehow missed all the glaring signs.
Guilt washed over him because he had intended to talk and explain his side of things to Dean before telling their dad, hoping to appeal to that instinct in Dean to put Sam’s well-being above all else, to convince him that his decision to leave this life of hunting did not equal a decision to leave Dean. In his mind’s eye he saw Dean passed out from a drinking binge on his bed and his guilt flowed into a wave of anger, a part of which was directed at himself.
Damnit, Dean should have said something, the stubborn bastard.
If only he’d badgered him into having that chick-flick moment…
Unbidden, he recalled the only other time Dean had drunk himself into an oblivious stupor and his anger dissipated as swiftly as it had formed.
Dean had dropped out of school that week and had begun accompanying their Dad on out-of-town hunts. In response to Sam’s surprised query regarding ‘graduation’ and ‘the future’ Dean had thrown him a wink and that trademark Dean Winchester grin with some comment about one nerd in the family being enough. Sam had rolled his eyes, jokingly accused Dean of being too dumb to graduate anyway, and let the matter drop.
Now, four and a half years later, it all clicked into place.
There was a bitter ache in his chest at the memory and its implications, but Sam clamped down on it stubbornly.
It didn't change anything now, anyway.
Dean might have given up on a normal life, on Sam, but Sam was not going to make that mistake. He was not going to end up a bitter, lonely hunter with nothing but a decades-old vendetta against an unknown enemy. Sam was going to make something more of himself.
And some day, one day, when they weren’t quite as angry at each other anymore, maybe they could be brothers again.
The End