Work Text:
You watch him grow up. You watch him twirl around a rented kitchen filled with canned food and frozen dinners, waving the fairy wand you made him out of cardboard. You make him a stupid purple tutu with tulle stolen from the craft shop in town, and he wears it for three weeks straight. When it finally falls off him in shreds, he cries until you promise to make another. And you’re the only kid in your second grade class who knows how to sew or steal, and most days that bugs you. Not when he’s so happy, though, not when he smiles at you like you’re the best thing in the world. Not when he climbs up into your lap, purple tutu and all, and touches the wand to your shoulder, declaring you a princess too. Later that night you’re putting him to bed, tutu wrapped around his pajamas and wand still clutched in his hand, if a little soggy from the bathwater. You whisper that you love him bigger than the sun, and he wraps his arms around you and whispers back that he loves you bigger than the universe.
You watch him read and dance and laugh, in a million different motels and rentals. You clean kitchens and bathrooms with pure bleach so that he won't get sick in them. You make breakfasts and dinners, and you pack lunches in brown bags for him. On the few occasions that dad is actually around, Sam cries when he makes the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches because he says Dad makes them wrong (too much jelly, and he never spreads the peanut all the way around). You would never admit it, but you always feel this little flush of pride when Sam stomps home from school and dumps a whole, uneaten sandwich on the kitchen table, cheeks flushed with anger and hands on him hips.
You steal clothes for him when he has growth spurts, and when dad finds out and kicks your ass for it (because that’s somehow different than the credit card scams you help him run), you get a series of shitty part time jobs at grocery stores and auto shops to buy food and clothes and those stupid sci-fi books he likes to read. You explain the birds and the bees to him, because you know if dad does it then it would be nothing more than what he did for you: toss him a box of condoms and tell him to be careful. You buy him a book, one that says it's written by a mother. You think he needs that, because somebody else’s mother is still better than none.
You tell him all about it, the first time you go all the way in the back of the car with that girl in your biology class (Amy Something, or maybe Amanda). He listens with rapt attention while you brag, and then decides it sounds gross and he never wants to hear it again. You think about the fact that your little brother will one day be in a backseat with an Amy or an Amanda, and that doesn’t sit well with you. You want to tell him never to trust anyone, but you don't want to see the hard look on his face that you see on Dad's, and on your own when you look in the mirror.
You give him basically whatever he wants, if you can get your hands on it. There's something about him, probably just because he's your little brother, something that stops you from being able to properly say no. Discipline's a bitch, because you don't want to leave it to dad. He's almost always gone anyway on one hunt or another, and getting spanked or grounded for something that happened weeks ago doesn't seem fair. So you take care of it yourself, like you do most things, and you're far more fair and gentle than dad ever would have been. Sometimes you worry you failed him, spoiled him, but then he flashes you that great big grin and his dimples come out and you realize that there's no use in wondering because you're never going to change.
You try to keep him safe from the world, from anything that could hurt him. You have a talk with every girl he ever dates (and the one or two guys who sneak into the line-up that he thinks you don’t know about). He complains that you act like he’s a girl when you sit them down for a talk, but you remind him of Princess Samantha and make sure they all know that your little brother has a guard dog fiercer than any monster guarding his heart (and you know about monsters). Every person who ever comes near your Sammy with the intention of winning his heart knows just how damn much he's worth.
You never regret it, how much you do for him. You never regret that you end up not finishing high school, because dad stays around less and less and you have to start working full time to pay for food and PSAT prep courses. You never regret that you didn't really get to be a kid, not since Dad put your baby brother in your arms and you carried him out of the flames. You never even think to regret it, how much he means to you. You know, deep down in what feels like you suspect might be your very soul, that you mean just as much to him.
You can't even bring yourself to regret it when he leaves. You're not naive enough to think you can bring him back, not with the look in his eyes when he walks out the door. Not with the way he cornered you in the bathroom last night, his nose cold and his eyes wet against your neck, and said unprompted that he loved you bigger than the universe. You want to regret it. You want to be mad at him. You want to yell at him and dad about too much responsibility and missed chances and a wasted life. You don't, though. You go on hunts, and you date pretty girls, and you drive up to Stanford twice a year to check on him, but you never knock on his door.
It only ever once occurs to you that you could disappear completely, one night when you're three sheets to the wind and you think dad might really not be coming back this time. You let yourself have ten glorious seconds of imagined freedom, and it's intoxicating. You imagine ditching your prepaid phone, making up a new alias no one knows about, then picking a direction and just driving. You could go anywhere, literally anywhere, and no one would be able to find you (you don’t flatter yourself to think they’d look very hard). You could meet a girl and get married and buy a house and have a white fucking picket fence.
Then you remember the little kid dancing around one of many kitchens in a purple tutu that you made for him, and you remember him hugging you tight (the way Dad never did because he was worried you’d be too soft), and you remember him whispering in your ear that he loves you more than anything, loves you bigger than the universe.
You remember his high school graduation, how you show up hands in pockets, feeling ridiculously uncomfortable in a place just like the one you should have graduated from. You remember him hugging you just as tight as he did when he was seven, and telling you he still loves you bigger than the universe. You know then that he’ll be gone soon, because months ago you saw the stuffed-full envelopes from at least seven different colleges. The ones you hid from dad and put back in the mailbox the next day for him to find, unopened. The ones he didn't tell you about.
You remember your baby brother, and you know you won't ever leave him. You don't expect him to come back, because there’s so much in his future and you’re the only thing in his past. You know you're not worth more than wherever he'll end up, but you are his home. And if he ever wants you, you'll be there waiting. You'll wait forever, because he may love you more than the universe, but to you he is the universe.