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The guitar cost eleven dollars because the low E string was missing and somebody had placed stickers across the body that would never come off no matter how hard Dean picked at them with his nails. It cost eleven dollars because that was exactly how much money Dean had, folded up small and soft from being unfolded so many times, tucked into the pocket of his jeans where Dad couldn't see it and ask where it came from.
(It came from finding change under motel room cushions for two months. Dean was not going to explain that to anybody.)
The pawn shop guy looked at Dean for a long moment, like he was trying to do math that didn't quite add up, a kid who looked to be no older than seven with cash this exact.
"You know how to play?" the man asked.
"I'm gonna learn," Dean said, already determined.
The man scratched at his beard. "It's missing a string, kid."
"I know," Dean said. "I got eleven dollars."
Whatever the guy saw in Dean's face, it worked, because ten minutes later Dean walked out of that pawn shop with a beat up acoustic guitar slung across his back by a strap held together with electrical tape, and he walked the six blocks back to the motel.
Sam was sitting on the floor of the motel room with Bugs, the ancient stuffed rabbit whose left ear had been chewed on by every Winchester who had ever been three years old, and he looked up when the door opened and his whole face did the thing it did, the thing where it just went bright, like somebody flipped a switch behind his eyes.
"Dee!"
"Hey, Sammy." Dean shut the door behind him with his foot because his hands were full of guitar. "Where's Dad?"
"Daddy went to play phone." Sam said, "He said don't open the door for nobody."
"Pay phone," Dean corrected, out of habit, already knowing Sam wasn't going to fix it.
"Pay phone," Sam repeated, not really listening, because his eyes had found the guitar and gone round as quarters. "What's that?"
"It's a guitar."
"Why do you have it?"
Dean set it down carefully on the bed closest to the window, the one that was his and Sam's to share since Sam was still small enough that John didn't think he needed his own space, propping it against the pillows. "I'm gonna learn how to play it."
Sam considered this, chewing on the ear of Bugs while he thought, which Dean had given up trying to stop him from doing sometime around Sam's second birthday.
"Can you play Hey Jude?"
"Not yet."
"Can you play it now?"
"Sammy, I said not yet."
"Okay," Sam decided, and climbed up onto the bed to sit next to the guitar, patting it once on the body like you'd pat a dog you were getting to know. "When?"
This was, Dean would reflect later, an extremely fair question, and also one he did not have an answer to.
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Here is a thing about Dean Winchester at seven years old: he did not know very much about very many things. He did not know why they moved around so often, not really. He did not know why their Dad was so angry some nights. He did not know what their mother's voice had sounded like, not anymore, not really, no matter how hard he tried to remember it, and some nights that scared him more than anything with teeth ever could.
But Dean knew Sam's favorite songs.
He knew Sam liked Hey Jude best because Dean used to hum it to him in the back seat of the Impala when Sam couldn't sleep, back when Sam was tiny enough to fit against Dean's chest. He knew Sam liked You Are My Sunshine because it was the one Dean sang when Sam had nightmares. He knew Sam liked the Curious George theme song, which wasn't really a lullaby at all, but Sam liked it, and that was good enough for Dean.
Dean did not know how to read music. Dean did not, strictly speaking, know how to play guitar. But Dean had heard enough songs on Dad's tape deck and enough radio drifting out of gas station windows to know, roughly, that music was made of small repeating pieces, patterns, things you could learn one at a time if you were patient and didn't mind your fingers hurting.
And Dean Winchester, more than almost anything else in the world, did not mind his fingers hurting if it meant something good came out the other side.
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The first three days were, by any honest account, terrible.
"That doesn't sound like a song," Sam informed him on day one, sitting cross legged on the bed in his footie pajamas, the blue ones with the little stars on them that were getting too short in the leg as Sam got taller but that Sam refused to stop wearing.
"I know it doesn't sound like a song," Dean said through gritted teeth, adjusting his fingers on the frets for the ninth time. "I'm still learning."
"It sounds like a cat."
"Sammy."
"A sad cat," Sam clarified, as if there was an important difference, and went back to chewing on Bugs's ear.
By day two Dean's fingertips had gone from red to a strange kind of sore, and he'd found, tucked into the bottom of Dad's duffel under a stack of old newspaper clippings, a chord chart torn out of some magazine, half the corner missing, but enough of it there. G, C, D. Three chords. Dean stared at that scrap of paper like it held all the answers he needed, which, as far as he was concerned that week, it more or less did.
"G," Dean muttered to himself, mostly to himself, fingers pressing down in the shape the chart showed him. "One, two, three."
He strummed. It came out wrong, muddy, one string buzzing where it shouldn't.
"That was better," Sam said loyally from the bed, even though it hadn't been, not really, and Dean knew it hadn't been, but something in his chest went warm and steady anyway.
"You're just saying that."
"I'm not just saying that," Sam said with a pout. "It sounded like a real guitar that time. Not a cat guitar."
"Not a cat guitar," Dean repeated, and found himself smiling despite the ache climbing up his fingers, despite the missing low E string, despite everything. "High praise, Sammy."
"What's high praise?"
"It means thank you."
"Then why didn't you just say thank you?"
Dean didn't have a good answer for that one either. He was starting to notice a pattern.
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By day five Dean could manage a G chord that sounded mostly like a G chord if you weren't listening too closely, and a C chord that he was pretty sure was upside down in some way he didn't understand, and Sam had started narrating his progress to anyone who would listen, which, in their current circumstances, meant mostly Dad, and occasionally the guy who ran the motel office, and once, memorably, a vending machine.
"Dean's learning guitar," Sam told Dad over dinner, which was gas station sandwiches eaten on the hood of the car because it was warm out and Dad liked the quiet.
"Yeah?" Dad said, and there was something in his voice, something careful and a little bit soft, the way his voice got sometimes when he was looking at his boys and trying not to let either of them see how hard some days were on him. "That's good, Sammy."
"He sounds like a cat," Sam said. "A getting better cat."
"I'm working on it," Dean muttered around a mouthful of sandwich, and Dad huffed something that was almost a laugh.
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It took two full weeks, and one entirely new motel in a town Dean couldn't have named if you'd asked him, before Dean managed to string G to C to D together in something that resembled, if you squinted with your ears, an actual song.
He worked it out slow, sounding out the shape of Hey Jude from memory, humming it under his breath while his fingers found their way across the frets, wrong, wrong, less wrong, and then, on a Tuesday that smelled like a thunderstorm on the horizon through the cracked motel window, almost right.
Sam was sitting on the edge of the bed in his footie pajamas, the star ones, knees pulled up to his chest, chin resting on top of them, watching Dean with the kind of complete unblinking attention that only very small children and very devoted dogs are capable of giving anything. He had Bugs tucked under one arm. He was not chewing on the ear for once, which Dean had learned to recognize as a sign that Sam was paying extra close attention to something.
"Okay," Dean said, mostly to himself, wiping his palms on his pajamas. "Okay. Just, don't laugh if it's bad."
"I won't laugh," Sam promised.
Dean took a breath. He started to play.
It was not, by any professional standard, good. The rhythm stumbled in two places. The low E string was still missing, which left a hollow gap where a note should have been, like a tooth knocked loose. Dean's fingers pressed too hard in some spots and not hard enough in others, and his voice, when he started singing along under his breath, cracked on the high part because he was seven and his voice did that sometimes now, unpredictably, embarrassingly.
But it was Hey Jude. Rough and gap toothed and entirely, unmistakably Hey Jude, and Sam's whole face changed the second he recognized it, going soft and stunned and lit up all at once, the same look he'd get watching fireworks, except Dean had never taken Sam to see fireworks, not once, so maybe it was a look Sam had invented special, just for this.
"Dee," Sam whispered, like it was a secret. "Dean, that's my song."
"Yeah, Sammy." Dean's fingers found the next chord, clumsy but there. "I know it's your song."
"You're playing my song."
"I'm playing your song."
Sam scrambled forward on the bed, closer, close enough that his knee bumped Dean's arm, close enough to watch Dean's fingers move across the strings with an expression of total awe.
"How do your fingers know where to go?" Sam asked, breathless, genuinely amazed, like Dean had just performed a magic trick and not something that had taken two solid weeks of bleeding fingertips and muttered curse words Dean definitely wasn't supposed to know yet.
"I practiced."
"Can I practice?"
"You're three, Sammy, your hands are too little."
Sam's face fell and Dean, watching it happen, felt something in his chest twist sideways.
"But," Dean added, quick, before Sam's bottom lip could get all the way to wobbling, "when you're bigger. I'll teach you. Promise."
Sam considered this for a second.
"Pinky promise?"
"Pinky promise," Dean said, and held out his pinky without setting down the guitar, hooking it around Sam's much smaller one.
"Play it again," Sam said, settling back against the headboard with Bugs clutched to his chest, footie pajama feet tucked up underneath him. "Play it again, Dean."
So Dean played it again. And again. And a third time, his voice cracking in the same place it had cracked the first time, the low E note still missing, still hollow, and Sam mouthed along to the words he didn't fully know yet, humming where the words got away from him.
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It became a thing they did.
Some nights it was Hey Jude. Some nights, if Sam had had a hard day, if there'd been a nightmare the night before or a too long car ride or one of those days where Dad's face did the angry thing, it was You Are My Sunshine, Dean's fingers finding the chords slower and gentler, his voice pitched low and rough and careful, and Sam would climb into Dean's lap for comfort without asking, because he never had to ask.
"Sing the sad part again," Sam said once, three weeks and one more motel later, meaning the part of the song where you took my sunshine away, which was, Dean privately thought, a genuinely terrible thing to want to hear twice, but Sam had complicated taste for a three year old and Dean had stopped questioning it.
"You want the sad part?"
"I like the sad part," Sam said. "It makes the happy part happier."
Dean did not know what to do with a three year old who had accidentally said something actually smart, so he just played the sad part again, and then the happy part, and Sam sighed a long, satisfied sigh, and that was that.
Some nights it was the Curious George theme, which Dean absolutely could not play correctly, the chords too weird for his still small hands, but he'd fumble through an approximation of it anyway, humming the parts his fingers couldn't manage, and Sam would stand up on the bed, which he was not allowed to do and did anyway, and dance the specific uncoordinated three year old dance that involved mostly just bouncing and flapping his arms, footie pajama feet thumping softly against the mattress, laughing so hard he'd get the hiccups, and Dean would keep playing badly on purpose just to keep that laugh going, because Sam's laugh was, without any real competition, Dean's favorite sound in the entire world, better than music, better than anything.
"Dean!" Sam would shout, mid bounce. "Dean, watch me dance!"
"I'm watching, Sammy."
"Watch me do the good part!"
"I'm watching."
And Dean was. Dean was always watching. That was the whole job, as far as Dean understood it, the only job that had ever really mattered. Dad had jobs that involved guns and salt and things with too many teeth, jobs Dean was starting to understand in bits and pieces that he didn't like. But Dean's job, Dean's real job was watching Sam. Keeping Sam fed and warm and laughing. Making sure that no matter what town they woke up in, no matter what motel with what stain on what ceiling, Sam had something that stayed the same.
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By the time they'd been in four more towns, Dean had gotten better. Not good, not yet, but better, better in the way that comes from an hour a night for months on end, fingertips gone from soft to sore to calloused, chords no longer requiring him to look down at his hand to find them.
He learned Hey Jude properly, the whole thing, even the na na na na part at the end that went on so long Sam would fall asleep somewhere in the middle of it, head heavy against Dean's arm, thumb drifting toward his mouth the way it did when he was almost out, Bugs's chewed ear tucked under his chin.
He never did properly learn the Curious George theme, not really, but he learned enough of it to make Sam dance, which was, in the end, the only part of the assignment that had ever mattered.
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One night, in a motel that smelled like carpet cleaner and somebody else's cigarettes, a whole town Dean would forget the name of by the time they were three states away, Sam sat on the edge of the bed in his footie pajamas, chin propped on his knees, and watched Dean's hands move across the strings with the same wide, unblinking wonder he'd had that very first day, like it hadn't gotten any less magic to him just because it had gotten familiar.
"Dean," Sam said, quiet, a kid right on the edge of sleep. "How'd you learn to do that?"
Dean's fingers kept moving, easy now, without having to think about where they went. "I told you. I practiced."
"Why?"
Dean thought about it. Thought about eleven crumpled dollars and a missing string and two weeks of fingers that hurt too much to make a fist, thought about all of it, and found that the answer was the simplest thing he had ever said.
"Because you like it," Dean said.
Sam considered this, and then he smiled and scooted closer, and put his head down against Dean's arm.
"Play my song," Sam mumbled, already halfway gone. "The sunshine one."
So Dean played it. Slow, and a little bit rough around the edges, missing one low note that would probably always be missing, in a motel room that would be gone from both their memories inside a year, and Sam's breathing went even and slow somewhere around the second verse, small fist curled loose against Dean's sleeve, and Dean kept playing anyway.
Outside, another town's worth of strangers drove past on another stretch of highway that led toward wherever the Winchesters were headed next. Inside, seven year old Dean Winchester sat with his little brother asleep against his arm, and his guitar. It didn't matter what room they were in, or what town, or what waited for them three states down the road.
As long as Sam was smiling, Dean had done his job right.