There is an art, Dean finds, in hiding your sexuality. The line between making jokes and meaning them, to not have lingering eyes but not to be obvious in your avoidance. It helps that their dad moves them every few months. Sometimes paranoid delusions can work out in your favour.
"They'll find us," he says, manic gleam in his eyes, and then he rips the cheap rented rooms apart looking for evidence while Dean bundles Sam into the parking lot, shoving their cheap battered suitcases into the trunk of the car and crawling into the backseat, hunched against the cold and the shouting.
Tell me a story Sam says when he's four, and Dean exhausts his limited repertoire of Disney and Mother Goose, voice husky from disuse, straining to remember what their mother used to read to him before bed and making up the parts he can't recall.
He falls quiet when their father gets in the car, door creaking from age and the crackling of the vinyl as he settles his weight, breathing hard from exertion and rage. Sam doesn't quite know why his brother only talks to him, but he doesn't much care for the looks Dean gets.
"He's deaf," he tells the nice grocer, "so he tells me what to do and then I help him," and he adds a little-boy smile, dimples and sweetness and innocence, gets a five percent discount.
"His tonsils got gone," he explains loftily on his fifth birthday at the drugstore, buying cheap cake and tiny candles, "it's my birthday, so he's helping me," and they all take pity on the two young boys alone on the benches outside, free coca cola and borrowed blankets, while their father drinks at the bar across the street.
"What're you lookin at," he snarls two days before he turns six, wiping blood off Dean's knuckles "there's nothing wrong with him," and the principal looks sadly at the two of them and takes them to the lost and found to pick out some winter clothing.
Play twenty questions with me Sam says when he's six, and Dean guesses animals and places and people and rocks and colours, whatever Sam wants.
Sam has friend in one of the schools, another boy who draws with him and shares his crayons and makes adjoining graham cracker houses during art. They have a silly play fight after school one day after school and he pushes Sam a tad too hard, giggling, and Dean is there, shoving the boy to the ground and pounding his face into the dirt, hissing.
"Is that your brother?" asks a classmate six schools later, sneering, "he's a freak." Sam isn't a fighter like Dean is, but his lunchbox never recovers, mangled and dented aluminum he swings proudly all the way to the main office.
At first Sam isn't interested in friends that don't understand Dean, and then he's just longer interested in anyone but Dean.
Sing me a song Sam says at eight, and Dean obliges, low and rough and jagged, coaxes Sam into harmonizing, his voice higher and purer with just a hint of a warble, untrained vocal chords.
Dean will only sing when they move places, and even to Sam he doesn't speak volumes. Sam loves his voice, like a treat he only gets once in a while, shooting stars and peanuts in coke floats.
"It's from Mom," Dean whispers one night when Sam asks why, "I can't use it up all at once."
Sam dreams of his mother sometimes, and then of heat and flames, pressure on his shoulders and Dean shouting, loud and frightened, voice like smoke.
At ten he is used to their routine, and they sit in quiet solidarity, shoulder to shoulder, listening to the crashing and the shouting and the swearing. Sam will read, eyes squinted and brow furrowed over his dim booklight, nose pressed almost flush to the page, and Dean watches him, slides his fingers up and down the inseam of his jeans, picking at the threads until he falls asleep against the cold glass of the window.
Sam tries, once, to be silent like his brother. He crosses his arms and glares mulishly at his teachers like Dean does, lifts his lip in a snarl to the psychologist at the school, hisses at his classmates. Dean's teacher, two grades higher, informs him, and Dean storms the office, yanks Sam out of his chair and shakes him until Sam is choking on tears. The office aides pull them apart, but Sam darts out of their grasp and clings to Dean's waist.
"I'm sorry," he says, and never tries it again.
He's still sent to the psychologist twice, but every time they ask about Dean he gets upset, uses his tears and hyperventilating and big puppy eyes and scrawny frame and messy hair hanging into his eyes. They always back off.
Tell me about Mom Sam says when he's twelve, and Dean rages at him, snarls and snaps and turns away, ignores Sam's hitching breaths and shaky sniffles.
Sam uses the library computer to look her up, typing carefully and squinting at newspaper articles and obituaries. He finds a single picture, four year-old Dean in a fireman's jacket sitting in the back of an ambulance, clutching Sam as their house burns, the ashes of their mother's body and their father's sanity, Sam's childhood and Dean's voice falling like snow around them.
I hate Dad Sam says when he's fourteen, I wish he were dead. At sixteen, Dean punches his brother for the first and only time. He helps Sam stem the bleeding, and reads him Shakespeare, stumbling over foreign names and unfamiliar terms. You look like her he offers in apology, and Sam sleeps in his lap, breath warm against Dean's thigh.
There's no one chasing us Sam screams when he's sixteen, and his father rips his books apart, music theory and the history of trot, Bach sheet music and college pamphlets. Dean steals him replacements from the bookstore, and another bag to keep them in, soft smile and a finger pressed against lips.
Sam sees Dean with another boy once, kissing against peeling paint near the vending machine where he's supposed to be buying dinner. It's a rough slide of tongue and teeth and rolling hips and clenched teeth, but Dean moans, hums low in his throat and swears twice.
It boils Sam's blood, because Dean's voice is their mother's and hers alone, and the next time they're in the car waiting for their father he shoves Dean's head against the backrest and drags his teeth down Dean's throat until he tastes copper, hisses mine into his collarbone, slides down to rest by Dean's feet, undoes Dean's belt like he's seen girls do in the cheap motel movies. He makes Dean beg, takes every syllable and holds them in his heart like every bedtime kiss he didn't get and every facial feature he can't remember.
Come with me Sam begs when he's eighteen, but Dean drives him to the bus station and buys his ticket and presses money into Sam's hand and says don't ever come back and watches Sam until he's out of sight, to college and a future, away from twisted brothers and dead mothers and crazy fathers.
There is an art, Dean finds, to hiding the fact you're in love with your brother.