PLOT BUNNY TIMEEEEEE
Okay yeah I really am sorry about this. Seriously. I know I am right in the middle of two stories (technically three but I am actually considering discontinuing one of them because I have changed my own headcanon so much since starting it…), but I am lacking inspiration for Framing Innocence (which is why I have not freaking updated it even though I PROMISED) because all these plot bunnies keep assaulting me.
Anyway, I don't want to ruin anything, so the headcanon that explains this story will be at the end of the story.
This is set somewhere mid/late season 4, when Sam and Dean are having their kind of falling-out and angst over Sam's powers and demon blood and essentially Dean is worried about Sam, which manifests as anger, and Sam thinks Dean doesn't understand how desperate he was when Dean went to Hell, and they really, really suck at communicating.
No graphic descriptions of violence, but because it is Dean, this contains a fair amount of swearing.
Dean hated hospitals. He hated being a patient in them; hated the loss of control and the strangers poking and prodding and injecting and asking questions without giving answers. The only thing worse than being a patient was being the one stuck in the waiting room, which was exactly where he was now.
It had been a simple hunt, and nothing particularly spectacular had landed them here: just typically shitty Winchester luck. They'd been headed vaguely east and had gotten wind of what sounded like a vengeful spirit in an old steel mill. It had been simple, they found a worker who'd gone missing and never been found; a simple visit to one of the coworkers revealed a fight that culminated in a shove, causing the man to fall into the basin where cooling water from the river flowed through, while the machinery was still on and going, and the man had drowned. Frightened of being accused of murder, the coworker had hidden the body in an old unused space just off the main work floor.
They were loaded with rock salt, prepared as usual, but the factory was still functional and the spirit had started up the machinery. They managed to avoid the sparks, the giant clashing metal gears and other potential limb-removal devices, but as dumb luck would have it, Sam got thrown by the spirit into the one unsteady support, which collapsed and rained debris down upon him. The impacts weren't even enough to really hurt, but unfortunately, the debris included a few red-hot steel rods, which landed on Sam, singed right through his clothes, and left deep, cutting burns in both forearms and his right leg before he could roll away from them.
Dean found the remains quickly, salted and burned, and the spirit was destroyed. Sam claimed to be fine and even walked—well, limped—with Dean to the Impala, but was showing all the signs of shock. Dean normally resisted going to the hospital under any circumstances—he could deal with most types of injuries himself—but he knew that deep burns were serious, not something to be messed with, and needed sterile, professional treatment in order to avoid very nasty, potentially life-threatening infections. His decision to take Sam to the nearest ER was reinforced when his brother passed out in the car on the way there, shivering and sweating.
Now Dean sat impatiently in the white-walled, grim waiting room, and he could almost physically feel the damn hospital atmosphere pressing in on him, crowding him, until finally, as was inevitable, he started thinking about Sam. He knew his brother would be fine, he'd pulled through much worse, but now as he paced back and forth angrily, his thoughts turned to Sam's distance, his new terrible habits, Ruby, and all the other shit weighing Dean down lately.
He noticed the nurse behind the desk throwing impatient looks over at him, so he stopped his pacing and threw himself down into a chair before she could come out and reprimand him, or send security.
Christ, it wasn't like Sam was making this easy for him. He knew how desperate he had made his brother when he went to Hell, and heck, he even understood where the kid was coming from in his defense of Ruby and his freaky powers and even the demon blood. Looking beyond the obvious wrongness of it all, he saw that Sam had been trying to help. And he knew it wasn't entirely Sam's fault that everything had turned out the way it had—hindsight really was a bitch sometimes—Sam could never have predicted that Dean would come back from Hell, and Dean knew from experience what it was like to harbor a secret death wish because your life has become meaningless.
But now, circumstances had made it such that Sam had basically screwed up, royally, and more worrying than his defensiveness was his unfathomable insistence on continuing to associate with demons and to use his powers.
He swiped a hand over his face and through his short hair, letting out a loud sigh that made the few others sharing the waiting room glance over at him briefly. All of them turned away after a second—all except one. There was a girl standing in the corner, she'd been there since Dean arrived, but had been standing in that corner with her back to the room until now, and hadn't even appeared to notice when Dean entered the room, when he was pacing or when he stopped.
Now, however, he had clearly caught her eye. In fact, she was staring right at him, apparently completely oblivious to everything around her—or to Dean's annoyance. She wasn't bad looking by any means, in fact she was quite pretty—though a little young, she only looked about twenty—but Dean was only interested in women when Sam was fit and healthy, and he was really not in the mood to have some chick flirting with him.
She continued to stare even when he glared at her, however, either oblivious to his anger or ignoring it. He hardened his gaze even more, intending to stare her down until she realized how rude she was being and looked away… but suddenly she blinked and took half a step toward him from across the small room, and in that moment, her expression reminded him so forcefully of Sam—of the old, innocent, shaggy-haired Sam fresh out of college and determined to save every life possible—that Dean could no longer hold her gaze. He looked away to his left, and saw her approach him out of the corner of his eye.
She sat down gently in the seat next to him. Dean considered it an invasion of his personal space. He didn't want to talk to this stranger, to hear her false sympathies about his brother and be expected to offer his own in return. Before Dean could get up, though, she spoke softly. "Who're you waiting for, then?"
"My brother," he said shortly, hoping to convey that he was not in the mood for conversation. She just nodded and stared straight ahead, and Dean couldn't stop himself from asking "you?"
"My sister," she said, then added, "well, technically my cousin. Her father is my dad's brother. But we grew up together, I consider her my sister."
Dean forced a nod out of politeness. He didn't really care, though he did empathize somewhat. If the girl was really close enough to her cousin to consider her a sister, then they must have a strong bond. He wondered if her cousin was dying.
Dean braced himself, waiting for the question of what happened to his brother, and the subsequent explanation of whatever happened to the girl's cousin, the flood of personal information that would be forced upon him against his will.
To his surprise, it didn't come. The girl sat in silence for another moment before speaking abruptly. "Sorry for staring at you earlier." Dean finally turned and looked over at her. She was staring down into her lap, and she had a small smile on her face, like she was laughing at some personal joke. "You, ah, remind me of someone."
She once again reminded him of Sam, in her little smile and her posture. There was also something of his brother in her eyes and the shape of her chin. "You... remind me of someone too," he said.
She looked up at him with that same smile, as though he'd said something funny but failed to recognize it. "I'm Kaitlyn," she said quickly, and then breathed a laugh and looked back into her lap. Dean's brow furrowed in response to her odd behavior.
"Dean," he said, and looked at her quizzically. She looked back at him, but the inside-joke smile had been replaced by a normal, friendly one.
"So what'd your brother do wrong?" she asked lightly.
Dean was startled by the question. "Wrong?"
She raised an eyebrow. "I may not have been looking, but I could feel you pacing from across the room. You've been angsting all over the place since you got here, but you don't look all that worried, so clearly Brother Dearest isn't in any mortal danger. What'd he do?"
Dean was vaguely unsettled but unwillingly impressed by her conclusion. Business between him and Sam usually stayed very private, but once again, something about her—the very Sam-like raw emotion—encouraged him to speak up. "We're just… we're close. We're usually close. But he just.. we're not connecting like usual. I dunno. I just wish we could connect like we used to. It used to be automatic, you know? Didn't even have to think about it. But now it's like I don't even know him. I just… I want my brother back, you know?"
Dean felt a stinging behind his eyes and snapped his mouth shut, looking away from Kaitlyn. He had no idea what had prompted him to spill his guts out in front of a complete stranger, but now he felt embarrassed, and slightly ashamed: he'd just done to her exactly what he had been dreading she would do to him, and the worst part was, it felt surprisingly good to talk to someone who didn't know him, who didn't already have their own opinions and wouldn't really take a side.
Kaitlyn sat in silence for quite a while before speaking hesitantly. "My dad… he and my uncle are really close, too, like you and your brother. That's why my cousins and I grew up really close to each other, my dad and uncle stick around each other and we all stay close."
She looked ahead as she spoke, eyes fixed on the wall across from her. "A while back, a few years before I was born, my uncle… left, kinda suddenly. I mean, it wasn't without warning, not technically, but it was still sort of unexpected, you know, like when someone commits suicide and everyone else says 'he talked about it, but we never thought it would actually happen!'"
Dean nodded and she continued. "So when my uncle left, well, my dad… he thought it was his fault. And while my uncle was gone, my dad… kinda got into some bad stuff. He thought my uncle wasn't coming back, and he just… they were really close, but they didn't really have anyone else, so when my uncle left, my dad just felt like he didn't really have anything to live for, anyone to impress." Dean nodded again, and felt his throat constricting slightly.
"But my uncle came back. Really unexpectedly, didn't… call ahead, or anything, just kinda showed up one day, and when he found out what my dad was doing, he got pretty pissed.
"And my dad knew, he knew he'd been doing some screwed up stuff, and even my uncle knew why my dad had done it, he understood how bad my dad felt when he left. But I only know all this because they talked it all over once, years later, and then my dad told me the story one day.
"But at the time, well, my uncle just didn't want to really discuss the problem, because some shit had happened to him while he was away, too, and he told me once that it scared him, that he didn't want to bring it up at the time because he was afraid he couldn't handle it. He didn't want to put that burden on my dad. And so to avoid talking about his own problems, he just kinda focused on my dad's, and stayed mad at him for getting so messed up while he was gone.
"But my dad said he didn't understand, he couldn't see all that, because my uncle… well, he was good at hiding it all. My dad just saw that my uncle was pissed at him. And the problem was he took it personally. He thought that my uncle took his crap as a personal insult, like my dad had done it just to offend him, just to screw everything up in case my uncle ever came back. And my dad knew he'd messed up, but he kept defending himself, because he wanted my uncle to understand that he hadn't done it to offend him, he'd never meant to hurt him, it was just that he thought his big brother was never coming back and he didn't even know how to live anymore, and neither one of them knew how to express the fact that they both just wanted to go back to how things used to be."
Kaitlyn stopped and looked down at her hands again. "Little-brother emotions are a pain, huh?" she said, and Dean huffed out a laugh, looking down into his own lap and wiping at his burning eyes with the back of his hand.
Kaitlyn sighed just as the doors on the other side of the room opened and a white-coated doctor emerged, looking down at a chart. "But like I said," she said, moving to get out of her seat, "it was years before they really sat down and talked about it. I mean, at this point," she gestured vaguely around the room, "there's no way it would happen. It's not like Hell is a warm and fuzzy conversation topic, and Sam would probably die of shock if you started opening up out of the blue."
It took a long moment for her words to really register to Dean, and by the time he really figured out what was wrong with them, she was halfway across the room, already approaching the doctor as he called out, "family of Katherine Winchester?"
By the time Dean had leapt upright, the hard plastic waiting-room chair clattering backwards to the floor behind him, Kaitlyn and the doctor had disappeared behind the swinging doors.
Okay, so some short explanation needed: I have an extremely elaborate headcanon that starts about 6 years after the end of season 8, and it ends up with Sam having a son and a daughter (Kaitlyn), and Dean with three daughters, Ali, Katherine, and Mary. As part of the very long and detailed story, there is a short section wherein (due to angel involvement like in Frontierland and The Song Remains The Same) Kaitlyn, Katherine, and Mary are sent back in time to when Dean and Sam are a lot younger. They're still hunting even back in time and Katherine gets a minor injury. Mary's on her way to the hospital while Kaitlyn sits in the waiting room, and to her surprise finds she's sharing it with a much younger version of her uncle Dean. She goes over to talk to him and realizes from what he says that they've landed right in the middle of one of the brothers' biggest emotional crises, the one Sam and Dean told her stories about, after Dean got back from Hell and Sam got addicted to demon blood.
If the reaction to this is positive, I could write more, I suppose. The next part is just where Dean goes to find this Katherine Winchester, but she's already left the hospital. There's also a possible separate story, later, where Sam and Dean capture Mary and hold her, thinking she's a demon or something, and she has to convince them that she's Dean's daughter from the future, just like Dean had to convince Mary (other Mary) that he was her son. I could also write this story from the girls' point of view, with how the hunt started and how they got sent back in time and all that.