THREADING NEEDLES
The first time Sam grabbed a needle and a piece of thread, it was to sew a bloody gash on his brother side, when Dean was thirteen and he barely nine.
Dad was out on a hunt and Dean made him swear never to tell anyone about that one night when Dean went out to play baseball with his friends and had managed to slice his side open doing a slide on a ground that might've had a piece of rusty metal too many.
That was the night Sam found out that he actually had a knack for it. Tiny little rows of perfectly aligned stitches, so small that scars never even stood a chance.
The first time Sam grabbed a needle and a thread to fix a hole in his socks, he punctured his finger bloody more than five times before giving up and throwing the holy sock out.
The following day, Sam found the offending sock mended and resting innocently on top of his bed.
ooooOo000ooo
In the months after Dean's death, there was no one there to need Sam's skill with a needle. No one other than himself, that is.
But the thing was, sewing someone else's flesh, no matter how gruesome and heart aching it was, was a lot easier than trying to sew your own ripped skin.
Dean was buried with over a thousand neat stitches, that barely held together everything that the hellhounds had torn apart, but still carried nothing but love within each stitch.
Sam, on the other hand, gained a couple of new scars in those days were he had to do his own sewing.
ooooOo000ooo
Sam had given up on sewing his socks. Either way, it wasn't really their money that he was spending in the five pairs for two bucks socks that he kept buying when his turned thread bare.
They kept their needles in the med kit, which said a lot about the use they for them these days.
Still, when Sam woke up one night and opened his eyes, he was greeted with the sight of his big brother, the only known man to have returned from Hell and the only known hunter to have met an actual angel, running a thread's end through his lips before closing one eye and aiming for the tiny hole in the needle's tip.
Sam felt like he was nine all over again, seating in the dark, watching his big brother's every move, fascinated by how much he could do that completely escaped a little boy's comprehension and abilities. Like sewing socks in the near dark.
"What you doing?" Sam asked, even though he could perfectly see the concentration look Dean was making as he threaded the needle through the black sock. It was the same look he had on his face whenever he could stretch the Impala's wheels over a nice and long stretch of empty road: comfortable and practiced.
"Watching porn," Dean gruff out, pulling a knot. "Go back to sleep."
And Sam smiled all the way down until his head touched the pillow. Dean was back.
The end