A/N: I'm not entirely certain about this, because it didn't quite have the flow I wanted, but I couldn't make myself work on it any longer and publishing it feels like shoving it out of my head. Which, trust me, can only be a good thing. Enjoy, have a good weekend, and I'll hopefully scrounge up something more coherent next time.
20/20
Sam sometimes suspect that people who meet his brother and only know him on the surface never even consider that Dean was the most awkward kid in the world.
And yeah, maybe it is jealousy, because Dean takes to pretty much every social situation like a goddamned fish to water, whereas Sam is pretty certain he's trying to flap his fins in tapioca pudding. Dean can strike up a conversation with pretty much anyone, anywhere, at any time, and keep it alive where Sam rules a land made entirely by awkward silences (so he always brings a book, like a 14 year old girl).
The thought has struck him that mostly he's just biased. Because Dean is his big brother, and he spent his entire childhood following him around and breaking out in tears whenever Dean, King of the fucking Hill, would deny him his right to join in on whatever awesome (no doubt) activity he was starting up. If Sam has to talk about his childhood, all he can think of is Dean.
So he supposes that where Sam is pretty much convinced, even at the age of 22, that his brother is the awesomest, coolest guy in the whole wide world it's not a given that everyone agrees with him.
Just because he can't shake the childhood awe doesn't mean the rest of the world sees his brother through the same rose tinted glasses he does.
But Dean was a weird kid. Like. Weird. He was precocious (which was no doubt a result of John up and leaving whenever he got the chance and leaving a seven year old kid in charge), had (has) absolutely no manners, and he was rude.
Only he wasn't. He was the kindest kid Sam has ever met. He'd scream and shout himself blue in a fit of anger at the slightest hint of a scolding ("That's not fair! That's Sammy's job!"), but then he'd turn right around and do whatever he was being scolded for. A big mouth on a kid with the most honest, open gaze you'd ever meet.
But Dean seems to shake off anything that doesn't fit the "Dean is awesome"-persona he adopted sometime around the age of 15 like water on a duck.
And Sam supposes that's a skill, too, in a dysfunctional sort of way.
He remembers the time a girl told Dean that his upper lip was hairy, and how hard Dean worked to pretend he didn't feel embarrassed the entire walk home from school. He remembers the time Dean came home after smoking his first joint and vomited all over the kitchen floor, and the quiet, private conversation between him and Dad that he couldn't hear through the bedroom door that followed.
He remembers an awkward boy in the middle of puberty who couldn't control his voice and had a nose way out of control, who had the most embarrassing knack for saying the wrong things at the wrong time in a totally awkward way that had Sam wanting to hide behind his father's leg.
And all those times, even while Dean tried his hardest to chatter it all away with the never ending babble that comes out of his mouth whenever he feels the slightest bit embarrassed ("Dude, did you see that lady? She was like.. Huge. Man, I need new shoes. How often do you get new shoes? My boots are worn through, man. Hey, I feel like cheese. You want cheese? I could do with some cheese. How about those Lakers?"), he can still sometimes see that open gaze that tells him that the awkward mess of a brother he remembers from the 90's is still in there somehow.
Only.. Most of the time, he lives with a man who thinks strippers are the best things since sliced bread, that beer should permanently replace water as a main source of hydration, and who wears his socks the wrong side out to stall another laundry trip an extra day. And dude, his brother is a dick sometimes, because Sam has woken up with dirty boxers in his face, and showered in cold water more than any other person alive, and his toothbrushes practically live in the toilet.
And just as his patience has run thin, after years of angels and devils and stuff that's too epic for a Twilight book but with a plot thicker than a Dan Brown-novel, functional alcoholism and fresh toothbrushes, those eyes make appearances again, and just like that he's raw to the bone and helpless.
He just can't make out the pattern..
O
The first time it happens is on the road. In a dark car, January, with cold seeping through the leaking windows of the ancient, creaking pile of metal that's currently pulling them down the road at eleventythousand miles per hour, because Dean's foot has quite probably been replaced by pure iron. He should take a look at that later.
There's no point in telling him off. It'll earn him a rude, loud, obnoxious laugh, and the volume of ...whatever Dean's listening to turned up to max.
There's a sudden rush of speed through his body, unexpected and harsh. He's suspended by the ancient seatbelt, head hanging forwards and old burger wrappers tumbling out from under his seat as Dean clamps down on the breaks. There's a squeal of tires on the asphalt as the car twists around, turning circle the size of fucking Saturn, and they're going back just to twist to the left onto a smaller road.
"Sorry man, missed the sign." is all Dean says, and Sam flips him off. Their eyes meet a moment later, by accident because Sam is studying Dean (because Sam is kind of emo. Deep, deep down), and Dean wants to see Sam's reaction, if there is one. His face is somehow embarrassed, in a way that makes Sam remember footballs with no air in the back of the impala and beach towels with Sharks on them and burnt dinners and fucking childhood.
Dean turns his squinting eyes to the road after a moment, which is a moment too long, and Sam goes back to looking out the windows.
O
The second time, Dean misses a shot and gets his leg slashed open by an ice pick. A blunt, rusty ice pick that leaves him with a cut straight from the top of his thigh to right over this knee, then from his calf down to where calf becomes ankle.
His fingers, jittery with the natural painkillers his body is pumping out like reward for the pain his leg is dishing out, too much coffee, too much Whiskey and two Percocets, toy with the sawed-off while Sam tries to get him to sit still enough for him to rinse the cuts out with peroxide so he can stitch the worst of the mess up.
"You're going to look like the girl from 'A nightmare before Christmas'" He says, as Dean stares down the barrel of the gun with one eye like a pirate looking for land and wonders in a slurring voice why the fucker jammed.
"It didn't jam" Sam says, patiently and calmly, pushing the barrel up to the right so his brother will stop trying to murder himself in his drug induced stupidity. That's a mess Sam doesn't think he can fix with butterfly bandages and neat little stitches. "You missed."
"Missed?" Dean scoffs, left hand flapping wildly as he denies any such possibility, narrowly avoiding hitting Sam in the face and knocking the bottle of Whiskey to the floor.
"I never miss. I'm Dean fucking Winchester!"
Both hands flap out at this, like a demented, drunk bird on the front of the Titanic, and Sam doesn't think he's ever heard a more convincing, yet humble, argument.
"Okay, Rose. Sit still, you've still got about thirty of these to go. You can go back to blaming the shotgun later, all right?"
Which of course leads to him having the handle of the sawed-off poked into his chest as his brother shrieks in indignation.
"You missed, man. Deal with it."
When he looks up from kicking the shotgun away as far as he can with his socked foot, Dean's looking at him again. Red rimmed greenish-brown eyes fastened on the cut on his face for a moment, before they look away, squinting from pain or exhaustion or guilt or from the smell of his own bullshit.
O
The third time, Sam knows what's up.
Her name is Yasmin. With a Y. Like the chick from Baywatch Dean used to swear he'd marry one day.
She's wearing a bikini bottom that doesn't seem to have a front or back, and is only made out of string. Pink string. There's no top, and silicone filled balloons are bouncing to the beat of Ke$ha, which is as much class as Sam has ever experienced in this kind of place.
She's wearing a top hat, though, which he supposes is something. He's studying her ass, looking for the weird tattoo they've found in all their victims (like some demented meat stamp, marked with the upcoming date of death like an expiration date), and is just wondering if he's looking at a dolphin holding a rose between it's teeth or a tribal sun or the red circle with writing in it, his eyes squinted against the smoke filled room when Dean spills most of his beer over his own lap and the floor and starts wiping it off with a kind of frenetic energy that sets Sam's teeth on edge.
"Dude. Seriously." he hisses, and kicks out his right leg in the hope it'll hit Dean on the head. There's a muffled thump, and his chair rocks to the side a little, but Dean emerges from the cave under the table, boots loud on the sticky floor. His cheeks are red.
"Is that the one?"
He's trying to make it out clearly, now that Yasmin (who could float drowning victims to shore without a rescue can) has wriggled herself closer to their side of the stage with her ass pretty much inside a middle aged man's face. He's pretty sure his intense gaze is about to get him stamped as a creep, but he's also pretty sure he's got it when Dean says, in the voice that suggests four beers too many, "Dude, is that a top hat?"
It takes pretty much all the cunning Sam possesses, which isn't nothing, to get Dean to face the facts. First, he starts pointing out all sorts of shit to figure out what they're dealing with.
"What does that sign say?" He'll say, pretending to squint out of the window like a 90 year old lady, hanging over the steering wheel in a way that'll make any grandmother proud. "I can't quite see."
Dean looks out the window, eyes squinted into thin lines.
"Whatever." he finally says, still squinting as they pass the sign.
"Hey look, that's a funny plate number, right?" Sam tries, feebly, and his brother ignores him.
Sam doesn't blame him.
"What are you getting?" Sam asks as they stop for lunch, his eyes fastened on the poster proclaiming triple bacon cheese burger specials today only in proud, red letters.
"Pancakes" Dean answers, like Sam's an idiot.
And that pretty much settles it for Sam.
He pulls a wriggling brother by the back of his leather jacket into a tiny shop at a local mall the next day, damp boots squeaking against a shiny tiled floor.
"My brother needs glasses." he says, his face apparently pulled into such a scary grimace that the tiny lady behind the counter spills her coffee at the sight of him.
"Preferably now."
Her eyes, covered by a pair of purple glasses, follow his arm to where it's still hanging onto a scrunched up part of the leather that should technically cover Dean's right shoulder, but is instead somewhere around his elbow as he squirms.
He gives her a patented grin, and she nods silently and starts tapping away.
"We've got fifteen minutes for a drop in right now. Go right ahead" she says in a thin, nasal voice and gestures to the white door behind the counter, ignoring the fact that said brother is in his mid twenties and should by all means make this decision without being manhandled and wrestled inside.
It takes him nearly five minutes to convince Dean it's a good idea, and that he'll be waiting right outside the whole time. He wont even be in there with him. And no, if he doesn't need glasses Sam wont make him get any.
They're picking out frames twenty minutes later, Sam going off like an idiot over the fact that the optometrist was baffled that Dean hadn't gotten them killed in traffic yet.
O
"Dude, what's his name again?" Sam tries the following Thursday, his gaze fastened on a big ass billboard portraying Jamie Oliver (who is currently taking up 14,5 gb of Sam's precious hard drive space in the folder Dean named 'Cartoon Smut' in a fit of cleverness and secrecy). Dean squints.
"Hillary Clinton? Dude, she let herself go."
He looks over to the passenger seat to find green, honest eyes staring back at him from behind the square frame they picked out, smiling wrinkles curling out either side.
Dean with glasses is funny for about a week. Funny, because like a five year old Dean will conveniently try to "forget them" in every. Single. Place they visit.
Sam blames his stint as a 13 year old magician for pocketing them as easily as he does.
But sometimes, in between trying to piss each other off and not trying to kill each other in the tight quarters of their home he watches his brother view the world with eyes so wide they're just about reaching his ears. He's not smiling, and he's not scowling.
Just.. Observing.
And finally, without being asked to, Dean puts on the glasses in the morning like it's second nature. Wears them through the day like he's always been doing it, staring at Sam like he's an alien with a probe when Sam suggests contacts ("You can poke yourself in the eye every day, but I'm gonna take a pass, man"), and he stops taking them off to rub his eyes like they're hurting.
Their bottle of shared Aspirin lasts more than a day without needing a refill, all of a sudden.
And Sam truly can't help smiling at his stupid, stupid, vain idiot of a brother sleeping in front of the TV, glasses smushed into his cheek and drool all over his pillow, because honestly?
Dean is just Dean.
He argues and shouts and yells, angry and blotchy and downright nasty, and then he'll turn right around and do whatever he's asked.
Sam removes the glasses, folds them up carefully and puts them next to the cup of water on the nightstand.
-fin-