Hello! Long time, no story. I've been writing this one since Autumn of last year, it's a fic that's been on my mind for a long time and I'm really happy I'm finally around to sharing it with you. This is a world where Adam was raised with Sam and Dean, and each chapter will tell a story of something that happened each year from 1995-2001.

1995

There was a time when Adam was The Kid and not Little Brother. Dad came home one evening after two weeks away and for once he didn't have a black eye or blood spattered down his front, he had a little boy clinging onto his arm with big, watery eyes staring at Sam and Dean like they might pounce on him. John didn't ease them into it, he'd just shut the door behind him and said, "Boys, this is Adam, your brother. He's going to be staying with us from now on."

Dad had taken the time to get Adam dressed in a set of Sam's pyjamas – a set that was way too big, the waist band had to be rolled a few times just so the legs weren't hanging off his feet like flippers – and tucked him into one of the two motel beds, then he'd hopped into the shower. Questions wouldn't be answered until the next day, and even then neither Sam nor Dean got the whole story.

Two years later, and now Adam is more a Winchester than a Milligan. Sam sits on the bed with his homework spread out across the sheets and watches Adam's tiny six-year-old fingers eagerly pass gun parts over to Dean. They work like a well-oiled machine. Even with a decade between them they look more alike than Sam and Dean ever did. They have the same dark, sandy hair, freckled cheeks and green eyes. Neither of them got those from Dad. Sam imagines Adam's mother as beautiful and blonde, a lot like the woman smiling in the photos in Dad's journal with a baby Sam on her lap. The photos he's not supposed to look at.

On the other side of the room, Adam excitedly asks Dean, "Can I watch you shoot targets?"

Dean hesitates a moment, eyes focused on where his nimble fingers slot together the weapon with expert ease. "Only if you listen to everything I tell you," he finally says, evoking a gap-toothed grin from Adam. "You have to know this thing isn't a toy."

Sam sees the fondness in Dean's eyes as he looks down at Adam, and the adoration Adam reserves for Dean. He can't help but be jealous of them both. He turns his attention back to his homework, trying to blend into the room. No one's noticed him much yet and he's hoping to keep it that way. If he's quiet enough, they might mistake him for a bed pillow. However, Sam's always been unlucky.

"You coming?" Dean asks.

Sam peers upwards without lifting his head, face still ducked under his hair. "I'm busy," he answers.

"What are you doing?" Dean says, and he's across the room in two strides, leaning close and poking at Sam's textbooks. "History?" he scoffs. "God, you're a nerd."

"It's homework."

"So? Skip it. Not like we'll be in town much longer, anyway."

"It's important," Sam insists, cheeks burning. Moving from school to school each month drags his grades down, and he's not getting another D. He won't.

"Your aim's been off for weeks. If you don't fix that, you're dead," Dean says seriously. Across the room, Adam watches them both with wide eyes. Then, leaning close, Dean says the one thing he knows Sam can't ignore. "You need to set a good example for Adam," he whispers.

Sam's homework ends up half-finished and abandoned at the bottom of his backpack. They head out a mile from the motel where an old, abandoned warehouse stands. It's a trek they've made several times since arriving in town. A quiet, secluded place they can call their own. Their initials are even scratched in tiny letters on the rusted door.

D.W.

S.W.

A.W.M

Adam had insisted. He probably caught sight of Sam and Dean's initials carved into the Impala and decided he wanted in on it, too.

Dean efficiently sets up empty beer cans across the room, one on a rotted wood shelf, another on an old work bench. He hands the gun to Sam.

"Too far to the right," he says when Sam misses the target.

Sam clips the edge of the next one, but doesn't knock it over. Wordlessly, Dean takes the gun out of his hands. He aims, natural as if it's an extension of his arm, then takes a breath, both eyes open and hard with focus, and fires. Bang, bang, bang. Each can is pierced right through the middle, the metal edges curled inwards around the sharp, rounded wound. They each fall to the dusty concrete with a tinny thud.

"That's how it's done," Dean says. The smile on his face is almost blinding and Adam is standing behind him with his mouth hanging open.

"Can I try?" he asks.

Right away, Sam says, "No."

No one listens to Sam, no one ever listens to Sam. Dean flicks on the safety and empties the clip. Sam's taken back to being nine years old, shivering and sweating after a nightmare as Dad hands over a gun that's too heavy for his tiny hands, but this time he's watching his sixteen-year-old brother show his six-year-old brother how to hold a weapon.

"Dean," Sam hisses. "I think he's too young for this."

Dean shrugs. "I wasn't that much older when Dad taught me. He needs to learn to protect himself."

"He's six."

"I'm not a baby!" Adam yells, but the whine in his voice contradicts his point.

The thing is, Dean and Adam knew the truth about what's out there from the start. Both of them were old enough to remember what happened to their mothers, Adam even saw the monster with his own eyes. He wakes up most nights crying, and Sam holds him close and whispers softly to him until he falls back to sleep.

Dean and Adam both knew long before Sam ever figured it out, they both still feel the loss, they both grieve. Sam doesn't even know what his mom's voice sounded like. He doesn't know what her favourite movie was, or her favourite food, or what she might have had in common with him. Dean and Dad never talk about her, and they get mad if Sam brings her up, and all that's left of her is a stranger in a photograph that he's not allowed to look at.

He looks at Adam now, barely taller than the work benches lined up across the rusted warehouse, a gun in his hand, aimed at the distance. He has a serious look on his face, bobbing the gun with each imitated, "Bang!"

Sam thinks of the little green army men wedged into the ashtray in their car. Trapped.

When Adam starts his third kindergarten class of the year, his teacher sits him down separate from all the other kids and points to a piece of card.

"Can you tell me what colour this is, Adam?" she asks.

He squints at it. The colour of fire trucks and the graze on his elbow, but it also reminds him of oranges or leaves on a tree.

"Red?" he guesses, fiddling the edges of the paper between his fingers.

Miss Averton's lips pinch and Adam's heart dips as he waits for her scribble the same frowny face he's been getting on his work lately. Instead, she reaches out and places her hand on his arm, giving him a gentle pat. She sends him back into the classroom, just in time for the recess bell. As he's hurtling around the yard with Tom and Mike, Adam has mostly forgotten about the whole thing, until his Dad turns up at the end of school.

Miss Averton talks to Dad, then Dad talks to an eye doctor, then the eye doctor talks to Adam. They find the right words to describe him, like a stamp over his chest, or the letters under the pictures in his books. A new name. The words are too long for Adam to remember, and he isn't that great at reading yet.

"Colour vision deficiency," Sam tells him. He's twelve and already smarter than most grown-ups they know.

"Colour blind," Dean corrects. Dean's smart, too, but he's way quieter about it than Sam is. He doesn't know as many long and complicated words or remember as many things from school text books, but he knows the inside of the Impala's engine like the back of his hand. He could scrape up and assemble a monster trap out of the trash in the car's footwell, if he wanted.

"Just means you might put on socks that don't match without realising," Dean says.

Sam gives him that look that only Sam can perfect. The one that says you're an idiot better than any words could. "It's a serious thing, Dean," he says. "This means he can't become a pilot or an electrician or a train driver or a painter – "

Dean snorts and his soda nearly comes out of his nose. He dries his face with Sam's unused napkin, then swipes a couple of uneaten fries from his plate. Not that Sam complains, he never eats more than half a plateful of food these days.

"Who'd want to be a painter?" Dean laughs. "Maybe a pilot or a train driver, but a painter?" He wipes his watering eyes, shaking his head to himself, no doubt picturing Adam in a beret with a brush in his hand. "Besides, he's gonna be the toughest monster hunter there ever was, right?"

Dean nudges Adam and gives him a wink. Adam thinks on that for a moment. He thinks of himself riding shotgun in the Impala, holding a gun that actually has the bullets in it, wearing a leather jacket just like Dean's.

Like Indiana Jones or Han Solo.

A real hero, like the ones in the movies.

Next chapter coming soon. Reviews are appreciated!