Jack didn't really do mealtimes.

At first, it had been because he didn't need to eat that often—his human half had been powered by his grace, and he'd only needed to eat few times a week to stay alive. He liked eating on cases, with Sam and Dean at whatever burger van they'd stopped at. But that fell outside the social ritual of square meals. Eating in Apocalypse World was rarely communal, and rarely ever peaceful. The minutiae of communal dining were lost on him.

So today he was joining the rest of Team Free Will 2.0 for lunch.

Dean and Sam were having spaghetti, which looked really good, but Jack didn't have the same thing on his plate. Normally, that wouldn't bother him. But today...

Dean reached over and stole a smiley fry.

"Christ," he said, turning it to look at the face. "What are you, five?"

"Actually," Jack answered, smiling brightly. "I'm one and a half."

"Yeah," Dean said, dropping the smiley fry back on the plate. "It shows."

And… Dean was normally kinda harsh and grumpy, but that stung to hear. Because Jack had recently learned that babyish was a bad thing to be. It meant that people gave you weird looks and didn't take you seriously, and really, defeated the purpose of his body. It didn't matter if he looked like an adult; if people could tell how he thought , they'd take advantage of him anyway.

He quietly added smiley fries to the list of things to avoid. Considered adding dinosaur-shaped turkey nuggets too; he'd never seen Dean eat them.

"You know, when Sammy was your age," Dean added, casually twirling up a forkful of spaghetti, "he could use a fork."

Jack picked up his plate, pushed back from the table, and left.

Sam was startled by the sound of angel wings.

He turned to see his brother alone at the table, eating spaghetti and trying to look innocent.

"Oh no."

"What?" Dean said. "I didn't do anything."

Sam cast him a doubtful look.

"I told the kid he should...think about using silverware," Dean shrugged. "He didn't like that much."

In Sam's opinion, getting their newly-sorta-human kid to eat something that wasn't cookie cereal or fast food was in itself a victory. If Jack had his way, he'd eat frosting-dipped chocolate cookies for every meal. Sam had caught him eating sprinkles straight from the jar once.

"Jack doesn't exactly follow typical developmental milestones, Dean." Sam said, abandoning his own serving of spaghetti to go find the kid. He might have gone three rooms away, or he might have gone to Anchorage, Alaska. Either way, he'd probably wander back eventually, but this was a recipe for a meltdown they'd both like to avoid.

Jack hadn't gone far. He was in the first place Sam looked.

The nephilim was sitting cross legged on his bed, jabbing dinosaur-shaped turkey nuggets into ketchup like they'd done him wrong. Already, red flecks of ketchup dotted the comforter, blankets slowly falling prey to Jack's unpracticed eating.

"Jack?"

In response to Sam's quiet greeting, Jack crammed almost his entire serving of carrot sticks in his mouth, and crunched down noisily.

"Jack."

He managed to fit a cucumber slice in there too, just for good measure.

"We should talk."

Jack swallowed hard, in a way that looked almost painful, and immediately pushed the rest of his carrot sticks into his mouth. He mumbled something semi-coherent and slushy.

"Could you repeat that?"

"Not s'posed to talk with my mouth full." Jack said, spraying half-chewed carrot. "Y' said ."

Sam had, in fact, said that.

"Chew and swallow, then talk."

Jack did so, and grabbed for another handful of food, but Sam was faster. He took the plate itself, and held it up and out of Jack's reach. The kid stared at him, incredulous. Then his brow sank into a frown, and sadness began to shine through. Jack was an oddity, like that. He had faced armies and archangels. Wielded power that could tear holes in the fabric of the universe. And right now, he looked to be on the edge of tears over a plate of finger-foods.

"Okay," Jack said, folding his arms in someone else's gesture of defiance. He'd been picking up habits from the new hunters, and that was one of them. "I don't want to eat that anyway."

His posture shifted; he wiped his eyes, squared his shoulders, and made determined eye contact.

"I want spaghetti," he announced, with so much solemnity that Sam had to bite back a laugh. "Please."

That was a step in the right direction, the direction away from a food pyramid with a base made entirely of birthday cake oreos. The actual how and why of pasta could come later. Dean was almost certainly part of the why . They had somewhat different priorities, here.

"That's...workable," Sam said, lowering the plate out of defensive range.

He wasn't going to bring up the silverware issue at the core of this. Whatever Jack decided to do, he'd go along with it. Dr. Spock didn't exactly cover this, and Jack was pretty much fine stumbling through motor milestones at his own pace. The silverware thing was like everything else. He'd be ready whenever he was ready.

It was doubtful that he actually was —but that was for Jack to judge himself.

Jack was going to get this right.

He watched, very carefully, as Sam picked up his fork, and copied the grip as best as he could. He stuck the tines into his spaghetti—

And dropped the fork immediately. The handle clattered against the edge of his ceramic plate, sending up a splash of red sauce.

"Off to a good start," Dean commented.

Jack just picked the fork up again. Held it differently this time; in a fist, like he'd hold a marker pen. He scooped up some noodles—there was no way he'd manage the weird twirly thing Sam and Dean could do—and kept ahold of them. He grinned at the forkful of noodles, then at Dean, because he was getting it.

Then he messed up the angle just a tiny bit, and the noodles plopped back into the pile.

"I could cut the noodles smaller-" Sam began, and Jack shook his head fiercely.

"I can do this!" he insisted, pulling his plate towards himself. "I don't need help."

Sam raised his eyebrows.

"If you say so."

Jack's next forkful of spaghetti landed beside his plate. The next, between the plate and the edge of the table. But he could reliably get the spaghetti on his fork now, and that was progress. He just needed to master the next step. Spaghetti was very slippery, and he maybe should have started with something easier, but there was no going back now.

Four more potential bites of pasta fell plateward, then Jack almost got one to his mouth. Then he was betrayed by gravity, and the spaghetti slipped free again, and left curly red stains on his pale blue sweatshirt.

"Oh."

Jack picked the spaghetti off his shirt and put it in his mouth. The taste alone was motivation to get better at forks- he really wanted to eat more of it.

"This better not end up like the mac & cheese thing," Dean warned.

"It won't!" Jack made a more aggressive attempt with the spaghetti.

The mac & cheese thing had been a simple tragedy—Sam had made him macaroni cheese with hot dogs in it, and let him eat it with his hands, because Jack ate everything with his hands, and Dean had just about lost his mind over the cheesy yellow fingerprints that had been the end result.

Nothing like that was ever going to happen again. Because Jack was finally learning.

He scooped up more spaghetti—only a few noodles this time, because that was easier to control. He kept them on the fork this time, but overcompensated the angle a little. The cuff of his sleeve fell victim to the trailing ends of the noodles.

But that sacrifice was worth it.

Because he got the noodles in his mouth.

Jack fist-pumped in victory, and tapped the table in front of Dean to make sure he had his attention.

"Yes!" Dean said, smiling at him for once, before turning to Sam. "I knew he could do it."

"Good job, Jack," Sam added.

Jack slurped up the noodles and basked in their praise, his heart soaring. He couldn't resist the urge to smile as he chewed, and nearly dropped the fork again in his glee at a second successful mouthful. He could eat spaghetti, sleeves be damned. Next time he'd just wear a t-shirt.

Dean watched in mild amusement as Jack picked his way through the plate of spaghetti, and very politely didn't laugh at his numerous mistakes. It was so much like Sam had been—he had distant fuzzy memories of Sam doing the same thing with the plastic cutlery he'd stolen from a supermarket hot bar. The overcompensating fork-tilt and messy slurping. It was familiar.

He was slowly getting better at it, even as Dean watched—studying his own movements and self-correcting, which was the advantage he had on an infant. Jack was more self-aware.

The silverware thing was important.

Not only because it was… weird that he didn't use forks before, but that it stood out. Jack, by virtue of existing, had a huge target painted on his back, and the more they could hide him in standard society the better.

That was part of childhood. Learning to look like everything was fine.

Jack didn't break concentration on his spaghetti until he was scraping the last noodles from the plate. After he'd done that, he just sat there, beaming from the Pollock painting of his place setting. There was sauce on his sleeves, and in a ring around his mouth, and in a v-shaped streak down the front of his sweater. By some feat of physics, he'd managed to get some in his hair.

Dean got up and grabbed the dishcloth from the sink, so he could scrub the kid clean before he touched anything. Jack turned to follow him.

"See, Dean?" he said triumphantly. "I can use a fork."