Title: 5 Things
Author: Shadow
Summary: 5 Things Dean doesn't do after Sam leaves for Stanford, and one thing he does but will never admit to doing.
Warnings: Swearing, angst, unBeta'd
A/N: This is my first fic in a very long time. Reviews are loved and cherished, and fed imaginary cookies with chocolate milk.
1: Speak
The night that Sam leaves for Stanford, there is a lot of noise. He and John scream themselves hoarse before John plays his last bargaining chip.
"If you walk out that door, don't you ever come back!"
He thought that it might make Sam stay. It doesn't. Like everything that he does, it drives the boy further away.
"Don't worry, Dad. I wasn't planning to."
Throughout all of it, Dean remains silent, tired of playing moderator and too scared that anything that he does say would only serve to make the situation more volatile. He is scared that it would be like taking sides- that he would damage his relationship with one of them bad enough that they leave him, because there is no way that Sam is leaving him. Not after everything that he had done for his little brother. So he sits outside and waits.
When Sam comes storming out the front door, backpack in hand, he draws up short and just stares at his brother. A thousand thoughts fly through Dean's head, a thousand things that he could say. Things like "Please don't leave me, Sammy," and "Fuck you, you ungrateful bastard," and "Good luck, bro. I hope that you find something that makes you happy." He doesn't say anything though.
Sam stops long enough to try to say goodbye. He tries to tell him that "It isn't about getting away from you, Dean," and "We can still keep in touch- maybe visit on the holidays," and "You don't have to follow his orders, Dean. You could come with me." The only response that Dean gives him though is a hug, and the two hundred bucks that he had one in a poker game.
As Sam walks away in the night, Dean doesn't cry, because Sam, was always the one who did girly shit like that, and Sam had gone now. It was time to move on.
And when Sam is nothing more than an indistinct shadow in the night, he whispers goodbye.
2: Cry
As a rule, Winchesters don't cry. It was something that was ingrained in them, it was something that went against the very principle of the hunt. Sam was the one to get maudlin and weepy, to throw a fit when it was time to pack up and leave again, or tearfully eulogize the ghost that they were about to burn. Dean and John did the job to cope with the job. They channeled all of their rage and grief into the hunt- into destroying the things that destroyed lives, and when there was nothing to hunt, they would occasionally go out and drown their sorrows in beer, whiskey, and women.
They did the job, and they didn't fucking cry about it.
Dean waits a full hour before going back inside. John is almost a third of the way through a bottle of whiskey, and it doesn't look like he will be slowing down any time soon. His eyes shine brightly, and Dean tells himself that it is because of the booze, not because he had just completely destroyed his relationship with his youngest son. His baby, Mary's baby, was the one to walk out, and a part of John's mind screams at him that maybe Sam had a point.
Dean doesn't really care what is going on inside his father's head, or that the older man's beard was starting to get wet. He just wants a fucking drink.
He isn't exactly sure how he gets the bottle. Maybe he stole it right out of his father's hands. All he knows is that it is empty by the time he crashes onto the other bed Sam's bed in his their room, and the wetness on his pillow and on his face is most definitely from where he spilled holy water when he was packing up the weapons that Sam left behind.
3: Start a Fire
Dean has always had a strange preoccupation with fire. Some would call it unhealthy, but then again, some would call the level of co-dependence he has crippling. He is perfectly capable of being on his own, and he has never lit anything on fire that wasn't being purified of evil.
When he wakes up in the very late morning, John is gone. Dean panics for a moment, before realizing that both the impala and the truck are still there. They are parked out back, of course, because they are squatting after all, and they do not want to attract any unwanted attention from the street, but they are there, none the less.
Dean knows his father well enough to know that he will stop at the library, trying to get a hit on another hunt, before stopping at the bar to get completely shitfaced whether he is successful or not. Either way, the old man will stumble back in sometime after midnight and then act like nothing had happened the next morning. Dean is okay with that though. The routine is familiar- almost safe, even.
It does, however, leave him at a loss about what to do. He idly considers calling Sam to beg him to come home, but Dean is not that desperate, not that pathetic just yet to warrant such an action. He considers going out and getting drunk, but the thought of picking the same bar that John does on accident throws him off of that idea. Instead, he cleans all of the weapons. Every. Single. One. He cleaned the ones in his bag, the ones in the car, the ones in his father's bag, and the ones that Sam left behind.
Sam left a lot of things behind besides the weapons. He left behind his old books, the most worn out of his clothes, his stupid health food in the fridge. It angers Dean in a way that he has never felt before and doesn't really want to analyze. All he knows is that everything that he sees looks like his brother, and Sam had no right to do this to him.
The farmhouse that they are staying in is heated by an old wood stove. It is a cold night, and all of Sam's things are gone by morning. By that time, John has two solo hunts lined up for them, and he even lets Dean pick which one he wants to take.
4: Worry
Sam is a capable hunter in his own right, especially for only being 18 years old. He knows how to hustle pool, cheat at poker, fire a gun, and permanently disable a fully grown man in under a minute. There is absolutely no reason for anyone to worry about him.
Dean isn't worried. He is on a hunt near San Francisco while his dad works in Minnesota, and the only reason that he takes a detour through Palo Alto when he is done is to cruise for chicks. Dean is, after all, a sucker for a pretty face. Sam had texted him his new address a couple weeks after leaving, just in case. Dean had deleted the text, but not before memorizing its content like it was scripture, just in case.
He finds a pretty face all right- at a bar not too far from Sam's dorm. Her name is Jessica, and she is a little young to be drinking, but far older than Dean was when he started. Either way, he is not one to throw stones. They don't hook up, though god knows that she is interested.
Sam is in the bar, seated in the corner and laughing with a group that the girl had broken off from to talk to him. He looks good. He looks happy, and safe, and at peace in a way that no member of their family has experienced since a house burned down in Kansas in November of 1983.
Dean is sort of jealous, but at the same time he is sort of proud.
He sticks around a couple days, following up on every single urban legend and suspicious death in the area, because both he and his dad are too far gone for a normal life, but maybe Sam can be saved. Dean can't decide whether he hates him or loves him for that.
None of this stops either Dean or John from stopping by every couple months, just in case.
5: Send a Letter
The Winchester family has never been one for sentiment. Ever since their quest began, their entire life has been reduced to whatever they can fit into a couple of bags or the trunk of the car. School projects and birthday cards are discarded in favor of fake IDs and files of research. The only time that Dean has ever written a letter was for a school pen pal in the third grade, back when he actually tried at school and they had stayed in one place long enough to do so. In the intervening years, he had almost forgotten about it.
The case that they are on involved a college student. Her mother lived less than an hour away, but still they wrote each other almost daily, with stamps and envelopes and everything. It turns out to be a boon to their case work when the mother let them read the letters, able to identify from the girls veiled writing that her dorm was haunted, but the entire interaction put ideas in Dean's head that he would rather not dwell on.
They salt and burn the corpse and are out of town by that afternoon, going their separate ways again. Dean stops for coffee at a fill up station and ignores the rack of postcards. He most certainly doesn't buy one, and Sam most certainly doesn't start sobbing like a baby when a postcard arrives in the mail less than a week later.
6.
There are a lot of things that Dean doesn't do after Sam leaves.
What he does do is pray for the first time in decades for angels that he doesn't believe in and a God that he knows is not listening to keep his brother safe.