The worst part of growing up had never been the hunting.
After the initial shock, Dean could swing the idea that there monsters existed and that the world simply wasn't a safe place. He could handle the idea that he would grow up to be different, had in fact grown up differently, from other people his age. And while he could stomach being separate from the rest of humanity in his knowledge of the supernatural, he had a hard time coping with the fighting.
Not the hunting, but the arguments between Dad and Sam.
When his younger brother was really small, he'd asked questions. Those had been hard, but Dean could deal with them. He was good at lying. Even when Sammy dug out Dad's journal and called Dean out on all of his deflections, telling Sam the truth, horrible as it was, seemed only natural. But as Sam grew up, those questions changed in character and tone.
Eventually he became contentious, and Dad wouldn't stand for it.
On the nights when the yelling came to a head, Dean would put on a brave face, crack a joke, and quietly slip outside for a long walk in the darkness that he had been taught to fear. Anything felt better than hearing his world fall apart around his ears, than hearing the two people he loved most tear into each other like the monsters they hunted.
Their words cut into him more deeply than they cut into each other, but they were blind to it, and he would never say a word. Why should they notice?
Dean could lie.
And he'd learned at an early age to keep whatever he felt inside suppressed, because protecting his family was more important to him than acknowledging that he needed to be protected himself. So when they hurt him, he ignored the wounds until they scarred over invisible, and he channeled all of his pent emotion into the hunting, because he could handle that.
He understood it.
Hunting would always try to hurt him, but it would never try to make him pick a side; he knew where he stood and what to do. If he didn't, he could turn to the lore.
But this?
Wandering alone at night to escape their fighting, he couldn't escape his thoughts. There were no rules for this, no lore to tell him how to make them understand each other. He couldn't protect them from this, and he couldn't protect himself. But he lived with it.
Everything changed over time. Dean grew up, and he came to understand.
Some nights, lying awake at night, he would think about all of the crap he had dealt with across his life. Invariably, he thought about those fights and the nights alone in the dark. Growing up, that had been a private Hell. But now? A tightness would well up in his chest, a pang of some indescribable emotion twisting painfully just under his ribs, at the thought.
He missed the simpler world where the most painful thing he could imagine – not death, because he could not imagine losing his father or his brother – was a fight