Disclaimer: None of these characters are mine, all of the rights belong to The CW and Warner Brothers, and this is for entertainment purposes only. Please don't sue me, legal people.
A/N: This is my third (published) fanfiction, so if it's crap, sorry. I'm still more used to writing my own stories. Still, I would love to know what you think! Even if you think it's crap!
It had been three weeks since Dean Winchester last saw his brother. In that time, he'd called every phone number, searched every safe house, and asked every hunter he knew if they'd crossed paths.
No one had seen Sam.
Finally he returned, dirty and tired, to the shabby motel they were calling home for the month while John was out hunting. He sat at the kitchen table, cellphone in front of him, waiting for something, anything to tell him that Sam was alright, that he was alive.
For the next twenty-four hours, he didn't move. Food tasted like sawdust, and he bit his nails down to nothing. Dean wasn't quite sure what was more agonizing: not knowing where Sam was, or knowing what he'd have to face when John came home.
The latter happened three days after Dean returned to the motel. He was tapping an old knife absently on the table when the door swung open, causing him to leap to his feet, eyes wary.
But it was just John.
"Is it… did you gank the ghost?" Dean asked, clearing his throat nervously as John dropped his bags at the foot of one bed and the door swung shut.
No escape.
"It was a tough one," John said, words slurring slightly, "and I'm no closer to finding any leads on that damn demon." Always with the demon. "Where's Sammy?"
Dean glanced away, hoping to evade the question, but his father stepped closer to him, until they were eye to eye. Eighteen year old versus the old man. "I said, where's Sam, Dean?" John asked menacingly, eyes flaring. Dean could smell the alcohol on his breath, which meant this night would be even worse than he had anticipated.
"He ran away," Dean acquiesced at last. "I lost him."
His father backhanded him across the face before he could exhale the end of the sentence, making his neck snap and causing him to stumble. "Dad," he tried, tasting blood from a cut on his lip, "please. I'll find him. I'm-"
John's fist connected with his cheekbone with brutal force, and Dean slumped against the wall.
I deserve it, he repeated, over and over and over. I deserve it.
"He's your responsibility, Dean!" the man raged, grabbing him by his shirt collar before slamming him back into the wall.
Something about that statement seemed terribly off, in hindsight.
When it was all said and done, and Dean had poured antiseptic into his cuts and salve onto his bruises, he sat on the hood of the Impala and drank until he was seeing stars, wondering if this was really all there would ever be to his life.
The next morning John apologized, the next week they found Sammy, and the incidents were never mentioned again.
Years and years later, long after John was dead, Dean and Sam found themselves in Heaven, in the realm of Sam's best memories. When they found a cabin, and a dog, and Sam told him what it all meant, Dean thought about telling him.
He thought about telling Sam about what he'd put up with all those years, about what it had been like to not be the last tether to their dead mother but instead to be just another kid, just another pawn, just another soldier.
But he didn't tell Sam. He didn't tell Sam then, and he never would, because if nothing else he was still Sam's protector, and Sam was still his responsibility.
Dean didn't want his brother to have to live with the guilt, with the knowledge of what one brother's freedom had dearly cost the other.
The only person Dean ever told was Castiel, one lonely night when the poor angel decided to ask him why he drank so much.
"It helps me forget," Dean said, waving his beer bottle for emphasis.
"Forget what, exactly?"
Dean sighed, put his bottle down on the table, and sank into the decades old couch. And then he told Cas everything, because decades of holding a secret in can do terrible things to a man, corroding his brain and opening fissures in his heart, and Dean Winchester had been holding this secret in for far too long.
When he reached for them, the words came easily, like they had been waiting to be given up, and so he let them go.
"It started when I was twelve, I think," Dean said in a quiet voice, staring hard at the choppy wood floor of Rufus's cabin, unused to baring his soul. "He drank too much one night, I got in the way, and it just happened. And it kept on happening. And -" He stopped, trying to hold back the lump gathering at the back of his throat, all too aware of Cas sitting quietly next to him on the couch.
"And the worst part is that even after all of it, I still love him," Dean admitted hoarsely. The first tear fell, and the rest soon followed, but all Castiel could do was hug this man, who was so damaged that most days he thought he was poison, who was so loyal that he raised his own brother when his father would not, who was so good that he would give his life if it meant saving just one person.
Even after everything he'd been through, Dean still tried to do the right thing.
Few souls ever walk this earth quite like Dean Winchester's.