Disclaimer: I do not own Supernatural and intend no infringement.
Traditions
In many ways it was just another Winchester tradition, part of a format established over the years between two brothers that had spent the majority of their youth on the road together, bouncing from town to town, state by state - dragged across the country and back again.
Living so closely on top of each other, growing up together and each treating the other like a friend that never went home… it was only natural that routines and rituals had become seamlessly part of day to day life. Key words and phrases, in-jokes and knowing looks were nothing more than the side effects of having shared a room, a car, their dreams and nightmares and more often than not a bed for the majority of their young lives.
Even when Sam was at college there had been times that he had found himself using slang that no one else understood – having not realised or sometimes plane forgotten that the word only existed in the Winchester dictionary. Jess had merely chuckled at his dark ridicule of the cartoon leprechaun on the cereal box or his impassioned assertion that the lame Wicca store downtown 'gave people ideas'. Yet he knew that Dean would have understood.
Training his strong young sons to work together, hunt together had long been the goal of John Winchester, as much of an obsession as the hunt itself. He encouraged them to be in synch – sparring sessions became as much as an endeavour to make him proud as they were to avoid an off hit or missed block.
One of the most important lessons learnt, other than 'don't drop the match unless you know the son of a bitch is dead boy, otherwise you'll be facing down a smoking lump of evil for your trouble', is that you can't watch someone's back unless you can accurately predict their actions.
And watching someone's back, keeping them alive to fight another day was more important than any hunt.
That feeling – mutual to both brothers – is what had brought Sam to this run down side of town and what had triggered his trip down memory lane. The need to protect one another was in many ways just another part of their childhood, a tradition born from Dean's quick reactions in a house fire over twenty years ago; it was the reason that Dean slept with a knife under his pillow and the reason Sam had given him the protection amulet for his 13th Birthday.
The fact that Dean never removed that carefully sourced necklace was in many ways both a promise of commitment and an acknowledgement of the effort each put into the task of defending the other and was similar to the matching leather bands they both wore to guard from bewitchment – for a time frequently exchanged at significant moments in their lives so that on occasion one brother might be found to be wearing all three, a combination or none at all.
Although that game had stopped the moment Sam left for college, frozen mid play – a symbol of triumphs missed in those years of separation.
For years a carefully crafted dream catcher or a fervently found tigers-eye was the swiftest way to state an apology and achieve reconciliation and said more than any heated words sourced in anger.
And so Sam took one last look at his folded and refolded square of paper that he held in his calloused and capable hand and entered the dingy tattoo parlour. Inside was dark and cramped, a biker in the corner was having a logo branded onto his neck and a punk teenager was eyeing a tender looking eyebrow piercing in the mirror on the back wall. Sam, passing a series of display stands and a sign asserting piercing proficiency, approached the counter with a deliberate stride and placed the square of paper onto the glass top. The circular design that the paper depicted had been carefully copied by Sam that morning from Bobby's book on possession protection, strong pencil strokes indicative of the sheer number of practice copies that had littered the desk before perfection had been achieved.
The clerk took a close look at the design before eyeing what he had at first taken to be a lost kid asking for directions.
'Where abouts d'you want it?'
'Here' the not so lost kid replied - indicating that the sphere, beautiful now that he looked again, should be etched into the skin directly over his heart.