As The Years Go By
November 2nd, 1991
The motel they were staying in this week was musty, moldy. They'd had better.
Then again, they'd had worse, too.
"Who's that?" an eight year old Sam asked, pointing to the picture Dean was holding of a pretty blonde woman, clutching the arm of their father. The two boys were sprawled out on one of the beds on their stomachs, leafing through the box of memories that Dean kept hidden, saved for special occasions.
Today was November second. To him, that counted as occasion enough.
"You know who that is, Sammy," he told his brother, ruffling his hair. "That's Mom."
"She's pretty."
"Yeah. She was."
Sam rested his face in his hands so that both sides of his face smushed up, and then he said, "Tell me something about Mom, Dean. Was she like Dad?"
Dean laughed sadly, looking at the picture he was holding for a long while. Christmas, 1982, it read on the back. Their last Christmas as a real family. "She was nothing like Dad, Sammy," he answered the younger boy at last. "Nothing at all."
John came home wasted, that night, and the first thing he saw was his two boys lying on the bed sorting through pictures of his dead wife, talking and laughing.
His vision went red with rage.
Dean saw his father coming before Sam did, and so he yanked his brother to the far edge of the bed. "Dad!" he cried. "Dad, stop it!" The man lunged at them again, clipping Dean across the jaw as the boy shoved Sam onto the floor behind him.
"Don't you boys dare laugh," John roared, gripping Dean by the collar and slamming him back into the wall. Sam scrambled out of the way to hide under the bed, confused tears streaming down his face.
The moment when you first see your father as a villain is always a confusing one.
When John paused his beating to reach for a new bottle of beer, Dean pulled Sam from under the bed and dragged them both to the bathroom, locking the door and sinking to the cold tile while outside, their father roared his anger and distress.
This is normal, Dean told himself. He lost Mom. He's just still sad. We shouldn't have been laughing anyway.
He rinsed the blood from his mouth and put freezing wet towels over his aches, attempting to stave off bruises; meanwhile, Sam sat on the floor, back against the rattling door, and cried and cried and cried.
When Dean had cleaned himself up he sat next to Sammy and let the younger boy climb into his lap, hugging his shirt for dear life and wetting his neck with more tears. "Were we bad, Dean?" the kid asked when their father finally fell silent. "Is that why Daddy's angry?"
Dean clenched his jaw. Never had he wanted to hurt someone more than he wanted to hurt John Winchester in that moment. "You haven't done anything wrong, Sam. Not a single thing. Dad's just… sad. And he's not very good at showing it."
He offered the younger boy some toilet paper to wipe his nose, and Sam sniffled as he accepted it. "Sorry I cried."
Dean bit his lip so hard he nearly broke the skin.
Did Dad really think he was raising them right, teaching them to accept responsibility for his actions, to survive on their own, to bottle up their emotions?
"It's okay," was all he said.
They fell asleep in the bathroom, Sam tucked up against Dean's side, and in the morning they left for school without waking John up.
Some things need time to settle, Dean had learned in his years with his dad.
And some things take a lot longer than others.
June 4th, 1992
By December, Dean's bruises were completely gone. By January, John had cut back on the drinking. By February, Sam was back to hugging their father with pure delight after a day at school. By March, Dean had almost let himself forget it all. By April, everything felt normal. By May, he thought he might actually be happy.
And then June hit.
"There was this presentation in school today," Dean told his father as the older man leaned over the hood of the Impala, fixing a broken valve. "Someone came in to talk to us about how car companies design cars and build them, and how they were always looking for engineers who could think of new designs. Or stuff," he added, staring at his feet when his father didn't immediately respond.
John blew out a heavy breath. "You're thirteen, Dean. You can't even drive yet; I don't know what the hell you're thinking about designing cars for."
"I just thought," Dean said, trying to keep his voice steady (it's never easy to have someone crush your dreams), "you know, maybe in college."
At that, John slammed the hood of the Impala and turned towards his oldest son with an amused, if somewhat condescending, smirk on his face. "College? What the hell do you need college for?"
"Well, I wanted -"
John cut him off, stepping towards him threateningly until Dean was nearly pressed against the car to get away.
He thought about November.
"You listen here, boy," his father said then, taking a deep breath. "You and I, we have one purpose in life, and it's to find the thing that killed your mother. You don't need college for that. Understood?"
"But after -"
The sound of John's fist slamming into the roof of the car, right next to Dean's right ear, was deafening. "There are no buts," he said, menacingly calm. "This is the way the world works, and you will do what you are told because I am your father. Are we understood?"
Dean nodded, hands shaking. "Yes, sir."
He watched his father walk away, and when the shaking wouldn't stop, he clenched his hands into fists. It made him even angrier, even more terrified, damn it, that this time - this time - John had not been drenched in grief or alcohol.
No, the man had been perfectly sober.
He had known exactly what he was doing.
A/N: Something deep within me refuses to believe that there wasn't a time when Dean wanted to go to college. In other news, look, it's my first multi-chapter fanfic. I hope you didn't hate it but if you did that's cool; updates should be once a week, maybe sooner if you bribe me with encouragement, and hopefully the chapters will start getting longer.
Disclaimer: Nothing belongs to me, and I'm not selling this, and it's just for entertainment purposes.