Disclaimer: Supernatural and its characters are the property of Eric Kripke. Sadly, I do not own any of these guys.

A/N: This was written for a prompt fill on LJ. The prompt was as follows:

"While Sam was at Stanford, Dean's vision started going fuzzy and he ended up going to the optometrist for a prescription (per John's orders). Once he picks up Sam from school and they're back on the road again, he tries to be all sneaky about taking his contacts out at night and putting them on in the morning, hiding the case for his glasses, whatever.

Of course Sam catches him eventually, and come on, Dean, it's really not a big deal. Why are you so embarrassed?"

Of all the people in the world who would be expected to need glasses, Dean Winchester had always thought he was just about the last. If anyone, he mused as he walked out of the optometrist's office in a new pair of specs, it should have been Sam. Glasses were supposed to be for old people and geeks, not for a manly monster hunter looking to find at least one good lay in every city he visited. The kind of chicks he went for didn't exactly dig the four-eyed look, after all.

But of course, things didn't typically work the way they should for the men of the Winchester family. Whether it pertained to his luck on a hunt or his success with the few serious relationships he tried to form – *cough* Cassie *cough* – Dean seemed to strike out an unfairly high percentage of the time. So it made sense that the same would be true of his health.

Almost as soon as Sam had left for Stanford, Dean had noticed his eyesight getting blurrier, making distant targets harder to see, let alone hit, and the road in front of him hard to focus on when he drove his beloved Impala. He'd tried to ignore it for a while, just squinting more so he could see a little better (or at least make himself believe he could) and trying to leave the long-distance shots to Dad when he could.

After a while, though, John had caught on to the fact that Dean couldn't hit a target at a hundred and fifty yards if his life depended on it, and the young hunter barely had time to take the breath for a protest before John was on the phone with the nearest eye doctor and making him an appointment for that very afternoon. The Winchesters might be able to take care of most ailments themselves in the comfort of their shoddy motel rooms, but eyesight was not something to fool around with. A hunter with compromised eyes compromised the entire group, and John wasn't letting this get any worse. He already had one son who'd turned out useless, after all – he wasn't going to allow it to happen twice.

So that was how, mostly against his will, Dean wound up getting a couple pairs of strong prescription glasses, now diagnosed with a very severe near-sightedness that was pretty rare for someone in their early twenties.

Lucky him.

But like everything else he'd ever had thrown at him, Dean adapted to this new inconvenience quickly and with little complaint. He tried his best to act like the glasses were the sexiest part of him, tried to make himself believe that the cheap, clunky black metal frames were as natural a part of his face as his lips or his eyebrows. It worked for the most part, and after a while he even switched to contact lenses, which meant he didn't have to worry about constantly having to replace his glasses when they got broken on hunts; that had actually happened so regularly that up to that point John had carried at least three extra pairs of glasses for Dean in the med kit besides the two pairs Dean kept on his own.

Switching out the squishy little lenses became second-nature after the first few weeks of watery eyes and spasming, uncooperative eyelids, and over time Dean forgot to be humiliated – especially when he learned he could get different colors of contacts and change his eyes to whatever shade of sexy he wanted.

So by the time he drove up to Stanford to get Sam's help in finding their missing father, Dean had almost forgotten that there was anything different about his vision at all.

It hadn't been until Dean had started traveling the country with his younger brother again that he'd remembered how much he hated needing glasses and contacts.

Dad had known about his weakened eyesight, of course, since he'd been the one to make Dean go get it checked in the first place. Sam, though, hadn't been there for any of it, and Dean felt more than a little self-conscious revealing this particular weakness to his brother. It was stupid, he knew. Sam would never tease him about something like needing glasses. The kid would probably just reason it away, saying some stupid logical, rational thing like "If you need it to help you see, use it. What difference does it make how you help yourself aim for the monster as long as it keeps you alive?"

But still, he couldn't bring himself to tell Sam just yet. Sam had been so withdrawn after Jessica's death, Dean still wasn't sure exactly where he stood with his little brother. Was he just tagging along with Dean because he had nowhere else to go and he could help him get revenge against the demon, or did he actually want to see his big brother again after all these communication-less years?

Dean knew which side he was taking, of course, but that didn't mean Sam felt the same way. And if his little brother started seeing him as weak after all this time apart, Dean didn't think he could stand it. That realization ripped open every last stitch he'd ever sewn over his glasses-related insecurities over the last four years.

So he kept the whole thing a secret from Sam, carefully hiding it every time he put his contacts in or took them out. He made sure the bathroom door was locked when he was putting them in; cleaned them with the shower running on high so Sam wouldn't hear him pouring the old solution down the bathroom sink before he refilled his contact case; stored the case in an empty ibuprofen bottle filled with cotton balls to hide the rattling, so Sam wouldn't see anything weird if he looked in Dean's bag. And so far, everything had gone according to plan.

Or at least it had until the night after they finished hunting the Wendigo at Blackwater Ridge.

Both of the boys had decided to stay the night in town to recoup and tend to their wounds, rather than making another long drive so soon after an exhausting hunt. Dean was relaxing on the motel bed, lying at an odd angle so he could see the fuzzy TV without having to pull on the multitude of barely-sealed cuts he'd gotten from the creature, when he suddenly heard Sam make a puzzled humming noise from across the room.

"Sam? What's up?" he asked lazily, flipping the channel again when the show he had been watching ended and was switched over to an infomercial.

"Dean?" Sam's voice sounded totally confused, like whatever he had clutched in his monstrous mitt of a hand was something he'd never seen before. "Uh… since when do you wear contacts?"

Dean's heart almost skipped a beat, and for a second he completely forgot how to breathe.

"What are you talking about, Sammy?" he asked casually, hoping he sounded as relaxed and amused as he thought he did. "I don't wear…"

He stopped when Sam held up the tiny contact lens case between two fingers, one eyebrow raised as he caught his brother in the lie.

"How did you find those?" Dean choked out, feeling his heart hammering somewhere in the vicinity of his windpipe and making it very hard to breathe all of a sudden.

"I went to get you some pills for those bruises but the med kit is out of ibuprofen. I thought I saw some in your bag the other day while you were packing, so I went looking for it and found these inside instead. So, I ask again: since when do you wear these?"

When Dean didn't answer, Sam's eyebrows knitted together in confusion, gaze softening as he realized how red in the face his older brother suddenly was. "Dean?"

"Since you left for freaking Stanford, okay?!" Dean spat, turning away from Sam when his voice shook noticeably. This was bad. This was so bad. Sam was never supposed to find out about this.

"Since… Dean, that was almost four years ago!" Sam said softly, completely dumbfounded. "And I've been traveling with you for weeks now. Why would you try so hard to hide this?"

"wsmbrssed…" Dean muttered, still not looking at his brother.

"What? I can't understand you, man."

"Because I was embarrassed, dammit!" Dean shouted through clenched teeth, shooting Sam a venomous look before standing and striding to the other side of the room. "I'm twenty-six and I'm blind as a damn bat without my freaking glasses! The optometrist actually told me how astounded he was that I've basically got the near-sightedness of a man in his eighties."

Sam gaped at Dean, pity and sympathy warring within him against the urge to punch Dean in the jaw for thinking he should ever hide something like this from his own brother. What did he think Sam was going to do? Laugh?

"Well go on. Go ahead and laugh it up." So yes, apparently that was what Dean did expect, Sam mused. "I know Dad sure did when he found out," Dean added in a trembling voice, sounding just short of tears. And suddenly, all the anger at Dean in the younger Winchester's body rushed out, replaced by a reignited fury against their father for daring to mock Dean for something that obviously hurt him so badly.

"No, Dean, no, hey," he said in a rush, coming to his older brother's side and putting a hand on his shoulder as they completely crossed into chick-flick territory. Dean tensed and sniffed once, and Sam shook his shoulder a little. "Dean, look at me." When he did, Sam held up the contact case between them, not looking at it in favor of staring into Dean's overly-shiny green eyes. "This right here? This is not something I'll ever laugh at you for. This is something you can't help. Do you understand? I won't ever think any less of you for it, man. Never."

Dean blinked as if that had never occurred to him before, and Sam clenched his teeth, realizing that John had probably found some way to make Dean believe the whole thing really was his fault. Knowing their father, it was entirely possible.

"You promise?" Dean whispered, and if Sam didn't think he'd get socked in the face right then he would have hugged him and laughed. His brother could be so unbelievably stupid sometimes.

"I promise. Nothing wrong with helping yourself see better, Dean. If these save your life on a hunt, who cares? What difference does it make how you help yourself aim for the monster as long as it keeps you alive?"

Dean smiled then, remembering that this was almost exactly what he'd thought Sam would say when he'd first considered telling him. "Thanks, Sammy." He cleared his throat and wiped his wet eyes, giving his brother a look that clearly stated that no, he hadn't been about to cry and no one was to say any different.

"Any time."

"And if I hear one four-eyes joke, ever, I'm gonna kill you."

Sam smiled, nodded and went over to Dean's bag to put the contact case back where he'd found it.

"Noted."