Discliamer: Supenatural belongs to WB, Eric Kripke, and all affliated.

Everything has a Beginning

Dean at times wondered if he was born this way, or if he was somehow made into the person he is now.

Whether it was genetics or something "learned," Dean instinctually knew it doesn't fall under the category of normal. Now Dean couldn't help but wonder, in his self-deprecating way, if Sam could sense it. With women he either fell in the remarks as a horny prick or the 'best night of their life.' Yet, his outer appearance wasn't the problem. The constant moving, hunting, guns, and knives weren't the problem. It was the inside that troubled him.

He felt empty inside. That can't be normal.

Here's how Dean imagines the start:

He saw his mother die pinned to the ceiling. The image only lasted for a second before his father blocked his view, but it was already burnt into his mind like his mother was going to burn. The heats from the flames were the most clear and lucid aspect of his memories. The weight of his brother, Sam, placed in his arms. The thumps and creaks, as his feet race down the wooden stairs and across the wooden floors. Finally, the shock of the cold night air once Dean was outside with his little brother. So many feelings and emotions all wrapped up in one event—it was only something of the past and it still constantly bludgeoned at his brain.

After the fire, Dean could suddenly feel how empty he was inside. If there was something there before, it was gone. He didn't understand it. Just crawled into his brother's crib, and tried to regain that last fleeting bit of feeling he had during that night. That night's event burnt him on the inside. Dean didn't talk about it. What is there to say? If there's nothing inside, what is there to say? It's just emptiness.

That's all it is.

On the other hand, his family could just be more fuck up than they realized. Dean thought it could go either way. Maybe, it didn't even really matter.

When Dean was young, in his teens, he had tried drugs to fill up the void as his own emotions weren't deep enough on its own. It did the job fine. Some of them made him feel lighter than air and unstoppable. Others brought on a bout of paranoia—and yes, Dean would have even accepted that if it got him to feel something. Yet all that whirling and twirling throughout his mind and body wasn't cutting it for him. Dean didn't like the aspect of losing control of himself. He already didn't have control of Sam's temperament and constant questions, and definitely not over his father.

Simultaneously, his family was what kept him from going too far into those urges. Yeah, Dean got urges at times—many times. He was cautious to describe them—to think about them. Especially when other people were around him, as if they could peer right into him and see how truly wrong he was inside. Dean thinks his father could see it. He can almost affirm that his father knows that something is wrong. There was this 'nothing' inside his little boy, and it was jagged, sharp, and evil as the things he hunted.

It had slowly been building. So when Dean stopped the two years of drugs at seventeen, that emptiness inside him pronounced itself loudly. It was louder than he remembered. It had never truly gone away. It was just drowned out in a cacophony of manufactured chemicals and it was going to drive him insane.

That's how it all started.

Dean was so agitated by his own unnamable urges that he chucked a random rock at few birds sitting in the trees. His aim was good. It was almost unreal, the way the bird went down. He daresay almost comical, like those cartoons he watched when he was a kid. Dean threw the rock, hit the bird, and watched it hurl off the branch and away a few feet from the tree.

He stood still, just looking on in a now empty tree. The other birds had flown away. The motel they were staying at was within a sparse woodland area. The roadside he'd been walking on, didn't have a car driving on it very often. In fact, his walk around the area Dean had seen exactly two cars. He wasn't expected home till five.

Dean went and searched in anticipation.

He found the rock first. Dean inspected it, and his hand came away with a little blood. A pleasurable knowing shiver went down his spine. When he found the bird later, its body twitching in death throes, Dean could feel a thrumming in his body.

The twitching began to slow and lessen. It paralleled the agitation he had been feeling for most of his life. The bird was dead, and the emptiness was quiet.

Dean ran back to the motel room and barracked himself in the bathroom—ignored Sam and Dad's questioning. He flicked on the bathroom lights, and his attention instantly was drawn to the blood on his hand. Dean wanted to rub it in his skin. Looking at himself in the mirror, Dean could find no substantial change to his outer appearance. Yet he watched himself breathe. It was deep and gasp-like, but there was an element of control to it. This was the most control he had ever felt over himself.

Better yet, that emptiness was filled for the first time in seventeen years.

Dean washed away the evidence of his first kill, no matter how much it twisted him up inside. Later, Dean went back to find the bird—told his father that he had lost something during his walk, and left the room before dad could get a word in.

It was still where he left it. He had bent down to get a closer look at the bird, and could see the dent where the rock hit it on its head. Dean reached down to pluck a single feather. It didn't actually go that smoothly, not how he imagined it in his head back in the motel room. The feather didn't detach easily from the carcass. He lifted the single feather, and along with it, the entire bird. Dean had to shake viciously for the feather to actually detach. He would call himself a pussy later for not just using both hands, but whatever. He got what he came for: The first souvenir.

Whenever that emptiness came back, he just waited for the right time and found small animals: birds, rats (he hated rats), or strays. Stayed away from pets, because collars and owners weren't things he wanted to deal with. The hunting even helped, more so than the animals in fact. Dean had never realized it before, had always thought the pride he received from his father was what tamped the emptiness down. Well it was involved, but not completely. So he helped with the hunts to kill every evil son of a bitch they could possibly find. Dean was, of course, leaning more towards the supernatural variety. He wasn't an idiot or in denial about his own nature.

The first person Dean wanted to kill, that clenched at his heart only a small bit. He didn't have buckets of empathy for this guy: Terry Phanel was a pissed-off kid who had a hard on for picking on Sam. It would have been so much easier if it was just teasing. They type both he and Sam had endured during their elementary years. But Terry was a spiteful bastard who didn't go into things alone. Sam defended himself as much as he could, yet with six to one odds against him the fight training didn't really make much of a difference, except of getting in a few punches and kicks.

So the time he caught Terry and his groupies picking a fight with Sam in a building's back lot, Dean hadn't hesitated to join in. He may have punch Terry in the head a little harder than he needed to, but Dean knew then he wasn't going to place much grief on his actions. He and Sam booked it the first chance they got, grinning like loons at each other—partners in crime. Dean kept smiling and ignored that emptiness calling to be filled.

Dean had a good dream that night. Sam and he were fighting Terry and his group at the back lot. Yet this time when Dean punched Terry in the head he didn't stop with that one punch. He went at it over and over, could feel the ache and blood all over his fist. When Dean was done he just stood up it was just him and Terry. The scenery had changed from a building's back lot to the forest of Dean's very first kill. Terry was lying on the ground with part of his head caved in, twitching just like that little blue bird.

He had woken up in the middle of the night, that aching more pronounced. Dean snuck out to shut it up.

It was a year later that the emptiness inside Dean had gotten that bad again. Dean didn't fight it. He just dropped Sam off at the bus depot, watched him leave for a normal life, and proceeded to the nearest bar—closest he could find to the bus depot, farthest from his father. Dean drank and the emptiness was singing and humming throughout his entire body. It started with the appearance of Sam's Stanford acceptance letter, and it just grew from there. He tried to get between Sam and Dad, and his agitation for his family seemed to affect the emptiness. Dean drank and he needed to kill something. It couldn't wait; it had to be tonight.

Dean wanted it to be tonight. He needed to take off the edge that was digging into his body.

As a very twisted sense of luck would have it, when Dean left the bar someone tried to mug him. Some guy had pulled Dean into a darkened alley and held him at knife point. Dean couldn't help but laugh right then. It had to be Lady Luck smiling down on him tonight, as it couldn't have been God. The satisfaction he felt that night, it was like fulfilling a sexual fantasy, one for his own deformed soul. What Dean dreamed of doing to Terry Phenal, he accomplished towards this random mugger. He doesn't remember what the guy looked like, or what happened to his knife. Dean wasn't even careful as he'd usually be. The aftermath of his punches was the clearest image. It wasn't has he had imagined. The mugger's face looked caved in—in that sense he didn't really have a face anymore. It filled the emptiness, but another ache was still left inside.

Dean knew he couldn't fix that.