Jars
Dean feeds Sam from jars the size of his own tiny fist balled up. And that is all his world is for a few months. Their father is less a person than a frightening haze, melted away with nights where Sam and Dean eat with strangers and he is out in the world asking for Mary. Mary, and what happened to her. Dean is always good. He always helps a stranger woman's hand spoon colored mash into his brother's mouth. Because he knows what a terrible thing it is that his father can't find her.
Then his life suddenly becomes different, like time has hiccupped. Not slowly, but right away, Sam is not a baby but a very young toddler with moods that aren't about sadness or hunger. They're distinctly malicious. He is a pale and skinny boy and often refuses to eat. He sucks his lips in until they aren't on his face at all when Dean offers him a slice of gooey Wonderbread. Sam grips the side of his babyseat with puffy fingers and glares with contempt behind what's probably finally hair and not wispy baby down. Dad asks from behind the wheel if Sam is eating, so Dean sticks the slice of bread between his own teeth and says yes.
More years later and Sam is still too thin. Dean worries about him because Sam won't grow. From seven to fourteen he stays the same, small enough to be picked up with one arm. He's as fussy as he was as a baby because it still just makes him angry instead of making him laugh. Dean thinks it's because he's not eating right, the way they live with one case peanut butter, bottled water, and macaroni and cheese riding shotgun with them everywhere. But he and Dad seem healthy. Sam's smart and learns well, so he can fight and shoot fine, which keeps a little ache off Dean's heart. But it's a grim kind of lucky. The rare times Sam gets banged up it always feels like it takes him too long to heal. For a little while Dean panics that there's something seriously wrong, like Sam has a hideous disease in his blood that is slowly killing him. He almost asks Dad to let Sam go to the emergency room to get a full lookover the one time when Sam turns blue from head to toe from some pixie dust. But at midnight the churchbells ring and Sam is back to the color of fair, scrawny flesh.
Sam hits puberty just after Dean learns not to mind how he's been the same size forever. Suddenly he won't stop eating. He eats and eats and starts to sprout upwards but not outwards. Every knob of every bone in his skin shows. And still he keeps eating and stretching like Jack's beanstalk, until one day even the boys' father has a moment in the kitchen where he has to stare up, cowed, by the monstrous thing that has erupted into being with barely a year's time. There's this guy, Bobby, that Dad's kind of friendly with. Then Bobby makes a joke about Sam being a rougarou. At the time, Dean doesn't know what that is, but Dad punches Bobby in the face and says his boy isn't a monster. After that, Dean pretty much just goes by Dad's example when he has his own falling-outs.
Years pass again. Sam is eating from jars again. He hungrily scoops out chili asparagus pickles and apricot preserves out of Ball's mason jars. Dean feels stupid and guilty crouching with him behind a hay bale. There's a loaf Irish soda bread so fresh in his hands that it's steaming in its own bag. They'd lifted them from farmer's market stalls, long tempting rows of food sitting out on counters. Dad hasn't given them money for food in weeks, because they haven't seen him for about that long. Sam's all grown now, bigger than Dean. But he has the same resentful stare when he's hungry and unhappy. And just like when he was really small and they couldn't figure out how to feed him, it's Dad and Dean's fault.
Sam is going to college and it's a long slow drain on his brother. He gets his fucking kitchen table and his fucking summer screen door keeping the flies out and his fucking somebody looking after him in the mornings. Dad bailed when Sam broke the news in late spring, but he'll be back. Dean isn't worried about him. He's gone for now so he can't say squat about where Dean puts the rent money. Sam keeps going over this math book until way too late at night. Something about getting into a better class when he gets into Cali. He sleeps in til' late and when he wakes up, Dean's at the stove. He has the radio going and the grease crackling. To Sam it's like the tapes are playing in the Impala and the tires are running over gravel, only it feels more right. Dean has an easy hand on the spatula like it's the wheel looking free enough to sing along like he usually does. Instead, he stares out the window. Sam asks if he's ok and Dean tells him to shut up and eat his goddamned bacon.
The next time Dean sees Sam it's like he got pieces of steak glued to his chest. It's like Sam got in the way of a blast of growth hormone when they sprayed the vineyards, or like he went to LA and asked a plastic surgeon to stick a puppy inside each of his biceps. Dean expects Sam to down a dozen raw eggs and a gallon of protein shake every hour to keep up with that body. But when he was suddenly weaned off his mother's milk, Sam was finicky and sad. He's the same way with his sweetheart. All he can stomach are a few organic lettuce leaves.
Sam gets into jars again. This time they're spaghetti sauce jars with insides splashing leaky blood. He tilts his head all the way back to get at the dregs in the bottom. When he pulls back there's a red moustache under his nose like cherry jam. He wants to eat now, as much as he can get of something that Dean considers poison. Dean hates him more than he ever did those long hours where Sam would clench his teeth 'no' against the spoon, or gobble the whole meal as a voracious teen instead of his fair share.
It's the end now, a time when angels, demons, witches, lovers, and ghosts are past. They are slow and tired, somewhat in pain, and a meal isn't as frantic as it was before. Dean thinks back to the times of desperation. Sam would eat nothing, and then would eat everything when they had nothing, and then was eating something that would have destroyed everything. Eating has been an afterthought ever since they won back Sam's secondhand soul. It is a worn thing much too disinterested in its body for it to care whether he lives, much less eats. As Sam approaches sleeping, creeping death, Dean gets ready to feed him one last time. He uses an old jam jar because they have no cups. Dry-eyed, he takes flesh from his arm and lets the blood run down his finger. A red sauce at the round glass bottom gathers, the cut of meat sitting in a pool of it like an island. The old text runs through his head: The ancient remedy of flesh calls back fading spirits to living family awaiting them in life. Sacrifice will restore love. Dean takes a spoon of it and holds it to Sam's lips, hoping that he will eat.