You know Sam and Dean Winchester are psychotically, irrationally, erotically codependent on each other, right? (Zachariah, 5.18)
You two have the most unhealthy, tangled up, crazy thing that I've ever seen (Lisa Braeden, 6.06).
Sins Visited.
John expected a lot from his sons. Absolute sanity, probably, would be too much to ask for.
It's not right
God knew he knew that – it wasn't right or fair the way they had to grow up, college funds spent on ammo, but it wasn't right or fair that Mary died either, and this was the best he knew how to do for them, all of them. When he killed it, then, then they could rest. All four of them.
They're too close. It's not normal.
It wasn't – well, what could he expect, he had given Sam to Dean, and they spent their whole childhood practically in each other's pockets. But it wasn't like they had opportunities for making friends outside the family. And what the hell did you call normal anyhow, when the things out of nightmares were real and you'd seen your wife burned to death pinned to the ceiling, no home and rarely the same roof over their head for more than a week, preparations for war -
But he hadn't been like that with his sister, and they were a military family with a drill sergeant for a father/i.
But he was proud of them, seeing them become soldiers. Become hunters. All the things they gave up, Dean especially, every time they made a kill or a case connection, as proud as any damn father could ask to be. Soldiers became brothers, and they had absolute trust in their unit, or operations failed.
If there was anything else, anything he turned his eyes and mind subtly away from, it wasn't in him to commit acknowledgement.
...
"Come on Sammy, stop crying, it's okay, it's okay, be quiet now, shhh…"
John Winchester bounced his youngest child gently up and down, pacing back and forth across the one-room apartment. Sammy had been crying since 20:00, when John had first tried to put him to bed having finally gotten around to making dinner. It was nearing midnight, and John didn't understand how the kid was still making noise. John was beyond tired, vision becoming hazy around the edges, and Sammy's little face was screwed up and bright red as he squirmed and pushed at John with surprising strength.
"Mary, what do I do?" John asked out loud, but Sammy had never behaved like this before Mary died, mostly a quiet, content baby, absorbing the world through intelligent dark eyes and babbling thoughtfully to himself. Since she died, nothing was right anymore. Nothing would be right again.
He couldn't do this.
"He wants the bottle."
John nearly jumped out of his skin at the words from his other son, hastily readjusting his old on the baby. Sammy screamed louder. Dean didn't say very much these days. He was sitting up on the foldout couch, looking tiny amid all the bunched up blankets, serious and big-eyed.
"He's had his bottle, kiddo," John recognized the tinge of hysteria to his own voice.
"Not milk. He needs apple juice." Dean got out of bed and went purposely to the kitchen unit, stretched to reach the counter top and got Sammy's sippy cup. He filled it with apple juice John had forgotten buying and offered the cup to his father.
"He drinks apple juice?"
"Mommy gives us apple juice."
Worth a shot. John sat down on the bed, offering the cup to his youngest son. Sammy shoved the beaker forcefully into his mouth and started to suck, still grizzling. Dean moved so that he was sitting at John's side, pressed to his father's right arm and his brother's back.
Sammy's eyelids started to flutter.
...
Sammy's first word was 'Dee'. His second word was 'no'. By the age of two, he had an extensive vocabulary when he chose to use it, but 'Dee' and 'no' remained his favourite words. He rarely put them together.
...
Both the boys were in the back of the car, because John needed Singer at the front to give him directions. John had picked up one of those kiddie seats for Sam at a thrift store lately, the last one he would buy, when Sam outgrew this he could use the seatbelt. The old woman behind the counter had given him a look somewhere between suspicion and pity. The two days' worth of stubble and bruised cheek he'd been sporting probably hadn't exactly screamed 'father of the year'. They were happy enough back there, John reassured himself, checking the rear-view mirror intermittently, then did a double-take as he realized Dean had undone his seatbelt, and was sitting right next to Sammy, absorbed in something, heads bent and giggling together. John was struck by the way they blocked the rest of the world out, turned inwards to each other, and that Dean looked, rarely, childlike. He looked happy.
"Dean get back in your seatbelt now!" John barked, sensible instincts rising up suddenly, spell abruptly broken. Dean flinched and looked guilty, darted back to his seat and buckled up.
"Sorry Dad," he muttered.
"It's okay," John breathed, heart pounding. "It's just, you know that's dangerous. You stay strapped in. Alright?"
"Yes sir," Dean said. All was quiet for a moment. Singer raised his eyebrows, but John ignored him.
Sammy's high-pitched voice pronounced quietly and clearly,
"I don't like you, Daddy."
...
The only times Dean challenged him concerned Sam.
"It's just, it's really important to him to finish out the school year here."
"Why? He's smarter than any of that stuff they can teach him. What the hell was that book he was reading yesterday? Don't tell me that's a sixth-grade book."
"It's not that. If he doesn't pass the end of year exam he'll be held back, and he'll hate it. And get picked on."
John felt his eyebrows raise involuntarily. His eldest son looked a little helpless, well aware he was treading on thin ice but unable to himself, when it came to Sam.
"Are you telling me Sammy can't handle a few schoolyard idiots?"
"I'm saying he shouldn't have to." Even Dean looked surprised at his own daring. "On top of everything else."
John grimaced. Normally he'd chew the boys out for this degree of backchat, but instead he heard himself saying: "I know it's rough, Dean. But you've been held back, and you coped."
"But-"
Now John did silence Dean with a look. "Don't. Interrupt. People are dying, and there's nobody else who can take this hunt. We're going."
That night he heard sounds from their room, as usual – Dean's low, pacifying tones, and Sam's voice raised in protest and indignation. He couldn't make out words, but the volume rose. Then quiet. Abrupt.
Neither brought it up in the morning, but Sam made a point of sitting close to Dean, close enough to touch, and sending John silent, resentful looks from under his eyelashes.
...
Sometimes he was terrified, overwhelmed by how much he loved them, like that Thanksgiving at Jim's with the actual turkey, seeing them laugh and rib each other, flushed with warmth and food, and the booze John allowed Dean now and had turned a blind eye just this once when Sam helped himself from his brother's glass (real glasses). And the thought of it – losing either one - he was reasonably sure that would finish him off.
One would mean both.
If something happened to Sam, Dean would die too – he wouldn't commit suicide, too much of a soldier's sin, too responsible for his old man to consciously consider it. But he'd get himself killed pretty promptly after, throw himself a way on a hunt in such a manner that he could consider it duty. Sam probably wouldn't die – not purposely, in any case – but the prospect of watching what he would become was at least as horrific.
John took Dean on his first hunt when Dean was fourteen: Dean wouldn't wait any longer, and in all truth, John could use the backup. His eldest boy was a crack shot, fast as all hell, and probably more help than a lot of grown folk John could name who called themselves hunters. Sam was fifteen and still hadn't been out further than the back seat of the Impala. John made vague noises about starting him soon, and Sam hadn't refused outright, but John knew that some kind of watershed would be reached then, and he didn't exactly know what he'd do if Sam flat-out wouldn't do it. He would do it, John reassured him. If he made it so that Dean would need him there.
Oh. That was low.
...
He and Dean were three days late, back from finishing a poltergeist – John had busted his arm again when the thing decided to toss him against a heavy chest of drawers, and Dean had a butterfly-stitched cut down the left side of his face and a multitude of bruises. John counted it for a victory: one spirit down, one family saved, nothing that wouldn't heal up with a minimum of attention. The thing had the phone wires down, though, and cell had had no reception.
"Sam'll be freaking out," Dean said conversationally, as he changed gear and pulled off the Interstate.
"He knows these things don't run on an exact timescale."
"Yeah, but you know what he's like."
John scowled – riding shotgun in his own car made him cranky, and he could feel that this time the arm was gonna take its time getting back to capacity. He wondered vaguely what kind of painkillers they had left.
"He knows where the emergency cash is. He won't starve. A little anxiety won't kill him." God knew John had enough of it.
Sure enough, as the car approached the ground-floor apartment where they'd left Sam to his own devices, his youngest son's anxious face was clearly visible in the window. When Sam ascertained that it was indeed them, his face disappeared, then the door slammed open so hard it near came off the hinges. Sam came flying down the path and flung himself onto Dean as his brother was standing up:
"Woah kid," Dean chuckled, but it didn't escape John how he wrapped his arms around his brother, pulled him very close, lifted Sam off the ground slightly which he wouldn't be able to do much longer at the rate Sam was gaining height.
"Alright Sam, that's enough," John said. "Let your brother get in the house."
"Where were you?" Sam asked, his voice muffled by Dean's shoulder.
"You know where." John found he couldn't look at them, quite, the way there totally wrapped up in each other, so that he might as well not exist.
"Got held up, phones were down," Dean said apologetically. "You okay?"
John didn't have to look to know Sam was making the long-suffering face, the one he could make even more tragic now that his recent growth spurt had left him with a drawn, underfed appearance.
"That's enough," John said. "Dean, go and get cleaned up. Sam, help me unload this."
That night, after a dinner of tinned beans and rice, John slouched out in the big chair with codeine and no-brand beer dulling the edges of things – his eyes jerked open suddenly to his boys curled up together on the couch – Sam curled against Dean, to be precise, with his head on Dean's shoulder, though Dean wasn't exactly protesting either.
"Don't let him get away with that," John snapped. "Samuel, either sit up or go to bed."
They both jumped, and Sam did sit up.
"He, uh, didn't sleep much last night," Dean apologized for both of them, and was it the drugs and the poor light, or was Sam actually iblushing?/i
...
But how could he ask complete sanity from them, in such an insane world?
To see something – something that he'd have to take away – was one thing he couldn't do to them.
They only had each other, and if ihe/i didn't see, there would never be a problem.
"Bobby, uh, I'm sending Sam to you for a bit, if that's okay."
"How long is a bit?"
"Uh, depends…how long it takes Dean and me to figure out these disappearances…in Alaska."
"Alaska? If you're goin' away for the long haul, shouldn't you be takin' the kid with you?"
"I want him to use your library, figure some stuff out. We'll keep in touch. Besides.."
"Besides what?"
"I think the change of scenery will do us both good."
"You mean you two are at each other's throats again, and Dean's stuck in the middle."
"Pretty much," John admitted.
"Alright," Bobby said, in that 'Your funeral' way, "You know I'm happy to have the kid. Either of them. They're good boys."
"Yeah," John blew his breath out and loosened his grip on the phone he hadn't realized he was practically crushing. "They are."
The next day, Sam managed to come down with a bug of some sort, fever, vomiting, the whole nine yards, and even if John wasn't marginally worried he couldn't inflict Sam on anyone when he was sick. Sam was surprisingly tough when it came to injuries, but even a cold had acting like one of the women from those 19th-century costume dramas Mary had liked to watch, sprawled dramatically on the couch and predicting his death every ten minutes.
They never did make to Alaska.
...
Dean's first kill had been cause for celebration. He was sixteen, and the thing was indisputably evil, no remnants of humanity left in it, had killed three people and would keep going. He'd bought Dean his first official drink that night, his first time in a bar. Sam's first kill was, predictably, a train wreck – a shapeshifter that died slowly, messily, and not before dispatching its final victim, a kid it had taken hostage, right in front of them.
Sam wept noisily and messily the whole drive home – Dean sat in the back with him, and John when John dared a glance in the rear-view mirror he flashed abruptly back in time, to when they had huddled together as children, but giggling then, blocking the world out. When they parked, John said to Dean,
"Take him upstairs," and clarified, "Get cleaned up," – but he meant, 'sort this out, take care of him, I have no idea how to handle this'. Dean did, of course, and John went straight to the whiskey, thought about offering it to his kids but Dean was already manoeuvring Sam upstairs (and shit, Sam was taller than Dean, when the hell did that happen?). John sat on the couch and got drunk, heard the shower start and stop, heard the last stifled noises of sobs and then a long quiet from the bedroom.
Whatever else he heard that night, the whiskey helped to drown.
End