I came home from school one afternoon to find Dean pouring himself over a Latin text. He had a Latin to English dictionary beside the text, a pen in his mouth, and paper next to him. Dad usually left the Latin to me, because he knew that Dean had a hell of a time translating the text, Dean wanted to do it, but his brain just couldn't comprehend things like mine.

"Hey Dean." I said and threw my book bag on the ragged couch. "Whatcha doin'?"

"Translating this text for Dad."

"Want some help?"

"No." The pen went back into his mouth and he resumed chewing on the cap.

"You sure?"

"Positive. Now, don't you have a Calculus test to study for?" Deflection, always deflection. Just once I wish that my brother would accept help when it was offered and not act like we were offering to bite him.

I compromised. I got my Calc book and I sat down at the table next to my brother and did my math while he tried desperately to get the translation correct for our perfectionist father. I give Dean credit. He knows he isn't very good at Latin, knows that he always screws up the verbs, but he keeps trying, keeps hoping that he'll do a better job, hoping that someone will notice his efforts and praise him for it. No, not someone, just Dad. I could tell him that he's doing a good job, he'd cuff me on the back of the head and say that we aren't girls. But, he thrived on praise from Dad. And Dad never gave any to my older brother. Yet, he kept right on trying.

Hours had past, I hadn't noticed, I had been so engrossed in my text, when Dad came in the house, loudly. That was one thing I never quite understood about Dad. On a hunt he was silent as can be, but anywhere else, loud and clomping.

"Dean, you done with that translation yet?"

"Almost Dad." Dean said without so much as an upwards glance. He was truly concentrating, and trying to get the translation right.

"You've been working on it for six hours. Give it to your brother."

"Dad, I'm almost done." Dean said, brows knitted together in concentration.

"Give it to your brother. He can finish it. Go out to the car and get the weapons, they need cleaned."

"Dad…"

"That's an order Dean." The magic words and when Dean didn't respond quickly enough Dad picked up the book and threw it in my general air space. "This is not the time for defiance Dean." Dad said his eyes angry and his mouth a thin hard line. I could swear that he was breathing hard. All this over a stupid Latin translation? "There are lives at stake Dean, and they can't risk you not knowing what you are doing. Go. Go get the weapons and clean them and have them ready for tonight." The words "because you aren't good at anything else" hung thickly in the air. Dean put the pen down, didn't look at me, didn't even look in my general direction, and quickly left the apartment. Unlike Dad, his steps were quiet and the door shutting was so soft I thought I missed it. But Dean was a good soldier after all, and didn't complain, and didn't communicate just how humiliated or hurt he had to be.

"Dad, Dean would have had it."

"No. He wouldn't. I only let him do it because you weren't here and he needed something to do to keep him busy while I was doing the leg work of the hunt."

"Why didn't you let him do the leg work?" I asked as I looked down at my brother's scrawls. He had translated some of it, but most of what he had done was incorrect. Dean had never been good with languages. I remember when he was a Freshman in high school, before he'd been beat down so bad and humiliated, he worked so hard on papers. He wrote and rewrote, asked me to look over them, asked neighbors to look over them, but they were never very good. Dean didn't have that flow that was needed to write a really good paper. Words on a page never made sense to my brother. But, he tried. He tried hard then, and he tried hard now, and it still seemed to get him nowhere. No wonder he liked fast women and pool. Those things didn't tell him he was stupid.

"Your brother isn't a very delicate human being. He's good at killing, and grunt work. Remember that Sam." My brain actually had a hard time processing that one. My brother raised me. He was good with people. He was damn good with people. He spent more time when we were kids trying to get the neighbors to let him do odd jobs, and asking little old ladies to watch me while he went out and did whatever he did to earn us money that we needed when Dad wasn't around, or when Dad had forgotten that in addition to a roof over our heads we needed food in our stomachs as well. Dean was most certainly good with people.

"So you think Dean's only good for the blood and guts end of a hunt? That he's what? One of the foot soldiers during the invasion of Normandy, that all of the generals knew would more than likely die, but they needed them to pave the way to glory with their deaths. I couldn't believe it. My dad thought my brother was nothing but a warm body.

"Your brother, he can handle a gun, but not people. He doesn't have anything that would endear people to him. Remember that when you guys go hunting together. Make sure that when you guys go out to interview people that you do it, don't let him. But most definitely hand him the gun. He's good with a gun." The rage boiled inside of me. If I had to guess, this is the moment in my life where I decided that I dislike or even hate my father.

Dean came back in and cleaned the weapons while I translated. Dean watched me out of the corner of his eye. But he absolutely never said a word. He must have been humiliated. When the Latin was translated and the guns were cleaned, we were allowed to go to bed. Dean wasn't going on this hunt. This was something Dad wanted to do on his own. Said Dean wasn't needed. Short of cutting off my brother's manhood, I'm not sure how else my father could have emasculated him further.

I woke up again in the middle of the night, Dean had gotten up again. I crept out of the room and into the kitchen and there he was, working diligently on the Latin he had been unable to do earlier in the day, checking his work against mine and scratching out and erasing his until there was a hole in the paper.

I was just about to go to bed when I heard the pencil, book and paper fly across the room and crash into the wall. My brother sat there for a moment and then put his head down on the table in his crossed arms. Then I saw something I was unaccustomed to. I watched my brother's shoulder shake in sobs.

"I'm sorry I'm so stupid mom. You would be so disappointed in me. First, for not finishing school, and now, I can't even do something basic. I'm so sorry mom that I turned into such a screw up." I had to put a hand over my own mouth to keep from crying myself. I wanted to yell and tell him that mom couldn't think he was a screw up, that he wasn't a disappointment, that he had single handedly raised me, and I was going to Stanford, that I was smart, and if I was smart then he had to be smart. But instead I stood there and watched my brother cry and apologize to our dead mother for being stupid, and for being a screw up. What a horrible person I turned out to be.