They started at Bobby's because everything, always, had started at Bobby's. The first real fight their dad and the man, who would over the years become their surrogate father, had had about the boys and how John had to learn "that they are just kids, god damn it, and not your personal war machines". The first time Dean had discovered that there was more to this world than hunting and protecting Sammy; that it also consisted of playing catch – just for fun and not while trying to hunt something – and pancakes. The first time he had had a dream about a hot girl – and had woken up to the result of that. The first time Sam had driven a car. That one fatal evening, when Dean found his brother reading a book about linear algebra and how Sam had expressed his wish to go to college for the first time.
After their father had died, Bobby had become the first address the went to when they needed help and eventually, the old, dusty house had become their home.
To see what was left of it - the scorched earth, the dark, burned wood, the stone – hurt like hell.
Dean still remembered when they drove back from the warehouse, after Sam had had his breakdown and he had proven to him that, no matter what or who he was seeing after getting out of the cage, it was not real.
He remembered driving up to the house, his mind racing about ways how he could help Sam, how he could make him feel that this, their life, he, was real. He remembered longing for the old house like a sailor for a haven after months on stormy seas.
The house had been so old, so full of proof that it had survived storms and floods and what ever there was to come – he had felt it was indestructible. Their castle, the one place where they could retreat to, that was always going to be there.
He saw the light first, strangely flickering at places where no light should be. He saw the colors – the angry orange and the bloodthirsty red; like tongs were they licking the facade.
When they moved in closer they saw that the flames were just the last echo of an inferno that had flambéed the entire building.
They had gone inside, the dust was barely settling, burning in their eyes and lungs.
Dean remembered standing in what was supposed to be the living room. The room, where he had watched over Sammy when he had been tuckered out by everything that had happened after the cage. The room where they had had some of their greatest fights and not a little amount of their best moments.
Dean remembered calling Bobby, cursing and threatening to drive both his brother and himself of the pier if Bobby was dead. He remembered how broken he had been, how desperate.
He swallowed thickly when he realized that right now, he did not feel any different to the moment back then.
"It hurts so much!", Sam whispered and Dean turned his attention back to the present.
"Yeah. Yeah, it does."
His brother shook his head. "I still can't believe that the place is gone, you know?"
Dean nodded.
Sam sighed. "All the memories we have of this place. It's… I don't know – as a kid, it always felt like the only home I have ever had."
Had they been younger, Dean would have gotten angry at that comment. Depending on the day, he would have thrown Sam an angry stare or pressed him against the wall, hissing that he was not allowed to talk about their first, their real home, like this.
Sam seemed to think the same when he eyed Dean, who just stared at the black brigs that were slowly corroding to dust.
He took a deep breath. He wasn't the young version of himself; too much time had passed, too much had happened to still provoke these feelings. He sighed. "Yeah. I mean, Lawrence will always be the first place I called a home, but… as with how things developed… Bobby's place kind of became one too."
They fell silent for a minute, before Dean went and grabbed two bottles of beer out of the trunk and handed one to Sam. They opened them simultaneously and raised them towards the ruin.
"To Bobby!", Dean said.
"To the man I sometimes hoped to be our father!", Sam answered.
Dean did not protest but closed his eyes and drank from the bottle.
Silence spread again, but it was a comforting silence.
Finally, Sam cleared his throat. "In all our lives – what places would you call a home?"
Dean took another sip and thought about it for a minute. "Lawrence and our old house. This." He waved a hand towards the building.
"The bunker", Sam added.
Dean nodded in agreement. "It's strange, but yeah. Until… you know, the trials and everything, it was the one thing I could call home."
"The Impala", Sam suggested.
"And Baby of course", Dean agreed.
Sam laughed sarcastically. "You know, had you told me, when I was a kid, that I was ever going to say that, I would have probably declared you insane", he said.
Dean raised an eyebrow. "Really? Why?"
To him, the Impala had always seemed… well, it was part of it all. Just like you don't question that there is oxygen in the air or solid ground under your feet, he never questioned the Impala to be there.
Sam laughed again and shook his head, before taking another sip of the beer. "When I was a kid, the Impala seemed like my own personal hell, designed to torture me."
"Really?" Dean looked genuinely surprised and shocked.
Sam nodded. "Yeah. It was the one place where I could not escape Dad, you know. When we were at a hunt or in the motels – I could always sneak out, always find my ways to have a few moments of silence for myself, without him staring at me, constantly judging every move I made, constantly criticizing and showing to me how I was not good enough, not man enough, to be a hunter or part of this family."
Dean was rendered silent for a moment.
"What changed?", he finally asked with a breathy voice.
Sam smiled. "You. After Dad went missing… it was just us in the car, you and me. With you, I don't know. I never had to hide who I am, I never had to hide when I was sick or tired or sad or whatever emotion you might find that Dad found to be unpleasant and not worth showing or even having."
Dean finished his bottle, before he answered. "Hearing you talk like this… I sometimes think you're giving our old man not enough credit."
Sam raised his eyebrows. "Oh, do I not?"
Dean sighed. "I am not going to give you the speech about how hard things had been for Dad after Mom… We have had this talk multiple times. But, you know, when you were younger, when you were really young, it had been Dad and me who had been fighting – over everything. He was constantly criticizing every move I made, always giving me the feeling that I wasn't good enough. You should have seen him, when you had a cold or even just bruised your arm because you ran against a chair or something – he sometimes was so worried about you that he was almost going mad. To him, you were so young, so tiny, that over all this, he forgot, how young I had been."
Dean looked at Sam. "I am not trying to blame you, I really don't. I just want you to understand, that you, Sam, have always been Dad's favorite. When I realized that, many, many, years ago, I got so mad and I tried my best to become everything he wanted us to be – I became this obedient soldier he needed for his crusade, the warrior. Just to please him. To make him see that I, too, was worthy of his love and his affection and that… I deserved to have a father to."
Now it was Sam who was rendered speechless.
After a while, he shook his head. "No, I don't believe this, Dean. Maybe you, too, are seeing things out of your own perspective; maybe you, too, are only seeing what you want to see, what you need to see to keep the picture you have of Dad."
He drowned the rest of his beer. "But, no matter what, I know what I have seen, Dean. I know the hatred in his eyes, when he threw me out that night, I saw it in my dreams for years after I left – I did not imagine this."
Dean stared at the stone walls that were still covered in so much soot, it looked as if the flames had just died down an hour ago.
"What you saw in his eyes was no hatred for you, Sam. It was hatred for himself. For not being able to protect you. For having to let you go, for not being able to see the world like you see it."
Sam did not answer to that but stared at what had once been the hall where Bobby had repaired his cars.
"After I left for Stanford… It was maybe a few nights into the semester and I had been to this party and… I had been wasted for one of the first times in my life – like, really wasted. That night, I missed you and Dad so much, I thought I could not handle it anymore. I was one drink away from packing my things and going to find you. I didn't care about Dad's words or what he was going to do to me, all I cared about was how lonely I felt. So I stared at your number for almost an hour, but I figured you would be just as mad as Dad, so I was too afraid to call you. In the end, I phoned Bobby."
Sam smiled sadly at the memory. "We ended up talking all night. I was walking through the streets of Stanford, a bottle of water, that Bobby had forced me to buy, in one hand and my phone in the other. He must have been tired like hell when morning came, but he did not complain. He talked to me until I was able to stop crying and until I was sober enough to find back to the dormitories."
Sam laughed. "He mostly told me stories of what we used to do when we were at his place, back when we were really little. Do you remember when we tried to build a swing out of the old rope and the tractor tire we found behind the stables?"
Dean laughed as well and looked at the old tree that was still standing beside the house, a silent witness of everything they had seen. "Right there." – He pointed towards the tree – "I pushed you on the swing for at least an hour before I tried it myself. Right when I was at the highest point, the rope ripped and I fell on my butt. I wasn't able to sit for a whole damn week after that."
They both grinned.
"That night, Bobby taught me more about self-worth and how, before everything else, you have to believe that what you are doing is right than our father had in all these years."
Dean nodded and took a deep breath. "You know…"
He wanted to tell Sam. He wanted to tell him how he, too, had called Bobby, maybe a night or two earlier than Sam had. How shattered he had been, how he had not been able to understand how Sammy could just leave them, could just walk out of that room and close the door on everything they had had and how his father was just standing by, doing nothing and letting his son walk away.
That night, John and he had had the biggest fight they had ever had – bigger then when the Shtriga almost sucked the life out of Sam, bigger than when Sam had run away. Because this time, Dean had been fighting back and his father had not been prepared for that. Looking back at it now, he realized that what he had seen that night in the motel room, almost hidden by the darkness in the room, shrouded in a big cloud of alcohol, had been a father who was afraid to lose both of his children in one week. A father, who had been terrified to death that he was not able to protect anyone he cared about and that all the meaning his life had had after his wife had died, was taken away from him.
Looking back at it now, Dean was beginning to understand it. Back then, though, he had been devastated. All he had tried to do since that night when he had been four years old – trying to hold this family together – seemed to have failed.
He had been drunken and crying, finally having a moment clear enough to call Bobby and tell him everything that had happened.
Dean sighed. He wanted to tell Sam that Bobby, too, had spent the whole night talking to him, until he fell asleep on a park bank in the middle of nowhere. That Bobby had driven up to where they were staying that night and had found him, carried him into the car and driven him to safety before finding John and doing the same with him.
He wanted to tell him, but, it seemed wrong. It seemed to much right now, like he was digging to deep in the emotional swamp their life had been.
"I sometimes wish I had given him more credit, you know?", Dean said instead and Sam nodded.
"Me too."
