**Time skip brought to you by: Christmas cookies**
Lance sent Dean out to get the mail a little after lunch and Dean opened the door to see a small gift sitting on the porch… yet again. The tag said To Dean on it without a signature.
"What the literal hell?" he says, poking the package with the tip of his boot. "This is not normal." He pulls out a whole container of salt and upends it on the package right as Lance comes over.
"Can you just open it without questions for once?" Lance sighs shaking his head and walking away again. "I mean it's Christmas for Pete's sake Dean."
"The worst things always happen on Christmas because of attitudes like that. And if you'd seen what I've seen, you wouldn't open a package without question if you didn't know where it came from either." Dean says simply, pulling out a vial of holy water next.
"Dude!" Lance ran over and snatched it from him, "this one is not water resistant, come one, please just open it." Lance pleas.
Dean glanced at Lance suspiciously. "And how the hell would you know that? You bought this, didn't you?"
"Yeah, THIS ONE is from me, now would you please just open in and accept we love you?" Lance picks it up and shoves it in his arms.
Dean just stares at him in confusion for a second. "But… but why would you… I mean… it's not like…" He's really not sure how to put what he's trying to say into words, and he's not sure if he should. Lance did tell him to stop saying stuff like this, but he really just doesn't understand why anyone would bother. Other than Sammy, but Sammy had always been different. Finally, he just carefully pulls the present out to find a pair of fluffy piggy slippers.
"Do you like it?" Lance asks, beams of sunshine emanating from his face. His smile is so big he just might burst.
"It's… they're…" Holy shit, somebody actually got him a present. "Yeah, I love them." He hugs them against his chest, remembering how he used to get Sammy to eat stuff he didn't like by having him show him how the piggies eat.
Lance took that as a complete and utter victory. His smile got bigger and he held in the screams of joy as he closed the door. "I'm glad." he said and walked back down the hall to check on Keith who was taking a nap.
As soon as he's sure nobody's paying attention, Dean sits down, slips off his boots, and puts on the slippers, smiling like… well, like a kid on Christmas. Nobody but Sammy had ever done anything like this for him, since Cas didn't really know much about Christmas, and he really didn't know what to make of how he was feeling. It'd been such a long time, but maybe, just maybe, he felt a little… happy.
"Hey Keith." Lance says rubbing his shoulder to wake him up. "Your two hour nap is over, you need to do some real stuff now, maybe we can go for a walk?" Lance says. Keith rolls over and looks at him.
"What?" he asks in a husky voice. Lance smiles.
"A walk, you know around the block for fresh air." Lance says like it was obvious.
"Why?" he asks, Lance's smile wavers. "I was asleep and you woke me up, why would I want to go outside, when it's warm right here under the covers." Keith says,
"Welp, looks like your feeling better." Lance stands up, a little disappointed, but also glad he was better. He kind of wished he had stayed in the little kid faze a little longer, but he was still gonna make Keith get up and maybe take a walk. "Now get up, you've been a couch potato for to long, time to do something productive." Lance tugs on Keiths arm.
When they get to the doorway, they find Dean patting the piggy slippers on the head like they're puppies and saying, "I'll name you Bobby, and you Sammy." When he sees Lance and Keith, he flushes bright red, wrapping his arms around his knees and looking down quickly. That was so damn childish. What the hell was he thinking? His dad would've burned the slippers the minute he saw them. Better safe than sorry, after all.
"I love it." Lance declared with a smile. "Has anyone seen Cas? He like disappeared after we made cookies." Lance looks around a bit.
"We made cookies?" Keith says. Lance spins to look at him, and just like Lance thought, he doesn't remember anything, maybe that was a good thing, but Lance can't hide his frown as much as he wanted to.
"Yeah, we made Christmas cookies. All of us."
"Don't sweat it." Dean says, still blushing, but trying to act normal. "Some memory loss is totally normal. You're lucky it wasn't something random and permanent. I can't remember anything from when I was six 'cause I hit my head so hard." He turns to Lance. "And I think Cas is out on the back porch with his angel cookies, hoping his family will notice and forgive him." Man, does he feel bad for that baby in a trench coat.
"Oh, I'm just gonna let him be for now." Lance decides. "Keith do you want to taste a cookie we made?" Lance asks trying a smile.
"Uh…" Keith's eyes widen slightly and he looks over Lance's shoulder to Dean for help, 'we made cookies… together?' he says with his eyes.
Dean nods and mouths 'damn well adorable'. Keith looks back to Lance a light blush across the bridge of his nose. "I guess." Keith shrugs. Lance smiles and tugs Keith into the kitchen.
"Dean you can come too." Lance says as they enter the kitchen.
For a second, Dean's shocked. Then he shakes his head and stands up. He really needs to remember that things aren't how they used to be. There are people other than Sammy who want him around now. He follows them into the kitchen and stands by his cookies, keeping a careful watch on Sammy's. Nothing and nobody was touching that cookie.
"You were all about the reindeer cookie cutter." Lance says with a smirk handing him a poorly decorated reindeer cookie. Keith looks down at it, then back up at lance.
"We…" Keith pauses not sure how to say this. "And we made this… together?" Keith asks a bit skeptical, not knowing if they were trying to pull a prank on him. Lance blushes.
"I mean, we uh, we made the dough together, but we all frosted the cookies, you frosted that one by yourself, almost, I mean I had to take the frosting away for a second, cause you were dumping it out… and now I'm rambling." Lance turns and looks for a cookie he made while muttering to himself.
"Yeah, you were really into the frosting." Dean says, smirking. "It was… entertaining." Keith looks at him not knowing what he's talking about and Lance drops a cookie on the floor.
"Shit." he bends over to pick it up. "Damn you Dean." he mutters just loud enough for them to hear.
"Wait, what happened?" Keith asks still confused, the look on his face priceless, looking between the blue eyed boy and the green eyed boy.
Dean had gone a little pale. "I've already been damned, Lance. It's not fun." He turned to Keith. "Nothing happened. You were just a little over enthusiastic." He gave Lance another look full of ice. Stupid overly happy son of a bitch.
Keith could tell they weren't telling him something. "No seriously, what did I do. Did I say something?" he asks. "Did I make a joke about the white frosting looking like- well, you know." Keith asks not wanting to further embarrass himself, he looks to lance for an answer and Lance just goes back to softly pressing some sprinkles into the frosting on the cookie he was holding.
Keith looks at Dean, and Dean snaps, "Don't look at me, I'm too busy being damned again." He turned to go, but in the process, he accidentally bumped Sammy's cookie, and it fell off the counter onto the floor. And broke in half.
For a second, he just stares at it. Then, embarrassed by the tears that made an escape before he could stop them, he picks up the pieces and runs out of the room.
"Lance, what the hell did I do?" Keith almost yells at him, now he was desperate for an answer, he couldn't take this any more, but Lance was now worried about Dean, he grabbed a frosting bag and ran to deans room softly knocking on his door, Keith had followed right behind him.
"Dean, buddie, we can fix it, it'll just take a little bit of frosting, it's the super glue of the food world, trust me, Hunk made that very clear when I didn't believe him and he stuck me to the ceiling with it." Lance says through the door.
Dean doesn't say anything in response, but they can hear him crying through the door, so they carefully open it and go in. He's sitting on the floor by the bed, the two halves of the cookie in his hands, rocking backwards and forwards slightly. Lance knelt down in front of him and places and hand on his. Keith walked over and sat next to them.
Lance carefully and slowly reached for half the cookie to apply the frosting to the broken edge looking into Dean's eyes for approval before touching it.
Dean holds the halves out to Lance. "I broke it." he sniffles. "I made it for him, so he could be here, and I broke it." He starts crying harder. "I just want my brother back."
"I'm sorry." Lance whispers. "I can't bring him back, but I can help fix the cookie." Lance frosts it and sticks it back together, he was crafty when it came to cookies and cooking, like his father was. The cookie looked like it hadn't even been broken. "I'm sorry," Lance repeated himself. "I know exactly how you feel." Lance said looking into his eyes. He did, Cas knew the story, Keith, kind of knew the story, but Dean had never heard it. "I lost my family, when I could have spent their lives with them, but I left to be part of Voltron instead, and now their gone, and I didn't get to say goodbye." Lance tries to sum it up.
"You sound like Sammy." Dean whispers. "He left to go to Stanford. Dad was so angry. He said it was all my fault, that it was my job to keep the family together, that I should've tried harder…" Dean looks down. "I should've tried harder, but they were always fighting, and I didn't know what to do. I just wanted to be a family."
"I know nothing can replace your brother, but we are here. Cas is… somewhere… and we want to be… well, we want to be like your family, or as close as it can get. We made cookies, we decorated a tree, tomorrow is Christmas, let's have a good time ok buddie?" Lance sets the frosting on the floor to rest a hand on Dean's knee like he had earlier that day.
"In the kitchen, when you said damn you…" Dean stares at him for a second. "I'm sorry for freaking out. Just… if it were up to me, hell is exactly where I'd be, 'cause then Sammy would still be here. I don't care what they do to me. And Dad used to say that a lot, and… but that's not important. It's no excuse. I've got no right to get upset like that. I'm sorry."
"Dean," Keith cuts in, "you had every right to be upset, you could have been worse, you could have, you know, tried to punch him." Keith smirks. "And then broke a coffee table, but you didn't, you made it clear you didn't appreciate his comment, and now we know to try not to say that." Keith says
"Yeah." Lance says. "I will try harder next time, I can tell you've been trying hard on that thing we talked about."
Dean rubbed his eyes with his fists, looking for all the world like a four year old. "But dad said good soldiers don't…" he trailed off. Shit, Dean, stop it. He told himself. Nobody wants to hear it. It's Christmas, they want to have a good time. They don't want to hear this from you. Nobody wants to hear this from you. Besides, do you really want to share that? The thing that hurts you most of all? No. No you don't.
Don't kill me, this was the best place to cut it off, I promise! but if you wanna know what happened next, let us know, the more comments we get, the faster the next chapter will come out! lot's of love! -Sam