A/N: See, I told you I would update! Now enjoy a little time with Dean.

Chapter twenty

Dean had been tearing his hair out for two whole weeks now. Why had his brother done a runner right after he had rescued him? He may never know. That ungrateful brat had been giving him one headache after another since he had entered Dean's life, what a freaking drama queen.

When Sam's disappearing act had been deduced, Dean been pissed... And worried. And being so worried was making him even more pissed. He had long since learnt that getting so worked up about someone only led to heartache... And that worried him too.

He had immediately called Sam only to leave a message that was admittedly more intense than was helpful. Bobby however, had surprisingly been the least worried of everyone. Dean would have thought the surrogate father figure would have at least been worried about the fact that Sam had felt the need to run away, even if the guy was fairly confident that Sam was out of Azazel's crosshairs for now.

Bobby had only tried calling Sam once but the device had already been turned off... Probably in reaction to Dean's earlier voicemail.

His dad had been just straight up pissed at everything. He had been pissed at Sam for running off, he had been pissed at Dean for allowing it to happen, he had been pissed at Bobby for seemingly not caring and then he had been pissed at Dean again when Bobby asked Dean what the hell he had said to Sam to scare him off.

When the bickering had finally died down, the supposed tech genius Ash had been called again, but since Sam's phone had been turned off, there wasn't much he could do to track it until it was turned back on again. Bobby suggested they all go home, it was pretty clear that Sam didn't want to be found and if that were the case, finding him would be next to impossible. It made more sense to go home where Sam could easily find them when he was ready.

"So that's it? You're just gonna give up without even trying? Do you even care at all?" Dean accused. It had definitely been the wrong thing to say.

"Don't you dare try telling me I don't care, boy!" Bobby thundered, "You might have seen some of Sam's memories but I know that kid like the back of my hand! Sam has been trained by one of the best hunters out there since he was barely knee high. If he don't wanna be found, he ain't gonna be. Now until Sam surfaces again I can either go on a wild goose chase or I can do something useful!"

Dean still didn't really want to admit that Bobby had had a point, but he eventually had to make the admission anyway, that concession being the catalyst for Dean picking up the phone to Bobby two weeks later.

"Hello?" They grizzled hunter's tone was curt, "Who's this?"

"Hi Bobby, it's Dean." He began.

"Dean? What do you want, boy?" Dean took the slight softening of Bobby's tone as encouragement.

"Can you teach me to hunt demons?"

"What?"

"I said, can you-"

"I heard you the first time," Bobby cut him off, "What I want to know is why you think something so monumentally stupid would be a good idea."

"Because I've seen them, I know they're out there. I've been attacked by them and if Sam hadn't been there, me and my dad would be dead right now as well."

"If Sam hadn't been there, you wouldn't have been attacked in the first place. Your mom walked away from you so you wouldn't have to live the life of a hunter. She wanted better for you."

"Bobby, are you seriously telling me that demons never randomly attack innocent people? I thought you said they were agents of chaos or something and they just loved to hurt people with no rhyme or reason."

"...That's true," Bobby grudgingly admitted.

"Plus I don't give a rat's ass what my mom wanted, she tore my family apart! She gave up being a mom to me a long time ago and I've seen Sam's memories of what she turned into, she doesn't deserve any say in what I do! My little brother is out there all alone and with a huge target on his back from the king of hell himself. Maybe I won't be much help in a fight but I can damn well make sure I'm not a liability!"

"Fine. I can see stubbornness is a family trait with you boys."

Dean took down Bobby's address and promised he would be there the next evening. As he was hanging up the phone a cough announced a presence behind him and he jumped and whirled to face his dad.

"Dean, what are you doing?" John asked tiredly.

"You told me to get a job." Dean defended.

"Because you're eating me out of house and home; a job would help with the bills and stop you moping about the place."

"Well I'll be out of your hair anyway. I'm going to be there for my brother."

"Don't you think Bobby would be a better person to handle that?"

"That's why I want him to teach me about demons. Three heads are better than two." Dean explained.

John looked chargrinned, "Look, I know he's your brother but do you really have to go risking your life fighting demons?"

"He's your son too." Dean bit back.

He turned on his heel and stalked to his bedroom. He haphazardly threw his belongings into a bag and within ten minutes was stood by the door staring awkwardly at his father.

"Why do you want to do this? You saw what those demons were like, it's... dangerous. And it's crazy."

"I know it's dangerous. Why do you think I want to know how to fight those things? ...And who knows, maybe if I help Sam save a few lives you'll finally be proud of me."

With his last sentence Dean opened the door and took his first steps to becoming a hunter. Dean internally cringed at the cheesiness of the thought - but he couldn't be on top form all the time - and twenty-six uneventful hours later he arrived at Singer Salvage.

His arrival was met with Bobby's usual crustiness but Dean didn't really expect anything else.

"Well don't stand around gawking all day, get your ass in here." Bobby called from the porch as Dean took stock of his surroundings. "I hope you like reading." He muttered as he turned and shuffled back into the old, sunbleached house that looked like it had been plucked straight from an episode of Scooby Doo.

Dean sighed at the mention of reading, already feeling the tinges of regret colour his decision to come here. But he shook it off quickly and followed Bobby into the house trying not to compare himself to Luke Skywalker too much, he was more of a Han Solo type anyway.

He dumped his belongings on the bed he was shown - the rusty metal frame creaking ominously as he did so - took a look around the room, and headed back downstairs. He made his way to the second most important room in the house and set about acquiring coffee and sustenance. Bobby was stirring some tinned chilli in a pan and Dean realised it had been nowhere near long enough since he had encountered cooking as bad as his dad's. He wrinkled his nose in distaste and distracted himself from saying something stupid by seeing to his caffeine needs.

Unfortunately he wasn't distracted for long enough. "So... That's what you call dinner around here, is it?"

"My house may be many things, but the Ritz ain't one of them." Bobby replied sternly, "So you can get any fancy ideas out of your head right now."

Dean sidestepped Bobby as the old hunter moved to serve the lumpy substance that barely passed for food. He grumbled under his breath as he sat down to eat and as he ate the food, his grumbling was barely interrupted by the act. Bobby simply rolled his eyes and glared at Dean for his whining and the array of disgusted faces Dean was pulling with varying degrees of subtlety, and managed to otherwise ignore him. Until he had finished his own helping and had nothing to distract him from Dean's obvious suffering.

"Well that's the best you're gonna get out of me, so you're just gonna have to make your peace with it." He finally rebuked.

"Or how about I cook?"

After three weeks of living at Bobby's, Dean had decided that this was the life for him; sure the bed was possibly the most uncomfortable thing he had ever attempted to sleep on, but the beer was good and the whisky even better. And it was kinda fun in the afternoons, shooting targets with the old geezer and throwing knives - he had never actually thrown a knife before and he had clearly been missing out.

Even the reading hadn't been too bad but Dean suspected that was probably because Bobby had the patience of a saint - and the shrewdness to quickly give up on insisting he read for more than a couple of hours a day.

"To be honest," Bobby sighed, "No hunter's gonna know everything anyway. There's too many monsters and too much lore for anyone to have it all crammed into their heads. I still get calls from hunters who have been in the game for twenty years or more asking me to look something up for them. We'll just give you the basics and then focus on demons since you seem to be so fixated on them... " he had muttered as he turned to sort through the books on his desk.

"Yeah, because when those demons attacked I couldn't even do anything!"

"Dean, demons are not beginner level monsters. They're the closest thing this world has to pure evil, a lot of hunters steer clear of them altogether."

"Well Sam didn't!"

"Sam couldn't! He didn't have a choice in the matter! You know that. Do you really wanna hunt demons out of some sort of sibling rivalry?" Bobby asked appalled.

"No!" Dean protested vehemently.

"Then what the hell are you trying to prove?"

"I'm trying to prove that I haven't screwed up my life so badly that I can't make it right! I used to think I had it so bad, you know? My mom ran away when I was little and my dad never got over it..." Dean's selfdepricating snideness was cutting, "I sound like such a whiny little bitch! And all that time I was busy feeling sorry for myself my brother was..." Dean was getting too worked up to follow his own train of thought.

"There was no way you could have known - and even if you had, there was no way you could have stopped it." Bobby said unusually gently for him.

"I know, I know. But that doesn't mean I can't help now. I want to make amends for all the crap I've pulled. I want to be a proper big brother and I wanna kill that bastard demon for ruining my family."

Bobby smirked, "Well then, you best get to work."

And that had been that. The pair had quickly fallen into the habit of getting the theory out of the way early in the day and fill the afternoons with more practical skills and the evenings with tv and, more often than not, beer. Until one morning, at the kitchen table, mug of coffee encircled by one hand as it rested on the worn table and crinkled newspaper clutched in the other, Bobby suggested they go on a hunt.

"Sure," Dean replied with raised eyebrows through the steam of his own coffee. "What are we hunting?"

"Looks like a ghost to me. There have been a suspicious amount of disappearances along a stretch of road in Jericho, California." Bobby replied as he squinted at this relevant article.

"How do you know it's a ghost?"

"Because it's a fairly short stretch of road and spirits can't move too far away from whatever's tying them to this world. That and it's a pretty strict pattern: always men, always an abandoned car, no bodies, no signs of a struggle..."

"Huh. So now we just go down there, figure out who the ghost is and burn the bones. Right?"

"Gotta salt them too, but you pretty much got it. Go get ready, I wanna be in on the road within half an hour."

They rolled up at a cheap motel and booked two rooms for a couple of nights and shared a quick dinner at a nearby diner. Once Dean was alone in his room he couldn't help but think back to the last time he had been in one of these tasteless, generic rooms. He still didn't understand why Sam had run away and the rejection still stung. He had just saved the kid! What had he done wrong?

Angrily Dean pushed the thought away and rolled over in his bed banishing the thoughts but being unable to quell the feelings they evoked as easily. Trying to guide himself into sleep he steered his mind to more pleasant, relaxing thoughts, thoughts that were soft and had plentiful curves and tonight they had long dark hair.

They next morning was spent at the local library searching for violent deaths in the area about a decade old, after they had had a brief nosey about the victim's car. Bobby had left him in the truck, telling him to watch and learn before swaggering up to the police and conning all the information he could get out of them. That had been kinda cool, but being sat in a dusty library going through article after article about local deaths circa nineteen-ninety-five while Bobby cross-checked biographies of the victims was considerably less cool.

He bookmarked the handful of deaths that hinted at violence in that year, only having a general idea what he was looking for, and once he reached August - and the end of his attention span - he tapped Bobby on the shoulder.

"Hey, any of these looking likely to you?"

Bobby leant over and skimmed the articles Dean had saved, "No, none of these are violent enough to produce a spirit... Maybe it's about unfinished business?" He muttered. "Move over. I'm going to have another look through these, you have a look through the victims and see if you can see the connection I'm missing."

Dean rolled his eyes and switched desks as instructed. For the rest of the day Dean resigned himself to researching in half hour spurts with snack breaks in between courtesy of the enormous bag of sweets he had brought with him. Although Dean didn't manage to make a connection besides the obvious, at nearly closing time for the library Bobby announced he had found what he was looking for.

"A suicide?" Dean asked dubiously, "Why would someone who wanted to die stick around afterwards? Wouldn't they be the first to move on?"

"Suicides are never about how, they're always about why... Were all those victims in a relationship?"

Baffled by the sudden segue but knowing better than to question it, Dean checked and reported back that the victims were, in fact, all in relationships when they had bit the dust. "But what's that got to do with anything?"

"I'm pretty sure we're dealing with a woman in white. It is a ghost but it's a ghost of a woman who was betrayed by her husband and, after drowning her kids and committing suicide, she now preys on the unfaithful from beyond the grave." Bobby explained.

Dean nodded solemnly as he absorbed the sad story.

Then Dean suddenly perked up. "Well I don't know about you, but I could really go for a burger right now. Fancy some dinner?"

"Sure," Bobby muttered good naturedly before lifting himself out of the chair that had been his home for the last five hours. Dean wasn't sure if the creaking he heard was the chair or Bobby's bones.

Bobby shuffled after Dean, cursing his old age and Dean's youthful stride as he stalked ahead with ease towards the exit, a flirtatious smile and a nod aimed towards the librarian.

The poor girl only narrowed her eyes at him and Dean heard Bobby catching up with him. He let out a small chuckle at Dean's expense and said, "I honestly don't know what you use for a brain more, your stomach or your dick."

Dean turned and scowled at Bobby as the glass door closed behind them, "This isn't funny Bobby! I haven't had any action in over a month. That's... unheard of for me!"

"Maybe you're just not her type," Bobby offered, still trying to stifle his amusement as climbed into his truck.

Fortunately the waitress at the diner was a lot more receptive to Dean's charms, in fact she was positively enthusiastic, so Dean wasted no time in securing the deal, relieved he was finally having a night of quality fun.

The next evening Dean found himself kidnapped by a very attractive but also very angry ghost. He struggled frantically with the locks as the truck drove itself along the road, eventually easing to a stop in front of a dilapidated house. Then the ghost was freaking coming on to him! If it hadn't been for the fact that she was dead and had immediate plans for him to join her in the afterlife he might have been tempted... But yeesh!

Then Bobby was shooting rock salt through the window and through her, shouting at him to take her home.

"What?" Dean quizzed, how could he take a freaking ghost home? And why would be want to?

The ghost materialised again only to be dissipated almost instantly by another shot from Bobby.

"Just drive the ghost into the house!" he yelled.

When the penny dropped Dean could feel the chill that accompanied the ghost's manifestation and floored it, crashing through the rotted timber walk easily.

If the ghost seemed angry before, she was enraged now. There was a terrible screeching at a pitch the human ear was clearly not designed to endure and furniture which had no business being airborne, flying across the room. All of it stopped when two more ghosts turned up.

The sight of two pale, translucent children, dripping wet and stone faced appearing at the top of the creaking staircase was just about the creepiest thing Dean had ever witnessed. They even filled the woman in white with terror. Dean could only watch as the creepiest family reunion in the world went down and on boy did it go down! Like, probably all the way down to hell.

Dean was still transfixed as the lightshow ended and Bobby started shoving at the heavy wooden dresser that was pinning them both.

"Do you fancy lending a hand any time soon Dean, or are you starting to like it under here?" Bobby griped.

"Huh?" Dean blinked as his awareness expanded behind the ghostly spectacle, "Oh. Yeah... Right."

Dean added his strength to Bobby's and the dresser fell away and then... all there was left to do was clear up and clear out.