Dean stared blankly at the monitor in front of him. The yahoo search bar seemed to be taunting him, waiting for input. All around him were the soft sounds he associated with small town libraries. The low murmurs of hushed voices conferring with each other, papers crinkling and pages being turned, all set to the rhythm of click-click-clickity-clack, his neighbor's fingers tapping on a keyboard.
Sadly not the kind of place where he could just bring a bottle of beer and take a swig to brace himself. Not at barely past noon, anyway. God. Dean was going to have to do this sober and in public.
Gritting his teeth, he pressed down the first few keys.
effacts of
He backspaced to correct himself.
For much of his childhood, Dean had been terrible at spelling, never quite able to catch up to his peers. But one summer Bobby had taken a look at his incomprehensible scrawl, shaken his head, and then put him through what could only be described as Spelling Bee Bootcamp. In their line of work, Bobby had explained, spelling a monster's name wrong led to missing out on critical information regarding its strengths and weaknesses.
In other words, it led to a sloppy and dead hunter.
At the time, Bobby's harrowing spelling lessons had seemed rather pointless. It had been evident even back then that Dean was the brawn of the family, not the brains, and he could always outsource research to someone else. Dad, Bobby, and eventually Sam.
Sam, the bitch, had been practically born with the ability to read and write. When Dean had been learning his ABCs, Sam had crawled into his lap and demanded to be taught as well. Despite the four year age gap, there had never been a time that his younger brother couldn't keep up with Dean when it came to reading books. Indeed, for most of Dean's life, Sam's reading comprehension skills surpassed his own.
effects of
Of course, Sam had someone to teach him to read and write, but Dean had just been thrown into the merciless jaws of ever-changing schools. Maybe if things had been different, Dean could have been different. He could have earned himself a scholarship, too.
Or not.
Maybe he'd always been destined to end up a high school dropout with a GED and his unstable home life just provided a convenient excuse for why he was as stupid as he was.
But no matter what Sam thought, he was not that stupid.
He'd always known. Well, maybe not always, but for a long time. Teachers had whispered it, Sam had roared it, social workers had pinned him with a critical eye over it. What this thing was called, between him and Dad and Sam.
Abuse.
But frankly, this was a word for normal people, not the Winchesters. The ones who grew up safe in homes untouched by fire and monsters, who couldn't possibly understand why being raised this way was necessary. Why it had to be this way even if it resulted in all of them getting damaged, because it was better to be damaged than to be dead.
Words couldn't capture the scope of it all, the complexity. Normal folk, they made labels out of singular desperate acts, no matter how justified. But it wasn't as simple as saying that just because Sammy and he suffered aftereffects from neglect, that this made Dad… Dad, who saved lives and tried his best even though he was cracked in the head…
It wasn't as simple as saying that just because someone told a lie, that they were a liar. Like that was all this person had ever been, like that word could capture the whole of a man. If someone told 99 truths and a single lie, were they a liar? How about 80 truths and 20 lies?
Dean didn't know where the line was, exactly. What he did know was that being aware of all the shit that was really out there punted that line somewhere where normal people wouldn't draw it. Like Eve and the apple, once you knew, your sense of morality could never be the same as before.
But of course, normal people had found a word for this concept Dean was getting at, too, to instantly dismiss Dean's thinking there.
Two words, actually. Abuse apologist.
Well fuck whoever had invented that term because Dean knew that what he was getting at was nothing but the truth. There was one set of morality for peace, and another for times of war. And his father had been at war since his family's peaceful existence had burned up alongside Mom on that ceiling.
Fuck, but he hated to put this into words. He might not be on speaking terms with the man at the moment, but he didn't want to pin this label on him. But Dean did it anyway, because a library computer's search function was merciless like that and he knew that this was where he had to start looking, or he'd never find the answers he needed.
effects of childhood abuse
Dean paused, stared at those words, and after a moment added:
effects of childhood abuse older brothe
He backspaced to correct himself.
effects of childhood abuse on eldest sibling
Parentification.
It drew his eye, that word, attention shifting like it was caught in a gravitational pull. Perhaps because Dean knew its meaning before he even read the definition. It was plain, honest language that made intuitive sense, which already put it above most of the jargon in this book, and gave name to what his gut had always been telling him. Sammy was his little brother, but he was also more. Or perhaps it was more accurate to say that Dean was more, had always been expected to be more than what he actually was.
Dean being an older brother wasn't enough. Dad had thrust his own responsibilities on Dean's shoulders, and then tossed Mom's saintly corpse on top, too. Naturally, Dean had buckled under the weight of the three disparate roles he was expected to play. Mother, father, brother - he was meant to be all at once, and ended up being nothing.
So yeah.
Now he had a pithy label for that whole mess.
What good was the label, though? What was he supposed to do now that he'd been turned into this strange hybrid? The book in his hands held no answer to that. It described all his symptoms in loving, excruciating detail, all of Dean's pain dissected and meticulously laid out right there on the page. But when it came to the whole point of this stupid exercise, the next section which Dean had been looking forward to, well.
That was when the text suddenly grew sparse.
Actually, it was a rather long section, it just had nothing at all to say. Pretty language that was all fluff, no substance, and Dean was beginning to suspect this was just their affirmation-jargon-filled way of saying you can't do shit about it because the damage was already done. Jesus, the coddling in these books was like something straight out of kindergarten.
Could have just written incurable, nothing to be done, try not to drink yourself to death, good luck. But no, let's make Dean sift through five pages of nauseating bullshit.
Find a way to honor your inner child, the book said, and Dean snorted. Who talked like this? Sure, he'd build himself a little shrine and burn some incense, then he'd feel better. Take responsibility for your emotions, like Dean hadn't been shouldering responsibility his whole damn life and wasn't that the problem? Tell your story free of shame. To who? How was he supposed to get rid of the shame? Just snap his fingers, and boom, lifetime trauma solved?
Seriously, people paid money for this? Was therapy really just a scam where people sat around telling some guy their problems so they could answer with the dubious wisdom found inside a fortune cookie, and then got paid two hundred bucks an hour for that?
Shit, maybe Dean should become a shrink himself. Sounded like a sweet gig. You lend some chump a willing ear so he could think through his problems out loud and point out some blind spots maybe, and then get paid the big bucks. Toss in a Confucious quote, too. As a treat.
You could get that for free in any church, just find a priest and spill your guts. Maybe that was all that shrinks really were. Secular priests. That you had to pay for because secular meant capitalism, baby. We're not trying to save souls here, we're running a business.
Yeah, well, Dean and priests had never gotten along, and he liked this new version of them even less. God has a plan for you, Dean, Pastor Jim used to say, and, well, there was a reason he'd latched onto Bobby and not the only righteous man among John Winchester's friends. Yeah, Dean didn't need any more father figures with convoluted plans that fucked up his life, thanks. That this might all be according to God's plan just tells Dean the dude's sadistic.
So Dean, a staunch atheist since the age of four, had run from Bible study and its talks of hellfire, and gotten attached to a crotchety old man who drank too much and spoke more wisdom in ten minutes than most people did their entire lives. Fuck, but he missed Bobby. He wanted to show this nonsense book to him and have a laugh about it together.
Above him, the solitary lightbulb flickered, casting the dingy hotel room in distorted shadows. Dean slammed the book shut, and added it to the growing pile next to him.
It was just Dean's luck that a hunt would cross his path right when he wasn't looking for one anymore. He dutifully stowed his therapy project and started researching the cold case of several children going missing in the area.
The therapy-speak was leaking into Dean's thoughts and it was the funniest shit ever. When the rawhead slammed him against a wall, making his ears ring with the force of the percussion, the words I'm going to die floated through his head. They were promptly followed up with: Stop negative thinking. Catch yourself when you begin to think negatively.
For reasons known only to his demented brain, the therapy-voice was quite distinct from Dean's regular thoughts, and it sounded like Sam at his most bitchy and pedantic.
Thankfully, that voice grew quiet past this point. Adrenaline flooded his body as thought fled, Dean's instincts unerringly guiding him through the flow of battle. Fuck, but he loved this part of hunting, always had, when there was nothing but him and the enemy he had to tear apart, senses narrowed to pinpoints and the drumbeat of his heart pounding in his ears.
After that charming near-death experience, Dean decided to put hunting on hold for good, at least until he got his head screwed on straight. That had been cutting it way too close and it turned out he actually did manage to scrape together a little will to live to get out of there by the skin of his teeth.
Dean didn't really know how to dig himself out of this hole and there still was no light at the end of this tunnel that he could see, but fuck, apparently deep down, so deep he couldn't even feel it most of the time, there was still part of him that desperately wanted to live.
Hey, maybe it was that famous inner child he'd read so much about. Thing was, Dean Winchester had never really allowed himself to think he'd ever been a child. In his memories, he was always his current age, and that didn't really make sense but maybe it was a coping mechanism or whatever. Because when he thought back to some of the shit he went through as a kid and tried to picture a child standing there in his place, just a stranger, a child that was not Dean Winchester, looking sweet and young and innocent and pushing that baby brother button in Dean's head without actually being Sammy, then…
Well, it made him want to murder every son of a bitch responsible for that, and Dean would rather not add patricide to his list of sins.
He didn't dare imagine Sammy in his place. Because wanting to murder John Winchester was one thing, that was the sort of reaction the man inspired in half the people he met, but then there was murdering Bobby, too, because he had just stood there and watched and offered that bit of kindness, yeah, but why hadn't he shot John Winchester when he had the chance and then taken these two small boys in properly–
So yeah, good thing Dean had never really been an innocent child to begin with. That was a dark corner of Dean's psyche best left unexplored.
Didn't mean he couldn't explore some other corners. Project DIY Therapy was back on, which meant going back to the library. Well, Dean kept saying the library like it was a single one, but it was a series of small town libraries. They all had their unique charms and quirks, even if the selection could be limited, but they were similar enough to one another to blend together so that Dean called it going to the library, like going to the diner as if there wasn't always a different one.
Dean wasn't actually trying to earn a degree here, the psychology 101 stuff was more than enough. He just made sure the town he stopped in for the week had a library with a mental health section. Then he steered clear of the obvious scams that marketed themselves as self-help and tried to find books about the underlying science of it all instead.
He hit the road when he started feeling restless, about once a week, a long drive with nothing but the road and Baby for company so he could process what he'd learned. Dean always did have his best epiphanies on the road, his subconscious mind wandering off into the boonies to play with all the new concepts in his head while Dean concentrated on driving.
So he zigzagged his way across the midwest, going nowhere in particular and on some weird quest to find a reason to keep going. Trouble was, he was growing increasingly convinced that psychology as a field was largely pseudoscience and that the secular priests' God wasn't real either.
Hey Dean, so get this, said the shrink in Dean's head. Children who grow up with emotionally unavailable parents are at risk for becoming codependent.
No shit, Sherlock. You put two scared kids into a run-down motel room all alone in a world filled with monsters, of course they were gonna have to cling to each other with all their heart. To let go would mean one or both of them got so much closer to being devoured by all that was out to get them.
Healing from codependency , proclaimed the chapter title in big, glossy letters, the whole page tinted in soft pastels because some bold color choices for the font might be too overwhelming and give the fragile readers a case of the vapors. And there, phrased in the most clinical yet sickly-sweet language, the page laid out the most horrifying thing that Dean Winchester, professional monster hunter, had ever read and called it healing .
Crunch, crunch. That would be the sound of Sam's bones breaking while he was being eaten alive by something Dean wasn't there to save him from because Dean had self-actualized and healed from his codependency. It was like the proverbial omelet, except the omelet was the improvement of Dean's mental health and the eggs needing to be broken were Sammy's bones.
Had to be done. Self-care, baby brother. Time to draw some boundaries to keep the screams out.
Sam would have been so proud of Dean for growing as a person. Sadly, Sam wasn't there to confirm this for sure as he would die at the tender age of 23. It must have given him great comfort while he died crying for his older brother that Dean had finally gotten over their toxic enmeshment.
Rest in pieces, Sammy.
It would be a good thing that Dean wasn't codependent anymore, or this sort of outcome might have been devastating and leave Dean unable to function. But now Dean would mourn his brother in a healthy manner, being sad for exactly one month and two weeks and no more, and then he would find himself a job and a wife and finally became a productive member of society. Naturally, he would allow himself to mourn on the anniversary of Sam's death as well. Perhaps he might even shed a tear or two.
Oh, and one of his 2.4 kids would be named Samantha.
She would die, tragically, at the age of 8 and Dean would not do maladjusted things like scream at the heavens and put a bullet through his brain at last. No, he would call his therapist–the one he would go to every week already, and this, too, would be healthy–and politely request some pills.
Now, Dean was not normally one to deface a library book, he really wasn't, but there was a first time for everything and every man had his limits. He didn't consciously decide to tear that page out and start shredding it into itty-bitty pieces, it just sort of happened to Dean's body while Dean's mind was off in la-la-land daydreaming about what it'd mean for him to heal .
Like his love for his brother was a disease he needed to recover from. That love was the only reason either of them had made it to adulthood and sometimes it was the only thing dragging Dean out of bed in the morning. When a vengeful spirit had him pinned to the wall, slowly choking the life out of him, it was Sammy's face flashing before his eyes that had given Dean the desperate burst of strength needed to raise his shotgun and blast that thing full of rock salt more than once.
No, to let go of Sammy now wouldn't be healing, it would be death. For Sam, maybe, and for Dean, definitely. Because once he'd clawed every bit of Sammy out from under his skin and mutilated his love for him, cutting and cutting away until it was deemed small enough to be socially acceptable, there would be a stranger left standing after that whole process. That man would not be Dean Winchester and he would have a gaping hole where his heart should be.
Yeah, Dean knew that the intensity of his love for Sam was the result of abuse. But the damage was done. Trying to bend him back into a normal shape wouldn't be healing, it would be torture. You couldn't take a chainsaw to a tree that had grown crooked, curled around another tree's stem, and expect two normal, healthy trees to emerge from that.
Some shit you just had to live with and his love for Sammy was the one good thing that had come out of his nightmare of a childhood, so why were these fucking books trying to tell him that he was sick for wanting to keep it?
Spring slowly turned into summer until Dean opened his eyes one morning to find it was John Winchester's birthday.
Dean tried to ignore it. Really, in their family, birthdays were no big deal, and Dad had forgotten his share of Dean's birthdays over the years.
Sam was the one who'd faithfully remembered every single one and given him presents. But seeing how they were poor as shit and Sammy, being the youngest and neither in charge of the money nor given an allowance, didn't have much to work with in terms of resources. So Sammy's gifts had come in two flavors: handmade crap while he was young and practical gifts when he got older, like gun oil and ammo.
Not a lot of those gifts had survived the years, either used up or lost to their constant moving around. The Winchesters didn't have a fridge where they could have pinned that adorable drawing 7-year-old Sammy had given 11-year-old Dean, and 11-year-old Dean had not yet understood the value of such gifts and hadn't given enough thought to how to preserve them. So the only one of Sammy's gifts that had survived to this day was the amulet 25-year-old Dean still faithfully wore around his neck.
Dean's 23rd birthday had been a shock to the system. He hadn't really expected a gift from Sammy, though some foolish part of him had hoped for one, but he genuinely had expected a call. Or at least a text. If there ever was a day to break the radio silence Sam had maintained for half a year at that point, it'd surely be on Dean's birthday.
So Dean had spent his 23rd birthday grappling with the realization that Sam wasn't just cooling off for a little while, no, it was quite possible he would never speak to Dean ever again for the rest of his life.
And, well. That was when Dad had suddenly started celebrating Dean's birthdays. Though it wasn't really a celebration, that wasn't the right word for it. It was more like an annual funeral for their family, every year on Dean's birthday. Dad made sure they had the day off and they drove somewhere nice to look at, and they'd spend the day drinking beer, shooting the shit, and being absolutely miserable but in a way that felt nice because they were stewing in misery together.
Though Dean tried to go through what might be generously termed his routine of breakfast at a diner and then hitting the library to self-actualize or whatever, part of self-actualizing was that it messed with his ability to repress and ignore shit. So when evening rolled around and Dean thought about the next part of his routine - hitting a seedy bar, hustle pool, maybe picking up a chick - he was intensely aware that his dad was likely also in a seedy bar somewhere, doing the same.
Felt creepy, somehow, though it was to be expected. Dean had learned at this guy's knees, after all.
So he checked out a few new books and headed back to his motel room. Dean had started branching out into sociology these past few days, giving the psychology textbooks a rest. He was getting tired of navelgazing and thought maybe there'd be some answers to be found in looking at human group behavior instead of focusing so hard on himself it felt downright narcissistic.
But when he tried to start settling in to read, fuck, h e couldn't stop picturing his dad.
Because Dean was young and pretty, people still smiled at him in seedy bars. They thought him being there was a phase. Ah, youth, strangers thought when they saw him hustle, fully expecting that Dean was just there to have fun, living dangerously because boys will be boys before they grew out of it and became men and respectable members of society. Ha.
Yeah, no, Dean was a permanent fixture there, people just didn't realize it yet. He would never amount to more than this. But those guys who had no more hope of growing out of it, who were permanently stuck just like Dean but visibly so, and who were still desperately trying to get laid just to not be lonely for one night, well. Those guys didn't get smiled at, they got looks crossed between pity and contempt.
Dad deserved to get more than those looks on his birthday. And shit, yeah, Dean was mad at him but also not really, and he remembered what it had been like to hope for a text from Sam on his birthday. So Dean pulled out his phone and sent his dad a text, short and to the point, and hoped it'd cheer him up.
Forget what I said about Sam being right, I was angry and I aimed for where it hurt. Happy birthday, Dad.
Ten minutes later his phone vibrated with an answer, and Dean couldn't not look.
got a hunt lined up. haunting in texas.
And Dean smiled a little, reading what was being said and what wasn't, and answered:
good luck. flying solo in ohio atm, working a case
The case was Dean learning how to love the inner child he wasn't sure he had, but Dad didn't need to know that. It wasn't two minutes before the phone vibrated again.
good luck son
Yeah, Dean would need it, because this was Mission: Impossible, the movie nobody wanted, starring Dean Winchester. It had zero action scenes, wasn't really related in any way to the MI series beyond the title, and was just one long string of pathetic chick flick moments. Box office flop of the year and Tom Cruise was suing for copyright infringement.
Around three hours later, when Dad must have gotten well and truly sloppy drunk to be doing this, the phone vibrated again. Dean sighed, squeezing his eyes shut as he braced himself for whatever this was. His dad could be a mean drunk, real fucking mean, but sometimes he just got sad, and there was nothing worse than seeing your father sobbing his eyes out and calling out for his dead wife. This was a call, not a text, and he let it go to voicemail because nothing good would come of accepting that call.
Dean did not want to hear his old man drunk dialing him on his own birthday because that would be so pathetic it'd really test Dean's resolve to keep his distance for a while. He waited until he was sure his dad wouldn't call again, then picked up his phone to listen, because if a man fell so low, the least you could do was hear what he had to say.
Sammy had probably deleted that one voicemail Dean had once drunkenly left him without listening to it. Yeah, that one had been on a birthday, too.
So when his father's raspy voice started speaking, it surprised Dean by being stone cold sober.
"I'm sorry, son. For everything. I should have trusted you'd be strong enough to stay away from Adam and I don't know why I thought you wouldn't be. You were strong when I was weak and you were only a kid. You're the reason this family stayed together as long as it did. I'm proud of the man you've become, De–"
The beep of the voicemail reaching its end cut off Dean's name, but it was clear that it was what Dad had meant to say. Dean's understanding of the world tilted on its axis, ended, and was reborn anew.
Oh.
So this was another of those hindsight things. An earth-shattering event, impossible yet an inevitability, really, that had been building up for so long it required hardcore denial on Dean's part to have noticed every puzzle piece without putting together the full picture until that picture came together on its own and sucker punched him in the face. Like Stanford.
Because this was it. This was all he had ever wanted to hear, everything he ever needed from John Winchester to make this fucking shitshow all worth it.
And how he could not have seen this coming, Dean didn't know, because it was obvious in everything John Winchester said and did. This moment was coming from the day Dean had decided to take a page from his little brother's playbook.
Dean had sensed it over the last few years, a gut feeling that he was doing something wrong, that Dad thought he was a failure. He'd told himself that he was being paranoid, but he knew his family too well to shake it off. It was there in Dad's hard eyes when he looked at Dean, mouth growing thinner and thinner with each passing year, as if Dean just kept fucking up and making it worse. Dean, frantic, had bent over backwards, been all yessir, no sir, how high should I jump sir, trying to find some way to please this man, and nothing had worked.
And the worst part was that for all that Sammy was convinced that Dad hated him, the man did nothing of the sort. No, even as they screamed the house down with their fights, during the sullen silence in between, Dad liked to sneak glances at Sam and in his eyes Dean could see that their old man was just about bursting with pride.
Growing up well, isn't he, Dad had once casually remarked, as they'd watched 17-year-old Sam practicing his aim on a couple of old beer cans in some woods. And Dean had looked at the soft smile on Dad's face, so rare Dean could count the number of times he saw it per year on one hand, and thought, why don't you ever look at me like that anymore?
There was a reason why Dad had never gone to drag Sam out of Stanford by his ridiculously fluffy hair and instead let him do his thing. It was the same reason why Sam had a demented graduation gift in the works while Dean got fuck-all despite being the loyal son all these years.
It was because John Winchester detested nothing more than a man without a spine.
And that was what Dad had thought of him all this time.
Well, this was the part where Dean's laughter tipped into the outright hysterical.
Because here was the thing: Dean had a spine. His spine was made of fucking titanium, thank you very much, he wouldn't have survived as long as he had if it wasn't. Dean didn't yield because his back was made of jello, it was because he gritted his teeth and made the conscious choice to bow. He loved his family, and no matter how much it hurt to love them sometimes, love them he did.
And all of it meant less than nothing.
Those words weren't for Dean at all, they were directed at a hypothetical Dean who'd made Dad proud and become more like Sam, like Dean lashing out was the result of personal growth and not of despair.
The very traits that his father had deliberately cultivated in Dean when he was young because they helped in raising Sam became a liability as soon as both of them were adults. All that devoted self-sacrifice Dean prided himself on meant nothing, nothing at all to a man like John Winchester.
No, the only son he respected was the one who fought back and didn't let himself get stepped on, who at every turn fiercely asserted his own worth and independence. The one who'd left because he was convinced Dad hated him. The one who probably didn't even give a single shit about today being Dad's birthday and even if he did, the one who'd never have been tempted to throw his old man a bone.
Sam had broken Dad's heart and Dad respected him all the more for it because that was what real men were supposed to do in John Winchester's worldview - charge forward in single-minded pursuit of their goal with no regard for the carnage left behind.
Dean laughed until he cried.
Author's Note:
So I ended up distracted from this story because it was making me sad to be so hard on Sam all the time. This is my love letter to Stanford Era Dean, who is understandably angry at Stanford Era Sam, so I ended up writing a love letter to Sam. Check out my time travel/de-aging fic "A Dream Is A Wish Your Heart Makes" where Pre Series Dean gets to meet Post Series Sam. It's not really connected to this fic except they're conceptually related in my mind. If you like Dean in this story and wish someone would appreciate him already, you will probably enjoy him in that other story because S15!Sam appreciates the hell out of baby!Dean :)
