Chapter 4
AN Enjoy. :)
John and Mary get Dean a therapist, and although she doesn't actually help him with Jason, because he isn't making him up. She does help him figure out how to make sure that John and Mary don't see when he has a really bad day, when he misses Jason so much he goes to the bus station and sits there, wondering what would happen if he were to buy a ticket to Gotham.
She points out things about Dean that could be worrying Mary and John, and she tells him things about himself that simply make it easier to hide. He learns how to put on different masks, not simply the ones he used in Gotham, which were mostly a poor kid with big green eyes, the street rat that nobody should mess with, and himself.
He learns to run to the woods behind their house when he's overwhelmed, and he's learned not to punch trees, because it worries them when he hurts himself, but to punch the ground instead, which is less likely to split the skin.
He learns a lot from therapy, nothing that any of them thought he would though.
He also learns a lot from school, but again, not anything that they thought he would.
He learns to call Mary and John, Mom and Dad, and he thinks it'll be good practice for when Mary has her baby, because he doesn't want to confuse it when he calls them Mary and John.
He learns that kids here aren't nearly as street smart as he is, they also know a lot of different things, him and them, he learns how to be polite enough to get his teachers to like him, and rebellious enough for his classmates to fear him.
He learns not to talk about Jason, because it makes John and Mary, Mom and Dad, get these funny looks on their faces, and then they start to treat him more like a little kid.
He doesn't like that.
So he stops mentioning Jason, but he keeps their picture, their bracelet, and their batarang.
Jason on the other hand, ignores the fact that his mother hasn't realised that Dean is gone yet, and spends more time in the small fighting rings than he should, he always keeps his bracelet on, his batarang in his pocket, and their picture in the wallet he's started carrying.
He keeps to a lot of the same routines that him and Dean were used to, except he designates a lot more time to the library than they used to, this time is spent looking for Dean using the computers.
By the time Sammy is born, Jason has grown accustomed to his new reality, missing his twin, and Dean has grown used to the same. The pain sticks around, tightening their chests every time something reminds one of the other. Their birthdays are spent in anger and sadness, and Dean tells John and Mary that he just doesn't like birthdays.
Dean finds it easier to cope with the pain of missing Jason by using Sammy, he spends a lot of time checking on him and Mary, he holds him a lot, and most days, John will come home to them laying on the floor together, Mary on the couch watching them.
Jason uses books to fill the hole that his brother left, not that either of their coping mechanisms work really, but they do distract. Jason can't deny that getting lost in books is his best escape from reality, and Dean can't deny that his baby brother is his.
It's six months after his little brother is born that Dean's life is once again thrust into chaos.
He's given his baby brother and told to run, and horror clogs this throat when he sees only his father emerge from the fiery house, he had seen Mary on the ceiling when John gave him Sammy, but he had hoped that she had been okay, that he had still been a little asleep, that he had seen it wrong. He hadn't.
A year and a half since he's seen Jason, a year and a half was all it took for this fragile safeness to fall apart beneath his feet.
It didn't take long for his father to begin going on about monsters, and at first Dean didn't believe him, but it didn't take long to convince him, and once he was convinced, it was his new obsession. Instead of taking care of Sammy as his coping mechanism, he trained to hunt. His father changed from the man he knew, he liked alcohol like his mother liked drugs, but he wasn't as bad, as neglectful, he didn't bring people home who would hurt him and Sammy, so Dean didn't say anything, just took care of John when he needed him to.
Dean didn't say anything when they began travelling across the country, didn't say anything when John, his dad, took him on his first hunt when he turned ten. Even though some part of him knew it was wrong to take a child to fight monsters, Dean liked the outlet for his anger more than he liked scrutinising what his father should and shouldn't be doing.
Taking care of Sammy became something that was as easy as breathing, he loved him, he was his brother, and he was a good baby. He didn't mind parenting him, didn't mind helping him with his schoolwork when he was old enough, didn't mind cooking him dinner and taking him to the park and the library. It reminded him of Jason in a good way, and hunting let him be angry at the world, angry at the cops that hurt them, angry at everything that came together to separate him from his brother.
He let his life become about protecting the brother he had within his grasp, and hunting to channel his anger about the one he didn't. He kept up good grades because it was easy, he fought in school because hunting was never enough for him not to be angry. And he learned that the charming kid in leather jacket inspired fear and respect in the right people, and although he usually had to show them that he wasn't a poser in a leather jacket, it never took more than a fight or two for people to learn not to fuck with him.
He let his Gotham street rat show when he was fighting, when he was hunting. He let his pain bleed through. It was all he allowed though, never wanting to taint Sammy with the same anger that he'd been carrying around his whole life.
Meanwhile, Jason continued to use fighting and the library as his escapes, he didn't want to connect with anybody else, because all it had gotten him was hurt, so while he would never regret having Dean as his brother, he wasn't about to willingly put himself in that position again.
Which is why, when he tried to steal the tires off the Batmobile, when Bruce took him in, he was so resistant to Dick's overbearing hugs, Alfred's cooking lessons and his attempts to teach him manners. Why he was so unwilling to connect with Bruce. At first. Like his twin, years earlier, it was so hard for him to open up, to love, other people, when the only other person he had ever trusted, loved, was his brother, who wasn't there to tell him it was okay, the simple fact that he wasn't there made it so hard for Jason to open up to them.
But the fact that he and Dean had had each other, meant that he didn't have to learn how to properly, healthily, love somebody, he just had to allow himself to admit to loving them, to seeing them as his family.
He never told them about Dean, but they knew about him anyway, at least that he was somebody that Jason loved. They saw the picture that was always in his wallet, they saw the searches on the Batcomputer, Dean Todd, Mary and John, Kansas. They saw how much he did and didn't struggle to love them.
They saw how much anger he had when he went out as Robin, how he was always already angry when he went out, that it didn't take anything special to rile him up. How he was always ready for a fight, whether or not he should have engaged. They might not have put it all together, but they saw them as individual pieces of the puzzle.
It was when Jason was fifteen that everything changed.
He was killed.
Dean was sick in bed for days, he didn't know why it felt like someone had carved a hole in his chest, but it did. He didn't know why he felt like crying. But he did.
John was off on a hunt when it happened, but Sam was there, and he was scared. He didn't know why his unshakeable big brother was lying in bed crying, looking like he'd been stomped on by an elephant. He was only six. He didn't understand, but he did know how to make himself cereal or soup when he was hungry, he knew to bring Dean soup and make sure he drank water.
By the time Dean got out of bed, he had realised that the hole in his chest wasn't going to go away, but the physical pain passed, so he pulled himself out of bed and into the shower. Then he made Sammy some real food, and he put him to bed for the first time in four days, he lied and he told him that he was okay.
He wasn't.
It wasn't until he was seventeen that the hole went away, he isn't sure exactly when, because he had grown so used to the hollow feeling, that he hadn't realised when it started fading.
He never told anyone about it, not even Sammy when he asked. He never told John, knowing that the man wouldn't have really cared, would have given him that same look that he used to give him when he mentioned his twin.
So while the hole in Dean's chest faded, Jason raged. His once piercing blue eyes turned a glowing green, his pitch hair now had a streak of stark white through the front of it. He was experiencing pit rage.
Dean never stopped looking for his brother, although as he grew up it moved to the back burner, something to work on when he had time off, when he was supposed to be doing homework, or he was injured. It became less of an obsession as time went on, and the same applied for Jason.
He went from using every spare, and not spare, minute looking for his brother, to doing it when he was in between cases, or when he was injured and had some down time.
By the time Jason was back on civil terms with his family, Dean had gotten his GED and began hunting full time, although he tended to work in or around the town that him and Sammy were staying in at the time, John off on his own, usually states away.
By the time Sammy is eighteen, he's applied to seven different colleges, and is waiting on acceptance letters. He doesn't tell Dean, but he knows anyway. Dean doesn't tell John, but he finds out. John tells Sammy that if he walks out the door, he's not ever welcome back, Sam walks out the door, and Dean is angry.
He might not blame John for losing Jason, but he doesn't find him faultless, he knows that if he had stayed in Gotham he would have found his brother. What he does blame him completely for, is losing another brother.
He knows that John is the reason that Sammy cuts contact, he knows that John regrets what he said, but he can't find it in himself to care. John pushed his brother away, and Dean was angry, so John left. He decided that it was time they hunt on their own, he called Dean periodically to let him know that he wasn't dead, and occasionally to tell him where a hunt was located.
It was then that Dean knew, really knew, that the man he met when he was eight was gone. That the man who bandaged his hands when he got so angry he hit walls, trees, and other kids, was gone. The man who sang to him when he had nightmares, gone. The man who loved his wife and sons more than anything else, gone. He knew that all his father really cared about anymore, was revenge, hunting the yellow eyed demon. He knew that on some paternal level, his father loved him and Sam, he was just incapable of showing it anymore. It didn't make him love his father any less, didn't make him follow his orders any less, it just made him… sad.
He took his anger about his missing twin, his sadness at his broken father, his despair at another brother gone, this time of his own doing, and he channeled it into his masks, he made himself the most charming, darkly humored, flirty guy around. He wanted to fit in wherever he went, didn't want questions. So he flirted with anything with a pulse, he smirked at anything, made everything into a joke, he shoved all of his real emotions down, he used those feelings to create something new, someone, new.
When his father disappeared he went and retrieved his baby brother, he dragged him back into hunting, and they searched.
They went through a lot before they found him, and even then, it didn't last long, it wasn't a few days before disaster struck and John sacrificed himself for Dean.
It didn't end there though. It never does.
Sammy died.
A deal was made.
Dean went to hell.
Jason felt an utterly empty pain in the center of his chest, one which passed after four months, but wasn't any less painful or confusing than when it happened to Dean years earlier.
Dean was gripped tight and raised from perdition.
Sam and Dean started and stopped the apocalypse.
Sam was possessed by Lucifer.
Dean finds normal.
Sam returns soulless.
They fix it.
Dean goes to purgatory.
Sam finds normal.
Dean returns without Cas.
They find him.
Sam and Dean catch a case in Gotham.
Dean is scared to go home, scared to find out that his brother has been dead, or is apart of one of the many gangs.
He's scared to know what happened to his twin, because even though he's been searching for him since they were separated, John made sure that they never took cases in Gotham, and Dean was always too afraid of finding out something he didn't want to know, that he didn't question it.
AN Thoughts? Good? Bad? Meh? Lemme know what you think. :)