Chapter 7

AN Enjoy. :)

Dean groans as sunlight suddenly blinds him, even though his eyes are closed. He flips over and drags his pillow with him, pulling it over his head to protect his eyes from the harmful rays.

"Come on Dean, I got us breakfast," Sam says, laughing at the inhuman sound that emanates from the general area of his brother's face.

"I'm up" he hears a few minutes later, and he picks up the now not-so-hot cup of coffee that he got for his brother, placing it in his hand while Dean's eyes are still closed, and he blinks tiredly up at Sam.

"Thank god" he mutters as he downs the first half cup of coffee, pulling himself over to the small table and plopping down, sighing as he pinches the bridge of his nose, no doubt trying to fend off a headache.

"We have to go to the police station today, talk to the coroner and take a look at the newest body." Sam says as he pushes Dean's bag of food across the table to him.

"Yeah, I gotta eat, shower, and change. I'll be ready in twenty." Dean tells him, stuffing half of his breakfast sandwich in his mouth.

"Yeah, in the meantime, I'm going to see if I can't figure out why the demon is choosing these people to possess, and why it's killing so many of them. It doesn't make sense, if it wanted to stay under the radar, you would think that it wouldn't be dropping so many bodies" Sam says, looking over at Dean, who is still stuffing his face, and holds a finger up. Sam waits for him to swallow enough to form a sentence.

"Unless it wants to be caught," Dean says, sipping his coffee as he starts on his second sandwich.

"Why though?" Sam asks, thinking.

"Maybe it's trying to lure us in? Maybe it's looking to catch somebody else's attention? Either way, we gotta take care of it" Dean says.

"Yeah, I know Dean, but I think it might help to know what the demon is doing here, what it wants, especially if what it wants is us." Sam explains, not for the first time.

"Okay, we still gotta gank the son of a bitch though. Doesn't matter if it's trying to get our attention or someone else's, whether or not it wants to kill us or somebody else. Either way, it's dropping bodies." Dean says, making Sam sigh. It's something that they will never agree on. Sam has learned to, somewhat, accept that.

"Whatever, i'm gonna look into it." Sam says, turning his attention to his computer.

"Have fun, geek boy." Dean says with a chuckle as he stands and makes his way to the bathroom.

"Ha ha ha" Sam says, a sarcastic lilt to his voice as he rolls his eyes at his brother's teasing. He can't help the sigh of relief that escapes him though, at seeing his brother acting normal for the first time since they got here.

Contrary to what he told his brother, Sam isn't researching the demon they're hunting. No, he's digging into his family's past. There was always something that didn't add up, with Dean and his dad. He never paid much attention to it, considering he was a child, but he knew that something wasn't normal, things that Dean said sometimes that made John sad, or angry. Things that Dean did that made John look at him funny. Sam remembers one time, he couldn't have been more than six at the time, but he and Dean had been sitting eating dinner one night, when all of a sudden Dean doubled over in pain, scratching at his chest with tears that Sammy hadn't before witnessed falling from his eyes.

He remembers those four days, where Dean was in and out of consciousness, he remembers Dean laying limp and coiled around himself like it was the only thing keeping him together as he begged for somebody named Jason. He remembers how he called his dad, how the man huffed an annoyed sigh down the line when Sam told him about Dean, about the things he was saying, and how Dean was scaring him. John told him that Dean was gonna be fine, but to call him if Dean worsened. John was gone for another two weeks, and when he got back, he looked at Dean like he was, disappointed. And then he pulled Dean out of the room by his arm, and when they came back, Dean had that stone cold mask over his face as he "yes, sirred" everything that John said.

Sam only brought it up once after that, a few months after it had happened, and all Dean would say was that it was nothing. That he had just had a fever, and that Jason wasn't real. To forget it. Not to bring it up again.

So he didn't.

But he never forgot that look in Dean's eye when he told him that Jason wasn't real. It was grief and defiance and love. And Sam hadn't had the vocabulary for those words at the time, but he was smart enough, and he knew Dean well enough not to believe those words.

There have been other instances over the years, of Dean calling that name out in the middle of a nightmare, or slurring it out when he's shitfaced and he sees a dark haired, blue eyed man at whatever bar they had been frequenting.

No matter how much younger Sam had wanted to believe that Dean wouldn't lie to him, older Sam knows that if Dean thought it was for the best, Dean would lie to him in a heartbeat. It's a shitty habit that the two of them picked up from their father. And no matter how many times it comes back to bite them in the ass, they somehow always find themselves back in that position, lying about something or another, under the guise of protecting the other, of them being better off not knowing.

Sam has always suspected Dean and his father of keeping things from him, but the longer he thinks about it, the more small moments he puts together, the more he realises that they might have been keeping something a whole lot bigger than he ever thought from him.

He realises a moment later that he's fallen fast and hard into his own thoughts, completely abandoning the email results that he had logged onto his computer to check out in the first place. He isn't sure what had him doing this, but a gut feeling had been pushing him towards it for a while, as he searched for whatever it was they had been keeping from him. He knew that confronting Dean wasn't an option, that if Dean had been keeping something from him for that long, if he had been working so hard to keep something from him, and working with John on it, then Sam demanding answers from his brother wasn't going to get him anywhere.

He takes a deep breath, checking that the shower is still running, before he opens the results in his email, though what he finds there makes his breath hitch in his throat and his eyes sting with betrayal.

The DNA test that should have shown him and Dean as brothers, was in fact, showing them as either "close family" or "first cousins" "what the fuck?" Sam mutters, his eyes glued to the screen as he scrolls through the results screen, so absorbed in his computer, that he doesn't even notice when the shower shuts off. Doesn't notice when Dean exits the bathroom. Doesn't even notice when a few stray drops of water from Dean's still wet hair fall onto his shoulder as Dean leans over him to look at what he's doing on the computer.

"What the fuck?" Dean mutters, finally snapping Sam out of his shock as he slams the computer down on the rickety table before spinning around in his chair to face his brother, or what he thought was his brother, tears pooling in his eyes as he searches Dean's eyes for an answer of some sort.

"You're not my brother?" Sam asks in a hoarse whisper, watching in a detached sort of way as Dean violently flinches back from his words.

"I am your fucking brother, Sammy. What the fuck is that?" Dean asks, anger clearly displayed on his face, but Sam knows from experience that Dean likes to use anger as a shield for his real emotions.

"It's a DNA test, Dean. I've always known that you and Dad were lying to me about something. There was just, stuff, that didn't add up. Little things that didn't make sense. But we don't have paperwork, we don't hardly keep any pictures, we don't have any family that I could talk to. I figured if you and dad had worked so hard to keep something from me, that you wouldn't just tell me. This was the only thing I could think of to find some answers. Apparently I wasn't wrong." Sam says, a mixture of anger and sadness emanating from his person.

"Fucking hell Sammy." Dean mutters, falling silent for a moment as he gathers his wits about him before he speaks again.

"Mary wasn't my mom. Not biologically. I only met her a year and a half before she died. But she, she took real good care of me. Treated me like her own, even though she had another baby on the way, even though I was an angry, fucked up little kid. She loved me, and she fed me, tucked me in at night, bandaged my injuries and never gave up on me." he doesn't say it, but Sam can hear the silent 'like Dad did' "We're half brother's, Sammy, biologically. Different mom's, same dad." Dean says, his voice quiet and restrained, like he's bracing for impact, and Sam knows, he knows, that that's John's fault too.

"Who's Jason?" Sam asks, knowing that this might be the only time he can get a straight answer out of Dean.

"I didn't grow up with Mary and John. I grew up here, in Gotham. The only reason that John found me, is cause' me and my brother, my twin brother, got arrested. We pissed off the cops that picked us up, and when they brought us into the station, they separated us. We weren't in the system cause' our mom was a junkie, we weren't born in a hospital, we never went to the doctor, we never got arrested or anything before then. We were ghosts. I got sent to an orphanage, and I don't know where they sent Jason. A few months later, after I had given them my name, John and Mary came to pick me up. John had been looking for his kid, one kid, cause' he didn't know we were twins. I told them what had happened, how we got separated, and they helped me look for him, stayed in Gotham for a whole month, went to our apartment, went through all the legal channels, but they told us he didn't exist, and our mom had left the apartment, gone somewhere else. The only thing I have left of him is a bracelet, a batarang, and a picture of the two of us. You've probably noticed them around, even if you didn't know what they meant to me.

"We couldn't find him. He hadn't given anyone his name, and they kept telling me that boys with no names couldn't have brothers. That Jason Todd didn't exist. Eventually they packed me up and took me to Kansas with them. When no signs of him ever existing came up, they began to think that I had made him up. That I was just a, fucked up little kid. And I was fucked up, but I didn't make Jason up. They sent me to therapy, and I learned how to hide my feelings, I learned that they worried about me when I brought him up, so I just … didn't. I learned that they were worried and scared when I got angry and hit things, when I split my knuckles on doors and trees and other kids' faces. I learned that if I punched the ground in the woods, my knuckles were a lot less likely to split and bruise. I learned how to hide all the things that worried them, how to be polite and charming and how to look happy even when it felt like my chest was collapsing in on itself ….. I don't know what happened to him. I don't know if he's dead or alive or part of a gang or if he ever got out of Gotham. I just know that it still feels like I'm only ever half alive. I know that he was all the best parts of me, he was the good half, and especially after Mary died, I was made to pretend like he didn't exist. Like he was some figment of my imagination that I made up because I grew up in a rough place. But he isn't. He isn't." Dean says, his elbows on his knees and his head resting in his hands as he stares at his boot clad feet, refusing to make eye contact with his brother.

"Why didn't you ever come back to Gotham?" Sam asks, regretting his words as soon as he catches sight of the tears making their way down his brother's cheeks.

"I looked for him, I looked online, and I checked newspapers and obituaries and I hacked into the police station for any file or cold case or anything. I was always scared to come back though, to find out that he's been dead, or that he's caught up in a gang or that…." Dean trails off then, his voice catching in his throat, and Sam waits patiently for Dean to collect himself enough to continue. "Do you remember when you were six, and I got really sick?" Dean asks suddenly, and Sam almost chuckles, having been thinking about that less than ten minutes earlier. "Yeah. You kept going in and out of consciousness, and when you were really out of it, you would beg for Jason, mutter shit that didn't make any sense at the time. I called Dad, and he told me that you were fine, but to call if you got any worse. When he got back like two weeks later, he dragged you out of the room for a chat. You would never talk about it after that." I tell him, and the surprise on his face makes me believe that he didn't expect me to remember much of anything.

"Yeah. I was, convinced, after that, that Jason was dead. I mean, obviously I can't prove anything, but, I don't know. It felt like, he was really gone after that. Like that spot, in my chest, where I always got a bad feeling whenever he was in trouble, was just, gone. It was like having a hole in my chest. And I thought it would never go away, but about two years later, when I was seventeen, it just sort of, filled up, again. I don't know what it was but, I was, less convinced after that. I guess I've always been scared to find out that he's really dead. There's no hope after that. There's, nothing." Dean says, a broken note in his voice as he tells his baby brother about his twin.

"But what if he isn't, Dean?" Sam asks, reaching out and settling a hand on his older brother's shoulder, waiting for him to raise his head and look at him before continuing.

"If he's still out there, we could find him. I could meet my brother, and you could see your twin again. It wouldn't just have to be you and me anymore." Sam says, a small, sad smile tipping his lips as he sees the fragile hope in his brother's eyes, and an overwhelming relief, probably because Sam doesn't think he's crazy. Doesn't think he made him up.

"Okay" Dean whispers, a cautious sort of happiness lifting his expression.

AN Thoughts? Good? Bad? Meh? Lemme know what you think. :)