Welcome to my third Supernatural short story! I keep getting the urge to write about the little Winchesters and all the different places they moved around. Here's a snapshot of their life when Dean is five and Sam is about one and a half. I hope you like it.
"And at my party, I'm having a bouncy house and a clown and lots of other cool stuff and I'm having race cars on my cake. And Dad said I can have a new bike and a gameboy and Mom said we can go to the cinema and get ice cream! What do you think of that? Huh? Dean? That's so cool, isn't it? Dean?"
Mikey jiggled up and down in his seat, his elbow nudging at Dean to get a reaction.
"Awesome," said Dean flatly. He tightened his arms around his backpack and turned his head away from Mikey, toward the window of the school bus, watching the sidewalks slide past, and the shops and all the normal people out doing normal things.
"When's your birthday, Dean? Are you having a party? Can I come?"
They turned a corner and, with relief, Dean saw St Mary's come into view. "I need to get out now," he said.
"Why? Do you live at the church?"
"No. In the pastor's house. We're just staying there. For a bit."
"Where do you live, then? Dean?"
"I have to go now."
Dean pushed his way out, down the aisle, past all the kids who still had things like homes and birthday parties and Moms - and Dads who were around and not off somewhere hunting monsters. He was glad to get off the yellow bus and let it drive away and get back to what was normal for him.
He'd started school a few weeks before and it was kind of okay, he supposed. But a lot of it was pointless and stupid and Dean felt like he didn't belong in the same world as the other kids. They played and sang, they drew pictures, they listened to stories - they were safe and protected - and they didn't get that life just wasn't like that. Life wasn't safe. No one was protected. Not really. And they wouldn't enjoy stories about monsters and witches and fairies if they knew that those things were real and would hurt them or kill them if they could. Or kill their Moms.
Dean dragged his backpack up the path to the vicarage. He bypassed the front door and followed the path around the house to go in through the side door, which always stuck if you didn't know the trick to getting it open - turn the handle and push hard, while kicking the bottom left panel.
The kitchen was empty and cold. Pastor Jim was out all day Tuesdays - at the hospital and then some old folks' home and sometimes at the prison. One of the ladies who helped in the church would cook a meal later. Probably Mrs Simmons, who wore garish aprons and called Dean Sugar and Cherry-pie. He wouldn't mind so much if she actually cooked a cherry pie once in a while. But she didn't.
Dean pulled a loaf of bread out of the crock, grabbed some cheese and baloney from the fridge and slapped together a sandwich. He put it on a plate for a change, because neither Pastor Jim nor any of the Mrs Simmons-types liked Dean to stuff sandwiches in his pockets.
He poked his head through the door to the hallway and listened. The house was silent. They'd be in the church, then.
Dean slung his pack over one shoulder and grabbed the sandwich on its plate - and if it was in his pocket he'd have both hands free in case something happened, but anyway. He crossed the walkway between the house and the side door of the church.
Just inside the door, there was a space where things were stored - chairs and some big toys that they used for the playgroup held on Wednesday mornings, all stacked along one wall. Then there was the vestry and the kitchenette behind it, and Dean knew that in one of the cupboards was a red and white tin containing cookies.
He found the tin, he prised it open, he stacked a few of the plain, round cookies on top of his sandwich, then he carried the plate through into the main part of the church.
"Hello, Sugar. Good day at school?"
Mrs Simmons was taking off the altar cloth and putting on a clean one. The candlesticks and stuff were on the floor, dusters and a bucket next to them. Dean didn't respond until he'd scanned the rest of the church and spotted his target - his baby brother, Sammy, fast asleep on the front pew.
"Yes, Ma'am," he said. Dean always tried to be polite to Mrs Simmons, because Dad had told him to be polite to the grown-ups. And she was okay, he supposed. He dumped his backpack on the floor and put his plate down on the pew, well away from Sammy's feet.
"Did you learn anything fun? Did you play with the other kids?"
"Yes, Ma'am. Is Sammy okay?" His brother's cheeks were red, his breathing a bit hitchy, even in sleep, and there was a tiny frown line between his softly curving brows.
Mrs Simmons sighed. "He's alright."
Dean stared at her, a silent request for more information.
She tugged the altar cloth until it lay straight and then looked up. "He misses his brother."
Dean took this to mean that Sammy had cried on and off for most of the day. He looked at Sammy's tear-stained face and then down at his own, worn sneakers. He wasn't going to start the argument again - that he should stay home and look after Sammy, that it was his job to keep his brother safe and happy, that he was the one who did it best. No one ever listened to Dean, and Mrs Simmons had no say anyway. And she liked looking after Sammy, even though he cried most of the time and didn't say any of his baby-talk to her and didn't crawl about and explore like he did when it was just him and Dean.
It wouldn't be for much longer anyway. Dad would come soon. A few weeks, he'd said, but those few weeks had turned into months, so that Pastor Jim said Dean had better go to the local school and start the kindergarten class.
So Dean got on the bus and went to school every day and Mrs Simmons, or one of the other church ladies, looked after Sammy - and Dean was supposed to be fine with that because kids did as they were told and went to school and let grown-ups do the looking after. But he wasn't fine with it.
Dean sat down on the floor, resting his back against the hard seat of the pew, just in front of where Sammy was sleeping, in case he rolled off. He dragged his backpack closer and took out his reading book, and sat with it resting on his knees. He ate a sandwich while turning the pages, picking out the letters he knew, not making much sense of the words.
Pastor Jim sometimes read to him - stories out of the bible. Some of them Dean didn't think much of. Especially the one where the lesson was to be meek and mild and if someone slapped you, to offer the other cheek for them to slap that as well. That was just plain stupid. If someone hit you, you hit them back and you went in hard - you put them down so they wouldn't hurt you again or get to hurt anyone else. It was just common sense.
The bit where that guy Jacob took on an angel had been promising, but then it went weird with all the blessing and stuff. Dean had imagined what he'd do in that situation and decided he'd definitely win the fight, because an angel wouldn't fight dirty, would it? But Dean would, so he'd win. And then what? He wouldn't want some stupid blessing. Did angels grant wishes or something? Mom always said angels watched over you. But they didn't. They hadn't watched over her, had they? Probably didn't grant wishes either.
David and Goliath - that was a good one. Dean had played at being David and made himself a sling and got pretty good with it until he'd broken one of the sacristy windows and Pastor Jim had put the sling in his locked-up weapons store - which Dean could have unlocked, but he'd decided not to give away that Dad had taught him that particular skill, in case he needed it in future.
The broken window incident was just before Dad had come, and Dean had thought he'd take them away from the church and it'd be just Dad and Dean and Sammy on the road again. But he'd been gone by the next morning.
Dad hadn't been mad about the broken window, though. Well, yeah, he had, but after the long, stern lecture, Dean had caught him examining the homemade sling, and he hadn't smiled exactly, but he'd had that look in his eyes which meant that, at one time, he would have smiled and maybe talked to Dean and maybe even picked him up to sit on his knee. Dean was sure he remembered that happening - before.
"Can you keep an eye on your brother for a while, Cherry-pie? I need to get started on the dinner and it seems a shame to wake him."
The altar was back in order. Mrs Simmons' hands were full of her cleaning stuff and the altar cloth that she'd take away to be washed. Could he keep an eye on his brother? Well, he'd carried Sammy out of their burning home, hadn't he?
"Yes, Ma'am."
She just stood there then, looking at him funny, her mouth twisting, like she wanted to say something else, or wanted him to say something else. She did that sometimes - just looked at him, and Dean didn't know what she wanted him to do or say or if he'd maybe done something wrong or disappointed her. Her lips parted, then pressed together, then parted again.
He looked back at her, the flowery apron - pink and yellow today - her sturdy shoes, her greying hair. There was a hollow in Dean's stomach suddenly. His skin prickled all over his chest and back and arms. If he put down his book and his sandwich and walked over to her, what would she do? An image flashed into his mind, or more of a feeling - of what the front of her apron might feel like against his cheek, of what it might be like to get closer to that sweet scent she wore, of her arms smoothing away the shivery prickles on his back.
Dean looked down at his book. The blurred squiggles on the page meant nothing. And when he looked up, Mrs Simmons had gone.
Dean finished his sandwich and started on the cookies. He gave up with the reading book and pulled a bundle of paper out of his backpack - a rolled up bunch of mismatched scraps, held together by an elastic band. It was a project, but not for school.
Dean slid the band off and the bundle fell apart. He stacked the pieces roughly, took a blank sheet (a flyer for a local barber's, but the back was blank) and leant it against his reading book. He'd done all the regular monsters - vampires, werewolves, wendigos, shapeshifters and so on. No - there were a few ghosts he hadn't done. Poltergeists. A Hunter's Guide wouldn't be complete without a section on poltergeists. And he knew the letter P. The teacher had shown it to them today and made them all say 'puh, puh, puh' loads of times. So he could even make a stab at some proper writing instead of the rows of spidery squiggles he usually did to make the pages look good.
He rummaged in his backpack, pulled out a black crayon and got started. Down and up and a round bit at the top - which side did it go? Oh well, it kind of looked right.
"Puh," Dean muttered. "Puh for poltergeist."
He hadn't a clue about the rest of the word, so he made it up. How did you draw one, though? You couldn't see poltergeists, could you? No. Maybe do some stuff flying about?
There was a rustle from behind him and something brushed through his hair. The something fastened and tugged.
"Dean-dean-dean-dean-dean."
Dean turned around, leaving a few of his hairs stuck between his brother's fingers.
"Hey, Sammy."
Sammy sat up and smacked Dean's face with his chubby hands. "Dean-dean-dean-dean-dean." He grinned.
"Yeah, yeah. I get that you're pleased to see me." Dean grabbed at his brother's wrists and Sammy used the extra leverage to launch himself forward so that Dean found himself with a faceful of his brother. He got a rough hold on him so that the small body slithered down into his lap, Sammy's strong toes digging into Dean's legs. The arms slid around his neck and squeezed hard and tight.
"Dean-dean-dean-dean-dean."
"Yeah, okay, okay. You don't have to say it five times at once."
It seemed like Sammy did have to, though. Once was never enough, although a long string of Deans was usually reserved for times like this, when they'd been apart for most of a day.
"Dean-dean. Cuck-key."
He'd spotted the plate.
Dean squirmed around until he was settled leaning against the hard edge of the pew again, with Sam facing outward in his lap. His work-in-progress lay in scattered sheets around them. Dean quickly grabbed the pages and rolled them up, putting the band around them and stuffing them deep into his bag. Sammy liked exploring stuff and the stuff didn't usually survive his grabby little hands and slobbery little mouth.
HIs brother bounced up and down, his head smacking against Dean's chin repeatedly. "Dean-dean. Cuck-key." Dean got the plate off the pew and Sammy reached forward, his fingers splayed out, Dean's arm around his waist holding him in place. "Dean-dean! Leggo!"
"Quit, it Sammy. You can have a cookie, okay?"
Dean sighed. He handed one of the cookies to his brother, who took it and tried to shove the whole thing in his mouth, and kept trying until the thing broke up and the pieces would fit. Why did everything with Sammy have to involve a major clean-up job? In just a second there'd be cookie-dribble running down his chin and onto his clothes and he'd get it all over his hands and then smear it on Dean and probably on Dean's face and in his hair. And then… well, almost always when Sammy put something in one end, something came out the other and Dean would have to deal with that too.
"You are such a mess," he said.
"Cuck-key," said Sam, crumbs spraying out and pale brown goop dripping out of his mouth.
"Yeah. Great."
Sammy's legs wiggled up and down like he couldn't keep them still. Dean grabbed one of the chunky calves and squeezed it.
"You use these at all today?"
Sammy didn't respond. Dean could ask Mrs Simmons. But he wouldn't. And he knew the answer anyway. When Dean wasn't here, Sammy didn't do much of anything. He'd only crawl about when his brother was close by. And even though he couldn't walk yet, he could stand up and lean against stuff, and move along, holding on for balance. Dean had overheard Mrs Simmons and one of the other churchy ladies talking, saying Sam was a 'late developer' and that he should be doing all kinds of stuff by now. Well, that was just crap. There was nothing wrong with Sammy. He could do all kinds of stuff, he just didn't do it when they were around.
"Nuvver," said Sammy, his sludgy hands reaching out.
"Sure, why not?" said Dean, giving his brother the last cookie. "Might as well clean up two as one."
The cookie was grabbed and drawn into the little concrete mixer. It set just like concrete, dried up cookie - Dean knew that from long experience. You could probably build houses with that stuff.
His brother hummed as he ate. Dean's arm was still wrapped around Sammy's waist, his other hand playing with his brother's socked toes.
That time Dad had dropped by for all of a half day or so, he'd sat at the kitchen table and held Sammy like this and Sammy had cried and cried and squirmed and reached out to Dean. And Dean had had to sit on his hands and watch his brother's face get redder and redder and his cries more and more desperate until Dad had said, "What the hell's wrong with him, Jim? Is he sick or something?"
The pastor had turned his whiskey glass with his long fingers and shrugged. "I guess he's just not used to you, John. They forget real quick at this age."
Dad's face had gone a bit weird then - even more closed off than usual. "He's my son."
Sammy had wailed, heartbroken. The pastor had taken another sip. "Give him to Dean. He'll soon quiet down."
His Dad had glanced at his older son, then. Didn't he remember giving Sammy to Dean? And Dean carrying his baby brother out of the burning house? Had he forgotten?
"I can do it, Dad."
Then Dad had handed the shrieking, kicking Sammy over and Sam had clung on to Dean with his arms and his legs, and buried his head between Dean's neck and his shoulder so that the tears and snot had quickly made a soggy patch. He'd stopped crying but his quick breaths had been hitchy for ages.
Dad hadn't said anything else about Sammy. He'd just talked to Pastor Jim about stuff, some of which Dean understood, some of which didn't mean anything. Dean had watched him, though, his arms full of his brother, his eyes fixed, not missing a detail.
Dad could have held Sammy, without Sammy crying at all. All he had to do was hold Dean too - just pick him up and sit him on his knee, like he used to. He had used to do that, hadn't he? Mom had. Mom had held him all the time. She'd picked him up. She'd hugged him. She was always touching him. It felt like no one had touched Dean in that way since that night. No one except his brother.
If Dad had picked him up he could have held Dean while he held Sammy and the three of them could have sat like that at Pastor Jim's kitchen table, so that even if Dad had still been gone the next day, it wouldn't have been so bad - not so bad at all.
Dean's nose twitched. "Aw, jeez, Sammy!"
Sammy giggled.
"Yeah, well, maybe you think it's funny. You don't have to clean it up." Had Mrs Simmons left the stuff he needed? Yes. Under the pew was the old canvas bag that Dad had stocked up with diapers and so on and Dean had had to remind him to refill every so often.
He dumped his brother on the floor, pulled out the mat and just got on with the job. Someone had to do it. Dean wondered if he'd always be the one who had to just get on and do the dirty jobs. Although, fixing cars was pretty dirty and he didn't mind that.
Maybe when Dad came back, the Impala would need work and he'd get to help. Dean was pretty sure Dad would let him help, because fixing cars was something he needed to learn how to do, along with learning about all the kinds of monsters and how to kill them or make them safe some other way. And shooting a gun.
Dad had let him fire a pellet gun, before he'd dropped them off at the church. They'd been on the road for a while and had had to stop overnight in the middle of nowhere and sleep in the car.
But then the next morning, when Sammy was still asleep on the back seat, Dad had shown him how to shoot. It had been cold and misty, but with that summery smell in the air that meant it was going to be hot later. When they'd stopped in the dark, Dean hadn't known what kind of a place it was, but in the dawn light he'd felt like he was waking up in a cowboy movie - dry, orangey-yellow earth all around and tall cactuses and bits of wiry bushes here and there. It was a great place to learn to shoot.
Dad had fished out a whole load of junk from the foot spaces in the car - empty water bottles and a couple of cans. And he'd set them up on rocks and he'd crouched down and shown Dean how to load up the gun and how to hold it and how not to point it at anything he didn't want to shoot. And then he'd let Dean fire it. Dean had missed, over and over, and he'd felt that lump in his throat which meant he'd have to work real hard not to cry.
And Dad had said, "Those bottles out there - what if they were spirits? What if that can was a werewolf? What if they were going to hurt you?"
Dean had reloaded, fired again, missed again.
"What if they were going to hurt your brother?"
He hadn't missed that time. Nobody hurt Sammy. Nobody hurt Dean's little brother. Not ever.
Sammy rolled off the changing mat and pulled himself up on the edge of the pew. Dean packed away all the stuff and put it back in the canvas bag. He tied-off the plastic bag containing the dirty diaper and all the wipes and threw it vaguely in the direction of the vestry. He'd bin it later on their way back through. And he'd better remember, because Pastor Jim didn't appreciate coming across dirty diaper bags in his church.
Sammy slapped his hands against the seat of the pew and yelled, then laughed, then did it again because he could make a really loud noise in the big, echoey space. Dean let him carry on for a bit, until he thought God might be getting a bit pissed at all the racket.
"Hey, Sammy, look at this." Dean pulled his reading book out and rested it on the seat, kneeling up to show it to his brother.
"Book," said Sam with interest.
"Yeah. See?" He pointed to the front cover, where a boy and a girl were playing with a ball. "That's Sam, like you. She's Pip. Stupid name, huh? What's the betting she drops the ball?"
"Ball-ball," agreed Sam.
Dean hadn't had much to do with girls before he went to school. He and Sam had spent time just with Dad or with Pastor Jim or at the houses of other hunters. There'd been grown-up women sometimes, but no girls.
The boys at school were pretty much straightforward - if the teacher wasn't looking, quite a few of them gave up on the rules - asking, sharing, playing nice - and just ended up on the floor in a bundle of fists and experimental wrestling moves. Dean didn't join in - he'd only end up hurting them and get in trouble. But he got where they were coming from at least.
The girls, though, he wasn't sure about. They whispered and giggled in little huddles in the playground and next to the coat pegs and anywhere they could get away with it. When the teacher was around, most of them slipped easily into an 'I'm being good' attitude, sitting with their legs crossed and looking like they were listening - and maybe it was just an act. Dean knew all about acting. He had to act stuff all the time, especially when Dad was around - not being scared, not being tired, not wanting to cry. It was part of being a hunter and he was good at it. But the girls' acting was like a competition, with little flicked looks to one side then the other, and moves to sit up extra straight and extra big-eyed from listening so hard. Weird.
They weren't all like that. There was that one girl whose eyes wandered, who shredded up a paper hankie all the time the teacher was telling a story and then looked surprised when she got told off for leaving bits all over the carpet. And there was the one who had real short hair and always wore pants and hovered halfway between the boys and the girls like she didn't know what was going on. Dean might not consider himself friends with many of the kids, or maybe with any of them, but he noticed things. It was his job as a hunter to notice things, to notice threats, to watch for patterns that might develop into threats.
Anyway, some of the 'good' girls sometimes went round copying the teacher, pretending they were adults, bossing people about and generally acting as if they had all the answers - which they didn't, because if he'd asked them what to do against a werewolf or a shapeshifter, they wouldn't know that, would they? But, in their role as tiny adults, they'd initially marked Dean down as someone to be mothered.
They'd kept coming up to him and grabbing his hands - one on each side so he couldn't easily squirm away. They'd told him their names, which he'd promptly forgotten, and drawn him into their whispering, giggling huddles, where it turned out they were mostly whispering and giggling about the bad things the boys were doing and stuff like scented erasers and who got to be Twilight Sparkle and Pinkie Pie at recess and whether they'd play with the girl who tore up hankies and the girl who maybe wasn't a girl.
"You can play, Dean," they'd said. "Do you like My Little Pony?"
He'd ridden a pony once. They'd stopped somewhere overnight and there was a grumpy, dirty pony in a field. He'd climbed on the fence and slid onto its back and it had jumped about and kicked until he'd fallen off into the dirt. So he'd shrugged at the girls (as much as he could with both his hands being held onto) and made an 'I dunno' face and for some reason they'd taken that as their cue to sigh and smile - and one of them had actually stroked his hair, which was going way, way beyond what he was comfortable with.
He'd panicked and pushed, and gotten in trouble because one of them had fallen over and started crying and the girls had turned their mothering onto the victim and called Dean a big bully. And after that they'd competed to give him the most pissy, nose-in-the-air looks and left him alone. So that was a result, anyway.
And it turned out the daydreamy girl, Katie, was good at pretty much any written work and didn't mind telling him words and letting him copy her, and the girl-boy, Jen, liked finding bugs in the yard and making them race each other, so he got on okay with her too. And there was Mikey who sat next to him on the bus and talked and didn't much care if he got an answer.
But this Pip character on the cover of his reading book - she looked like a 'good' girl.
"I bet she can't throw or catch worth shit," said Dean and then cast a guilty glance at the vaulted ceiling of the church. "Uh… sorry." Was God up there, amongst the criss-crossing beams? Dean didn't think so, but you never knew, like when you didn't think there was anything bad about, but then suddenly it got real cold and you could see your breath. Did it get cold if God was about, invisible, but listening out for you to slip up and say a bad word? Dean had heard Pastor Jim talking about the Holy Spirit. And a spirit was a ghost.
He sighed, shrugged and opened the book.
On the first page was a picture of the Sam character, holding the ball, his name written underneath in big, black, roundy letters
"Look, Sammy." Dean traced a finger over the S. "These are letters. They make sounds. This one's ssss. Like a snake. He wiggled his arm and tickled Sammy's arm with his snake fingertips.
His brother giggled and copied. "Sssss."
Dean wiped a spray of his brother's spit off the book with his sleeve. "This one here says 'a'," he said. The ball bit of the letter was on the left and the stick on the right, like if he held a ball in his left hand and a bat in his right. That might be a way to remember.
"A, a, a, A, A!"
"Yeah, okay, great. No need to yell. And this one says mmm. Like 'mmm cookies'."
"Mmmm," repeated Sammy, his legs jiggling so that he bounced up and down against the support of the pew.
"Awesome," Dean approved. "Then, you put 'em together - sss, a, mmm. And it says Sam." It always seemed so hard when he was at school, like his brain was so busy keeping track of all the weird kids and what he was supposed to be doing, as well as making sure he didn't say stuff he shouldn't - about monsters and so on - that he didn't have a lot of space left for learning stuff. Here, with Sammy, though, it made sense.
"Sa-MEEE!"
"No, look - sss, a, mmm. That's what it says."
"Sa-MEEEE!"
"Yeah, you're Sammy. Okay, I get it. I don't know how to make the ee sound yet, though, dude. We haven't learnt that one."
"Sammy, Sammy, Sammy," chanted his brother, his sturdy legs crab-walking him along the pew.
"Okay, yeah." Dean turned the page. There was a picture of the girl, Pip, wearing a flower in her hair and a too-good-to-be-true expression. "Puh, i, puh," Dean sounded out, grudgingly. Then, "Poltergeisssst." Huh. There was definitely a sss in there.
He checked on his brother. Sam had worked his way back along the pew and was moving away again. He'd be at that a while, from one end to the other, backward and forward.
Dean grabbed his backpack again, pulled out his rolled-up paper and arranged himself stomach-down, on the floor near the altar step, the pages fanned out in front of him. If Sammy decided crawling was on the agenda, he'd have enough distance to grab his stuff before his brother got a hold of any of it.
He went back to the poltergeist page and put in a letter S here and there. Then he looked over the other pages. Vampire. "Vammm-Pire," he muttered. He drew in some Ms and some Ps at random and decided it looked pretty good. Like he could really write.
His eye fell on the Restless Spirit page, where he'd drawn a floaty ghost on a torn up old order of service for someone's funeral. "Ressstlessss Sssspirit," said Dean. "Whoa. Cool." He went to town on that page, putting down plenty of curly little esses. And who cared if some of them were the wrong way around? He was writing, wasn't he? And it was way easier here, just him and Sammy in the big old empty church, when at school his pencil wouldn't do what he wanted and nothing made any real sense.
"Dean-dean!"
"Yeah? What's up, buddy?" Another couple of esses. Done. Uh… Werewolf. Www-air-ww-ulf. No. Dean didn't know any of those sounds.
"Dean-dean!" Sammy's little hands drum rolled against the seat of the pew.
Dean looked up. "What?"
Sammy was staring at him, at the distance between them, his little face screwed up into a frown. Had he hurt himself? Dean was right here. And no, he wasn't looking all the time, but he was here for his brother. He was doing his job - he wouldn't let Sammy come to any harm.
"Sammy-go," said his brother.
"Okay. We can go if you want. I don't think dinner's ready yet, though." Dean began to pack up his stuff.
"Dean-dean!" Sammy demanded again.
"What? What is your problem, dude?" Dean sat right up, his arms folded, and he glared, like Dad did when he was putting you on the spot.
Sammy grinned. He took one hand away from the seat of the pew. Then he took the other hand away.
Dean stayed very still.
Sammy took a wobbly step away from safety.
He could fall. Dean should move, get over there, go and catch his brother before he got hurt.
Sammy took another step and wobbled a bit more. But then he leant forward and, in a mad rush, his legs racing to catch up with his body, he staggered toward Dean, one-two, one-two, one-two. He was walking. He was actually walking.
Dean held his breath as he held out his arms, and Sammy's wayward little legs carried him just about far enough until he collapsed onto his brother, shrieking, "Sammy-go, Sammy-go! Dean-dean, Sammy-go!"
"Dude! You did it! You did it, Sammy!"
"Go-go-go!"
"Yeah! Awesome job, kiddo! Awesome!"
His brother's arms tightened around his neck, strangling him, but Dean didn't mind. Sammy's feet scrabbled against his legs and dug in, and his chubby knees pounded into Dean's stomach and chest a couple of times, and it hurt. But Dean didn't mind.
His brother's breath was hot against his neck, his sticky little fingers grabbing at his hair and tugging at his shirt. It was nothing like when his Mom used to enfold him gently in her arms. It was nothing like the firm, brief grip on his shoulder which was all the contact he had now with his Dad, when he was around. As hugs went, it was a mess. But it was right.
Being together with Sammy was right. Out of all the other wrong things in Dean's world, maybe it was the only right one. Because, yeah, he loved his Dad. Really loved him. But his Dad came and, all too often, went, without asking Dean what he thought about being left behind - so maybe Dad didn't love him back that much? Not like Mom had loved him.
But Sammy did. Sammy loved him. Sammy was always there. And Dean would make sure he was always there for Sammy. And he'd learn all the stuff he had to learn - reading and writing and driving and shooting and all about all the types of monsters - and so would his brother. And then one day, one day, they'd have their own guns and knives and wooden stakes, they'd have their own cool car, like the Impala, and that one, special, distant day, they'd get in their car and they'd drive off - together.
Because being together was the best thing. Being together was what counted. Just Dean and his brother Sammy. Just the two of them.
Thank you so much for reading. Please review!