Not sure if I'm going to continue this, but I guess it can be read as a sort of depressing standalone type thing. Until I publish the next chapter, that is. But yeah. Here. Sorry. So sorry.

All his life Sam felt like something was missing.

He made friends, but never good friends. No one seemed to click. Not his classmates, not his teachers, not the sweet girl who liked to call him her boyfriend in high school. Everything he did seemed wrong, and when he tried to make decisions it was like he was trying to make them for two different people. He threw himself at dreams and never picked himself up when they failed. He didn't have anyone to pick himself up for. His only family was his father – an alcoholic mechanic who could never seem to stay in one place long enough for Sam to settle down.

He sometimes wondered why he was like this. Was it because he'd never known his mother? Was it because his father never told him he was proud of him? Or was it something else? There were other things he wondered; like why there were no pictures of his parents before he was born, or why John never talked about the policeman who came by every once in a while with 'no news'. But he never asked – and so he never questioned the lack of answers.

And then he found the birth records.

At first he thought they were his. They were stuffed in the darkest part of his dad's closet, back behind the guns and the uniform and the bad memories. The manila folder they were in was water-stained and worn at the edges, clearly untouched for years. Had they been anywhere else other than stuffed in dad's 'things to forget about' closet, he would have assumed they were his.

But the date of birth was all wrong: January 24, 1979. Sam didn't even know anyone with that birthday – let alone anyone related to him. As he flipped through the manila folder, he began to piece things together from the pictures and the medical sheets and the certificates of death. He began to understand why dad never talked about mom, and why dad never kept lighters in the house. He figured out why there were no pictures and why, above all else, he felt so alone.

The birth certificate was at the end of the folder, neatly laminated to protect it from being forgotten. Name of child (print or type): Dean Winchester.

John and Mary's first son.

He didn't believe it at first because he couldn't believe it. But everything fit. Everything came together and everything made sense. Because whoever this child had been – Sam's older brother, John's first son, a four year old with blonde hair and green eyes and freckles and who bore no resemblance to Sam at all – when he died, more lives than his own had been taken. Including Sam's.

It took Sam a few days to finally accept it, and after that, there was almost nothing he could do but live. He lived with the grief of his father's recent death and the death that had taken place 30 years ago that he shouldn't even be grieving. In the back of his mind, he knew that he didn't have the right to feel everything he was feeling. His father had known Dean. Had raised him to four. Had seen his first steps, heard his first words, and then had all that torn away from him with an accidental flick of some cigarette ash.

But Sam had never known Dean. He'd always known that he was only six months old when his mother had perished in that fire. He didn't recognize the little boy with the bright smile and the pudgy hands that dominated the secret cache of pictures hidden away in the closet. All he knew was that everything he felt over his death was real, and it hurt. He was angry that Dean had gotten to know Mary and he was angry that Dean had known what it felt like to have his father come to a little league game. He was angry at Dean because he had been born and had known everything Sam never had.

He was also angry that Dean had died. He was angry because there were no conflicting schedules and none of Dean's friends to make fun of him and that he never got to be somebody's lame kid brother. He was angry because all his life he had searched for an answer to why he felt so incomplete, and it had been here all along, in the scary closet with all the other things John Winchester wanted to forget. He had been neglected and exhausted and lied to all his life, and now that his father was dead, he didn't even have anyone to be angry at.

At the end of the day, he was still alone. And knowing that things should have been different – well, that just made it worse.