Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

I’m looking at you through the glass,

don’t know how much time has passed.

Oh God, it feels like forever,

but no one ever tells you that forever feels like home,

sitting all alone inside your head...
Through Glass — Stone Sour

Dad isn’t coming back, least not for a good long while.

Once the dial tone starts squawking in his ear as a harsh reminder of exactly how many fucks John Winchester did not give about his sons, Dean is finally shaken from his reverie, and gently returns the receiver to its cradle. As if in a daze, he pulls his wallet from his back pocket, but he can tell even before he starts counting the bills that it’s too thin. Thin wallet means no cash, and no cash means no food, and pretty soon no roof over his and Sammy’s heads.

He closes his eyes for a moment when they start to burn, but does not allow the to tears fall. He doesn’t- he doesn’t have time for that bullshit. (Not to mention the fact that if he starts crying now, he’s afraid he might never stop.)

Sammy’s slept through the whole ordeal, thankfully. Dean’s not sure what woulda been worse — Sam wanting to talk to their father, or him not wanting to. Some days he’s not sure what’s worse for him, either.

The clock flashes 10:57, then 10:58, 10:59, and when it finally changes to 11:00, Dean knows what needs to be done. He grabs the little notepad with the motel’s name and logo on it (the Woodstock — what a fucking cliche), and scribbles a note for Sam, in case he does actually wake up at some point. Then, he grabs his room key, jams his feet into his boots, takes one hell of a deep breath, and sneaks out the door as quietly as he can.

He returns just in time to see the clock flip to 3:48, tired, and sore, and sick to his stomach, but when he pulls his wallet from his jeans before stripping them off and crawling into bed, he doesn’t need to open it, because he knows it's thick enough… at least for now.

Three more nights of sneaking out, and rent is due, the wallet is thin, and Dean’s given up on the whole not crying thing, cos ain’t like Dad’s around to sock him for it and tell him to man up. He saves it for the shower, though, where he can at least pretend he's not falling apart.

It’s almost cruel in its irony — or ironic in its cruelty, or whatever — that he’s been doing this to try to feed him ’n Sammy, cos what he’s been doing is making him feel so sick that he hasn’t wanted to eat a damn thing. He’s still dragging his ass to school, because the one thing Dad did manage to do before ditching them almost two weeks ago was register him and Sam at the local senior and junior high schools, respectively, and what a fucking-

Like. How the hell is he supposed to sit there and read the Great-fucking-Gatsby when he can still feel phantom hands shoving him to his knees, pulling his hair. Feel the ghost of the words — the things they’d called him — brushing against his skin.

He almost wishes he could peel it all right the fuck off. Shed it entirely, and become someone new.

Someone who doesn’t have the lingering taste of come in the back of his throat, no matter how many times he brushes his teeth, for example.

Rent’s due. It was due two days ago, actually, but looks like maybe the motel owner don’t got that great of a bookkeeping system, cos he hasn’t noticed — yet. Dean knows it’s just a matter of time, and spends Geometry wondering if it’s best to try to keep sneaking by undetected, or to be proactive and try to deal with it head on.

God, is he hungry tired.

The choice is taken right outta his hands, though, cos when he gets back to the motel, the owner’s knocking on the door to their empty room, looking none too pleased.

For a second, Dean wants to just keep walking, pretend he ain’t seen a thing, but experience has taught him that the longer he makes a man like him wait, the worse it is in the long run all the way around. Dad hasn’t called again since that first night, so there’s really no telling when he’ll be back. Dean does not keep walking.

The owner’s just raised his fist to knock again, and Dean steels himself before approaching. When the owner catches sight of him, he pauses.

‘Hey kid,’ he says, whiskey rough voice scraping over Dean’s raw nerves. ‘Your daddy around? Got some business to take care of with ’im.’

‘No, sir,’ Dean replies. He swallows hard and fights the urge to gag. ‘He’s- working. I’m, uh- I’m the one taking care of business.’

The owner seems to deflate a little at this. He takes his baseball cap off, scratches his head, then sighs, jamming the thing back into place. ‘Well, alright,’ he says, somewhat reluctantly. ‘Hate to put this on ya, kid, but your daddy only paid for the room through Monday.’

It’s Wednesday.

At least Sammy’s not back from school yet, Dean thinks miserably, desperate for a silver lining. He swallows his bitterness, because that’s about all he’s been able to do lately.

‘Yes, sir,’ Dean says, lowering his eyes to the ground, then looking back up at the owner coquettishly though his lashes. Men like when he does that. ‘I- I was hopin’-’ Humiliation burns through him, but he’s able to bite out the rest of his sentence, at least. ‘I was hopin’ we might be able to- to work somethin’ out. Man to man, if you get what I’m sayin’.’

He feels the weight of the owner’s gaze somewhere around the vicinity of his shoulders. Makes sense, cos that’s where everything else he’s been carrying hangs out.

‘Come with me, son,’ the owner says, jerking his head in the direction of the front office. There’s a gentleness in his voice that just makes everything worse.

Dean goes.

The office is like every other office of every other motel in America. When they walk in, the bell over the door jangles like Dean’s nerves.

‘Sit down,’ the owner says tersely, which is a surprising variant of get on your knees, but Dean’s the mouse in the lion’s den; he’s not about to question orders.

He sets his backpack down next to the chair he sinks into, keeping his eyes trained on the owner’s back. He’s gone over to the office refrigerator and is rummaging around inside. Dean wonders if he’s planning on trying to get Dean drunk. That happened exactly once in this situation, and afterwards, he’d promised himself he would never be that stupid again. He might be desperate, but he’s not a fucking idiot.

However, when the owner returns, he’s not carrying a beer bottle, but what looks like a sandwich in a plastic baggie and a can of Coke, which he sets down in front of Dean with a thunk that seems to echo in the small space. Dean doesn’t know what kinda sick game this fucker’s playing, but he’s not gonna humiliate himself further for a goddamn turkey sandwich.

The owner stares at Dean, who's glaring at the food like it’s just insulted his mother, and asks, ‘You gonna eat that sandwich, kid, or ask it to the prom?’ He’s standing behind his desk now, arms folded, observing Dean quietly in a way that unsettles the fuck outta him.

‘I ain’t- You ain’t gettin’ anything else outta me for a fuckin’ sandwich, man,’ Dean says. He eyes the office door. Mentally calculates how quickly he can make a break for it if this guy doesn’t like the word ‘no’. Sizes up the man in front of him. He estimates he has a 50/50 chance either way.

‘Son, all I want from you right now is for ya to get somethin’ in your belly ’fore ya pass out on my floor — ya look like you ain’t eaten damn a thing in a week,’ the owner snaps.

Three days, but who’s counting.

‘Not hungry,’ Dean mumbles petulantly, folding his arms over his chest. ‘Stop fuckin’ me around ’n- ’n let’s just- let’s do this, alright?’

He realises then that he’s acting like a sulking child around the man he’s supposed to be seducing, so he sits up a little straighter, tips his chin to the side. He puts on the act, makes himself a soft target — all coy smiles and fluttering eyelashes and barely parted lips. He knows what he looks like. He knows what men look for, what they want. And if it’s more than he wants to give, well bully for him.

‘I’m good for it,’ he says, voice like sugar on the rim of cocktail glasses, like the first drag from a lit cigarette — sweet, sharp, maybe even a little dangerous. ‘I can be good — I’ll make it good.’

When it seems like the owner either don’t know what to say, or don’t have anything to say to this, so before it can get ugly, Dean suppresses a sigh and stands. At sixteen, he’s nearly as tall as the owner, but as he maintains eye contact from beneath his lashes and sinks to his knees, the man seems like a giant.

(Dean’s fought giants before, armed with only a slingshot and his pretty mouth, and walked away just fine, thanks.)

What he hadn’t been counting on, however, was the way the owner nearly trips over his own feet in his hurry to back away from Dean’s hands that were going for his belt.

‘The hell you think you’re doin’?!’ the owner all but yells, and Dean flinches out of instinct. A man raising his voice has never been a good thing, in his experience.

‘What I gotta,’ Dean answers, but it comes out more like question than an explanation. He lowers his hands to his knees, cos they’ve started shaking, smooths them over the worn denim that’s about two washes away from falling apart. Dean finds he relates.

He tries to go for honesty — lays all the cards out on the table, and waits for the chips to fall where they will. ‘Alright, fine, I just- I don’t got it. The money for the room, I mean. I can get it, though, I just- I just need a few more days. If ya just- if you’ll give us just a few more days, I’ll pay up, I swear. Please don’t- I got a kid brother, alright? And I’ll- I’ll do whatever ya want, okay?’

The owner’s staring at him again, but his eyes have gone soft and he seems to shrink back down to the size of a man, not a monster.

‘What I want,’ he says quietly, ‘is for you to get your fool ass up, eat that food, and then we’re gonna sit here ’n have ourselves a serious conversation.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Dean replies. He’s just too tired to fight. He returns to his seat, reluctantly picks up the sandwich, and mumbles, ‘Thank you, sir.’

‘None’a that ‘sir’ bullshit now,’ the owner says gruffly. ‘You can call me Bobby.’

Chapter Text

Dean doesn’t let Sammy visit the owner — Bobby’s — office. He’s still not quite convinced that the guy is as peachy-keen as he’d clearly like Dean to believe, and Dean’s not about to trade his little brother for room and board and a full belly.

He’d been ready to roll over — literally and figuratively — and do whatever the guy wanted if it meant keeping a roof over their heads, though, so when he’d been turned down that first day, it had been a surprise, to say the least. Other motel owners and managers hadn’t been quite so scrupulous.

This guy, though, this ‘Bobby’… he seems to have no interest in Dean, in that way at least. Don’t mean Dean’s gonna let his guard down or anything, but it’s still weird as hell nonetheless.

Bobby has Dean doing shit like emptying trash cans and replacing busted lightbulbs, and says that if Dean don’t mind helping out for a bit when he gets home from school, he’ll consider them square for the room for as long as he needs. Dean doesn’t trust it, but he also isn’t in a position to question it, so he follows his orders and doesn’t argue.

Dad still hasn’t called.

So, Dean keeps sending Sammy to school — keeps dragging his own ass there as well, if only to keep the truancy officers off his back. Afternoons are spent being Bobby’s useless little shadow, checking off boxes on the to do list, and waiting for the other shoe to drop. Evenings mean homework and dinner. And late at night, once Sammy’s gone to sleep, it means slipping out the door again to make sure they can afford shit like school supplies and dinner. When Sammy reluctantly asks for ten bucks for some class trip or something, Dean gives it to him, even though it’s almost physically painful to hand over the cash, because he’s trying to give the kid everything he needs.

Dean’s trying so hard to keep all the plates spinning that it’s only a matter of time before they all come crashing down on his stupid, exhausted head, and he has no friggin’ idea what’s going to be left once the dust clears.

It goes on like that for two more weeks. Long days at school, long nights trying to make ends meet, and still no word from Dad. He’s been gone for over a month; hasn’t been heard from in over three weeks, and Dean is just now starting to get worried. Dad’s left them in tight spots before, for sure, but never for this long without checking in, even if it was only to remind Dean of the ass whuppin’ he’d have in store for him if he fucks shit up. Don’t draw attention from the authorities, don’t cause problems, and take care of Sam — that’s all Dean needs to do.

Only, it’s really not.

It’s getting cold now that it’s December. Dean watches the temperatures drop lower and lower every day, right along with his hope that Dad’ll show up. November was thankfully pretty mild, but now it’s only a matter of time before the first sight of snow, and where in the hell is Dean going to find the funds to buy Sam boots and a coat. The stress keeps him up at night, even after he sneaks out.

He’s not eating again, only this time it’s because he’s so goddamn worried and not because he can’t afford it — for once.

It’s fine. It’s fine, it’s fine, it’s all fucking fine.

Until it isn’t.

Apparently not sleeping, plus not eating, plus being forced to run around like an asshole, playing fucking dodgeball in gym class adds up to passing right the fuck out in the middle of the gymnasium, like some chick on a soap opera, and goddamnit, is Dean mortified when he wakes up on a cot in the nurse’s office with an icepack propped up on his head.

‘Oh, you’re awake,’ the strawberry blonde matronly nurse remarks briskly as she walks by, in case Dean wasn’t aware. ‘Well, thank goodness. I’ve been trying to reach your parent or guardian for the last hour, but the number listed as your emergency contact is out of service. If you’d been out for much longer, we were going to have to call an ambulance to take you to the hospital.’

Well, that wakes Dean up in a fucking hurry, that’s for sure. His brain doesn’t know what to process first — that he’d been out cold for a friggin’ hour, that Dad’s phone is out of service, or that this goddamn woman had been ready to send him to the hospital, which would have almost certainly ended up involving the cops, which would have absolutely ended with Dean flat on his fuckin’ back, black and blue when Dad found out. Realising how close he’d almost come to that disaster hits Dean harder than the fucking dodgeball and makes his stomach churn violently.

He pukes. Spectacularly, in fact, and all over the floor.

Only, he hasn’t been eating enough lately to actually puke, so it’s more like he dry heaves dramatically and coughs up bile until tears are streaming down his face of their own volition. He doesn’t realise the nurse has come over with a trash can and bottle of water until he notices that someone is rubbing his back, gentle hands moving in soothing circles between his shoulder blades. He allows himself a moment to close his eyes and take comfort in hands on his body that don’t want to take for once, before pulling away and letting the mask slip back into place.

The nurse wordlessly passes him the water, and he cracks the top, drinking greedily before having to face the humiliation of having yakked up all over the damn floor.

‘Sorry about the mess,’ Dean offers weakly after he’s drunk about half the water bottle, hoping like hell he can keep it down. ‘I’ll- I can clean it up if there’s a- a mop or something….’ He looks around like one might magically appear, and just that slight movement makes his head start pounding.

‘You’ll do no such thing,’ the nurse says, and fucking Christ, she’s brought over a bunch of paper towels to hide his vomit. Dean wants to disappear.

‘Sorry,’ he mumbles again, but the nurse just shakes her head and gives his shoulder a gentle pat.

‘Why don’t you give me your parents’ correct phone number, dear, and we’ll see if we can get someone to come pick you up,’ the nurse suggests sympathetically. ‘There’s a nasty stomach bug going around the school — it’s that time of year, you know — but a few days of chicken noodle soup and ginger ale, and you should be good as new. Just tell Mom that Mrs Butters said to let you stay in bed and watch TV for the rest of the week.’

She winks, and Dean laughs out loud at her joke, but not for the reasons she intended. Him being allowed to spend three days recovering from anything is a fucking hilarious thought. Dad’d yanked his shoulder out of its socket once when Dean got in his way when he was on a bender, and the old man had pushed him up against the wall to pop the thing back into place, thrown him a bottle of Tylenol, and given him a shot of whiskey for the trouble, then sent him to school the following morning. He’d been fourteen.

Mrs Butters is looking expectantly at him, and Dean realises she’s waiting for him to hand over his dad’s phone number — of course she thinks it’s a simple mistake that the number on his file is out of order, because that’s what a normal person who is accustomed to dealing with normal kids would think. Dean sizes her up, mind racing for a solution, a way out of this clusterfuck he’s gotten himself into. Needless to say, he doesn’t think fluttering his eyelashes and biting his lip is going to cut it this time.

‘I…’ he starts, but his stupid brain still hasn’t caught up with his stupid mouth, and he has no fucking clue how to finish that sentence, so the words just hang in the air between them, like crabapples dangling from a tree — the poison, the danger is all what’s beneath the surface.

‘Is something the matter, dear?’ Mrs Butters asks, only now she has that cautious ‘mandated reporter’ look in her eye, like she’s seconds away from coming up with four when she starts adding up all those twos. Dean has to fix this and fast.

He shoots her a sheepish grin and says, ‘Sorry, ma’am, just got spacey for a second… musta been the head thing. Guess that’s why all those moms wanna ban dodgeball, huh?’ She doesn’t look convinced, so he hurriedly adds, ‘Listen, my dad’s actually at work now and probably doesn’t have cell reception, so what if I just take off and promise I’ll head straight home?’

Mrs Butters hasn’t lost the sharp-eyed bird-dog expression, and she’s pursing her lips in a way that almost always precedes some sort of Good Samaritan tough love bullshit, so Dean sighs and says, ‘Alright, well… what if we call my uncle to come get me instead?’

This, at least, appears to be an acceptable solution. Mrs Butters scurries off to call the number of the Woodstock that Dean wrote down for her. He lays back down, closes his eyes, and prays to a God he doesn’t believe in that Bobby will pick up.

Chapter Text

For reasons Dean will never understand, Bobby not only answers the phone, but goes along with the charade of being Dean’s uncle without question, then comes to pick him up in his ’71 Chevelle. The rumble of the engine makes Dean’s chest hurt in a way that has nothing to do with dodgeball. He leans his head against the cool window and closes his eyes for just a few seconds.

When he opens them again, the car’s parked in front of his room at the Woodstock, and Bobby’s got his master set of keys out, apparently trying to find one that will open the door to Dean’s room.

Dean’s suddenly awake and alert in a real fucking hurry.

He looks at the clock on the dashboard and sees there’s still hours yet, before Sam gets home from school, and that’s something, at least. The bill was always going to come due, so he’s going to count his blessings and be glad that his brother’s not around to witness it.

Bobby finds the correct key and pushes the door open, kicking down the stopper before he strides back to the car for Dean. If Dean’s shaking, it’s because it’s fucking November and cold as a witch’s tit, nothing else.

‘D’ya need help gettin’ inside, son?’ Bobby asks, opening the car door for Dean, who shakes his head and immediately regrets it when the headache comes back full force.

He drags himself inside by sheer force of will. Bobby doesn’t touch him, but keeps his hands close enough that he could catch Dean if he falls, and it ends up being like Dean can feel them on him anyway. His stomach roils and he wonders if he’s going to be sick again.

When they get into the room and the door closes behind them, to Dean, it sounds like the slamming of a prison cell. He rolls his eyes at how dramatic he’s being and wonders if it’s from him being injured or being an idiot. Possibly both.

Bobby’s directing him over to the bed and Dean just- he can’t. He can’t say no, but he can’t say yes, and he’s shaking again. Violently, in fact.

‘Do you, uh- d’ya think ya need t’shower?’ Bobby asks uncomfortably. ‘To- to warm up or somethin’? I know I ain’t good at all this nursemaid shit, but seems like a hot shower might do ya some good.’

Is he implying he wants Dean in the shower? That thought makes Dean feel even more nauseous. It’s stupid as hell, but the shower has become something of a safe space for him — a spot where he can completely fall apart and no one needs to know.

‘I’m- I’m fine,’ he protests. He swallows hard, squares his shoulders. Sways a little, but who the fuck cares. ‘I just- I can- I’m fine.’ He forces himself to breathe, weighs his odds, then takes the leap. ‘I- I can do it, I- uh-’

This is pathetic. He feels like he hasn’t formed a full fucking sentence since Bobby picked him up from school, and he has to say something, do something, before it’s too late.

‘Can I just blow you?’ he blurts out finally. ‘Please- I- I just- my head really fuckin’ hurts, man, and I-’ He sounds like a whiny bitch even to his own ears. ‘I’m- I’m good for it, I swear, I-’

He knows he’s not making any fucking sense, and to his horror, he feels his throat getting tighter and tighter with every stuttered word. Before he knows it, there’s a hot, prickling sensation behind his eyes. He swipes at them angrily with the sleeve of his shirt, the exhaustion and stress of the last few weeks crashing down on him hard, and he can feel himself start to buckle.

‘Dean,’ Bobby utters, sounding strained. He sure as shit doesn’t sound turned on or like he’s ’bout to shove Dean facedown on the mattress, though, so Dean supposes he should count that as a blessing.

‘Please,’ Dean says again, but the word is lost somewhere in the tears that are streaming down his face and are no way within his power to stop. Maybe he should have taken that shower after all.

Bobby looks like he doesn’t know how to handle the whole fucked up situation. He’s probably regretting ever having done a damn thing for Dean, now that he knows Dean’s too fucking- too fucked up to even-

‘Where the hell’s your daddy, kid?’ Bobby asks gruffly. ‘The fuck’s he doin’ that’s got him so tied up that his goddamn kid thinks he’s gotta-’ He breaks off, looking vaguely ill. ‘What the hell have you been doing?’

He takes off his ever-present baseball cap and scratches his head. Dean’s been around the guy for long enough to know that this is what he does when he’s feeling some kinda way, he just doesn’t know why.

‘I do what I gotta to take care of Sammy,’ Dean says quietly. He’d been going for defiant, but ends up landing somewhere between hollow and despair. ‘Ain’t like the kid can live off’a water ’n sunshine, ya know.’

‘Fuck,’ Bobby growls, and Dean flinches, drawing back in on himself. Of course Bobby notices this, and softens his tone when he speaks again. ‘Kid, I… Shit, I don’t know what ta say, ’cept I’m sorry ya been goin’ through this alone. You don’t deserve it — none of it. Life ain’t meant to be this hard for a kid your age. It’s a weight you were never meant to carry..’

Something inside Dean breaks.

No one has ever told him they’re sorry, or that he doesn’t deserve the shit hand he’s been dealt. No one has ever seen him as a kid — not really. Ever since his mom died when he was only four years old, since they put her in the ground and six month old Sam into his arms, he’s been it. The one who handles it all, carries it all, the one who looks out for Sammy. It’s never mattered that there’s been no one looking out for him, and he’s been just fucking fine.

‘Listen,’ Bobby says, real serious and slow, ‘I do not,’ he sounds nauseous himself as he stresses the word, ‘want- want that from you. Ever. And ain’t nobody else who should- well.’

He does the hat off/ head scratching thing again, sounding as uncomfortable and out of his element as Dean feels. Dean doesn’t know what to think. Bobby makes a frustrated growling noise, then seems to force himself to continue.

‘Listen. I- shit. I hate to think of ya doin’- well, you know. So, just- just take this ’n…’ He’s suddenly got his wallet out and is blindly pulling all the cash he has and dropping it on an end table next to the sofa without even counting to see what’s there. ‘This ain’t- there ain’t no expectation of services rendered, ya hear? So don’t go tryin’ any of that- well, you know.’ He gestures vaguely towards his crotch, looking as though he wishes he could disappear.

Dean’s completely thrown off by how squeamish this guy is talkin’ ’bout fucking blowjobs. He doesn’t understand what the big deal is — he hadn’t wanted to get fucked, sure, cos the few times he’s had to do that he’d had a bad fucking time of it, but he hadn’t been lying when he said he was good for it. He’d been twelve the first time someone had said he had cocksucking lips, and thirteen the first time he’d had to put them to good use. He has the morbid thought that he’s probably given more blowjobs than handshakes in his life, and it almost makes him laugh.

‘I don’t get it,’ he mumbles somewhat dazedly. ‘I don’t get- I don’t understand what the fuck you want from me, man, but it- it’s really fucking with my head. Why are you doing this?’

‘Cos from where I’m standin’, you’re a sixteen year old friggin’ kid whose daddy’s dumped him and his brother at a motel in East Bumfuck with no food or money, then disappeared into thin air, and you’re workin’ yourself to the damn bone to take care of your brother, when oughta be someone lookin’ out for you,’ Bobby answers, and he sounds pissed again, but somehow Dean knows that this time it’s not directed at him. ‘All I want from you’s to know you’re- that you’re alright.’

‘I just don’t understand why the fuck you give a shit,’ Dean snaps, just wanting this whole thing to be over and done with. He just wants the other shoe to drop so he knows what the fuck he’s up against, and maybe after that, he can get some goddamn sleep.

‘Yeah, well. Me neither,’ Bobby mutters, half to himself, sounding annoyed as hell about that fact, and for some reason, it’s that more than anything else that makes Dean feel like he can breathe again.

Chapter Text

Bobby Singer has never been a man who wanted to be a father. Between havin’ a daddy who’d hit the bottle right before hittin’ Bobby and his momma, ’n growin’ up to be a pretty goddamn mean drunk himself, he always figured it’d be best if the curse ended with him. It’d been a huge point of contention between him ’n Karen before she passed, and if it weren’t for the fact that Bobby’d seen the doctor’s scans for the cancer that’d killed her with his own two eyes, he woulda assumed she’d died of a broken heart.

Karen woulda made a hell of a mom.

He thinks of her every day, normally, but he’s been thinkin’ of her a hell of a lot more lately, ever since that friggin’ Winchester kid had showed up on his radar. Karen woulda known what to do with him — about him — whatever. She woulda handled the whole goddamn situation a hell of a lot better than Bobby’s been doing, and that’s a fact. Some days, he ends up talkin’ to her as though she’s still there, just cos he needs to feel as though someone with some common goddamn sense knows what the hell’s goin’ on. He misses her like crazy, but he also feels like the poor kid’s missin’ out by not havin’ her as well.

When he starts goin’ down that road, he forces himself to pump the brakes and remember that that kid, Dean, and the nameless, faceless brother that Dean’s been charged with looking after — which apparently includes keeping him from Bobby’s sight for reasons Bobby don’t wanna know — ain’t his responsibility. It ain’t up to him — or Karen’s ghost, for that matter — to take care of ’em, look out for ’em, make sure they’re warm ’n fed. Oughta been their own damn father doin’ that shit. Only, the friggin’ bastard’s been AWOL basically since he booked the room in the first place.

Bobby’d been pissed when he found out the guy’d ditched his kids and then taken off for Timbuk-friggin’-tu, but his annoyance had shot straight to murderous when he’d finally clocked what the fuck the kid had been doing to feed himself ’n his brother.

(The mental images of Dean sinking to his knees in Bobby’s office, trembling, too-small hands reaching for his belt, or of him damn near shaking apart, half incoherent with panic and exhaustion as he begged Bobby not to- well. To use him in a way he’d obviously become accustomed to being used… it’d definitely made more than a few appearances in Bobby’s nightmares. The kind that he can’t shake with a few shots of whiskey and shitty late night TV. The kind that means he ends up callin’ Pamela in the middle of the night for an emergency head-shrinkin’ session to talk him down off a ledge he don’t understand how he got to.)

Bobby Singer had never wanted to have any friggin’ kids, but now somehow he’s got two boys stayin’ at the Woodstock, scared and alone, and in desperate need of a dad. Ain’t gonna be him, that’s for damn sure, but he can’t stop worryin’ about them anyway.

Bobby tells Dean to take the rest of the week off after his episode up at the school. When he’d gotten the call from the school saying his ‘nephew’ had passed out in gym class, he’d thought for all of two seconds about coming clean with the nurse and tellin’ her that the kid ain’t no relation to him, but in the end, he’d just shut his trap and went up to the school to get him. He remembers bein’ the kid who no one wanted, and if Dean’d given the woman his name and number, there’d obviously been a reason for it.

Dean don’t take more than just that day off, though. He shows up at three PM the day after Bobby’d picked him up from school as though it were any other day, and refuses every hint Bobby offers that maybe he should go rest, instead mumbling something about going to take the trash out. He staggers off, dwarfed by the too-big leather coat he wears that’s gotta do little against the cold November air.

(Against his better judgement, Bobby’d asked if Dean and the brother had proper coats and shit for winter, but the kid had just glared at him and said they were fine. Bobby wishes he didn’t have to wonder if that meant yes or no, then wishes that he wasn’t friggin’ wondering at all.)

Day after day, the kid shows up, does what’s asked of him, the waits quietly to be dismissed. On days Bobby forgets to cut him loose right at six, Dean’s breathing picks up and his shoulders tense, like he’s expecting this to be the day Bobby bends him over the edge of the desk, and goddamn if that don’t make Bobby wanna track that damn daddy’a his down just so he can punch him in the teeth.

Bobby sets an alarm on his phone to go off at ten to six after that.

He wants to ask — very badly, in fact — if Dean’s gone back to- to ‘doin’ what he’s gotta’ after he gets done with workin’ around the motel, but it really ain’t any of his business, nor does he know if he believes Dean’d tell him the truth in the first place. All he can do is hope what he gave the kid is enough to keep him and his brother afloat for at least a little while.

(And if Bobby starts staying late into second shift, well, it’s cos he’s a busy man with a whole bunch’a work that needs doin’, and has nothing at all to do with wantin’ to see if he spots anyone comin’ or goin’ from a certain room.)

The weekend comes and goes. John Winchester does not.

Bobby drinks his coffee standin’ in the office window, watching Dean trudge off in the direction of the high school, and heaves a disgusted sigh. He’s not sure if it’s directed at John Winchester or himself. Possibly (probably) both.

The boys have been left alone at the Woodstock for over a month by now. Either their daddy’s an even bigger piece of crap than Bobby’d been thinking this whole time, or something’s actually wrong. Whatever it is, it ain’t looking good for Dean and the brother.

And, whatever it is, it ain’t Bobby’s business, nor Bobby’s problem. It ain’t. Sucks that the kids have been dealt a shit hand, but ain’t up to Bobby to pick up the slack.

It ain’t.

He turns away from the window, drains his coffee cup, and gets to work on the shit that actually is his responsibility.

Two hours later, he’s no farther along with balancing the expense ledger, mostly because he’s spent the bulk of that time glaring at the telephone and convincing himself to just put his head down and do his damn job.

Ten more minutes of inactivity tick by. Bobby lets out a frustrated growl and picks up the phone.

Good morning, this is Officer Thomas Willis with the Hammond Police Department. We believe a suspect fleeing our jurisdiction might be heading your way. Name’s John Whiskey-indigo-November-Charlie-hotel-echo-sierra-tango-echo-Romeo…

Yeah, this is Pete Lovell with Lovell’s Towing — been tryin’ to hunt down parts for a late sixties Olds Delta… Chevy Bel-Air might work, too… You got a Chevy Impala, huh? Well, what colour? Yeah, ya idjit, I know I can paint the friggin’ thing, I just wanna know- Huh. That banged up, you say? Well damn, ya hate t’see that happen to a classic like that. For curiosity’s sake, what d’ya think happened to the driver…?

Hey there, this is Dr Louis Dunbar from Lake County Medical Center calling to check on the condition of my patient, John Winchester. Heard he got himself in some sorta MVA, condition critical… Ah. Well, that’s a damned shame. Any word on next of kin? Yeah, I’ll hold…

Bobby hangs up the phone and sits back in his chair, massaging his temples. Why in the holy hell did he decide to go stickin’ his nose in shit that don’t concern him? He glares at the phone, glares at his desk, glares at the drawer he knows hides a bottle of shitty whiskey that he keeps around in case of emergency, but even nipping just a sip from the bottle seems disrespectful, considering the news he’s just found out.

Then again, John Winchester, may he rot in Hell, definitely does not deserve his respect. Bobby opens the drawer. Then he shuts it with another growl.

That stupid bastard might not, but his boys sure do.

He sighs and tries to figure out what the fuck he’s going to do now.

Dean shows up at three, same as always, but this time, Bobby sends him away, begging a headache and saying they’ll pick it back up tomorrow. Dean eyes him suspiciously, but trots off obediently, never one to question orders. Bobby don’t want to let himself ponder why that might be.

About an hour later, he watches the brother lope across the parking lot, then get let into the room by Dean, and he knows what he’s gotta do.

He shrugs on his jacket, wondering again what the hell the kids are gonna do about cold weather gear now that their old man won’t be coming back for them, ever. He tries to remind himself that whatever it is, it’s not his concern anymore. Never was, really.

The door to their room flies open when he knocks, and Bobby finds himself face to face with six feet of pissed off teenager.

‘I ain’t lettin’ you in here with Sammy,’ Dean says, voice low and dangerous. ‘Whatever you want, you ’n me handle it privately.’

‘Set your phasers to stun, kid, I just got somethin’ I gotta talk to you boys about, ’n I think it’s somethin’ ya both oughta hear,’ Bobby says, raising his hands deferentially. Dean stands to his full height and crosses his arms, not surrendering an inch of ground. Bobby sighs. ‘It’s ’bout your daddy.’

Something flickers in Dean’s expression; the briefest glimpse behind the curtain, but then it shutters back to hard and indifferent. ‘I’ll pass the message along,’ he says, raising his chin defiantly, but he steps back to let Bobby a few feet inside the room.

Bobby sighs again and scratches his head uncomfortably. ‘Alright, well… you got other kin, kid?’ he asks, no clue how the hell to get the ball rolling. Dean shakes his head.

‘Why,’ he says, voice trembling slightly, but it’s not a question. Bobby looks the kid in the eyes and sees he already knows why. He’s just begging Bobby to tell him he’s wrong.

‘Your father was…’ Bobby’s mouth feels dry, so he tries to swallow and start again. ‘He was in an accident a few towns over. DWI. Wrapped the car ’round a telephone pole and, uh- well, he made it to the hospital, but went pretty quick after that, sounds like…’

He’d doing a terrible job of this. He remembers seeing an episode of Dr Sexy, MD where one of the doctors had said that when someone dies, you have to say it — say the word died, the word dead — to make it feel real. It’d been right around the time Karen had passed — died — and he remembers being angry at how true that was.

‘He’s dead, Dean,’ Bobby forces out. ‘He died in the hospital last week. Didn’t have any emergency contacts or nothin’ listed…’

‘Then how the fuck’d you find out?’ Dean demands. His voice has gone high and his eyes have gone bright, but he’s still holding on to that last shred of hope that Bobby had made a mistake.

Bobby closes his eyes and says gruffly, ‘Made some calls. Used’ta have to do the same shit with- with my old man. Folks’ll tell ya anything ya wanna know if you ask ’em with enough confidence… First called the cops, who directed me to the impound, then they clued me in to start callin’ hospitals. Weren’t a hard trail to follow.’

Deans arms have dropped from being crossed over his chest to hugging his stomach, and goddamn if it don’t look like he’s using every ounce’a strength he’s got to keep himself from fallin’ to pieces.

‘I’m sorry for your loss, son,’ Bobby says, wincing at how this is probably an exceptionally poor choice of words. ‘You got anyone you can call?’ Dean shakes his head again.

‘Dad’s really dead?’ he asks. He sounds lost, like the tether that’d been connecting him to the world’s just gone and cut him loose. ‘I- What are we- I…’

The sentence trails off.

‘Yeah,’ Bobby says, because that’s all he’s got. ‘Yeah, he is, kid. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you.’

‘I gotta- How long do we got?’ Dean asks distantly. He’s in shock, that much is obvious. He’s not looking at Bobby now, but his eyes are darting back and forth like he’s not seeing a damn thing. Like he thinks if he looks hard enough, the answer will magically appear in the air in front of him.

‘How long for what?’ Bobby asks, frowning. Dean’s shaking now, grief and worry making it seem like he might vibrate right out of his skin, like there’s an earthquake in his bones that’s a second and a half from causin’ mass devastation.

‘The fuck do you think I mean? How long til we’re out on our asses?’ Dean snaps, but there’s a hysterical edge to his vitriol. He’s reminding Bobby of a feral cat backed into a corner, hissing and biting and so goddamn afraid. ‘I- I gotta… gotta figure somethin’ out, gotta- I’m gonna hafta get a- a job. Gonna hafta find- Oh, God. What are they doing with- with Dad’s-’

He shudders.

‘Kid…’ Bobby says helplessly, the heart he’d been so sure he’d buried with Karen breaking right in goddamn two. ‘Take a breath.’

‘I gotta- I gotta go tell my twelve year old brother that I’m all he’s got left in this rotten fucking world. Don’t tell me to breathe,’ Dean says.

He glares at Bobby, who’d always assumed he didn’t have a single friggin’ paternal bone in his body, but then the kid uses the sleeve of his too-big flannel shirt to swipe angrily at his face, and without thinking, Bobby extends his arms awkwardly to him.

The kid breaks.

He falls against Bobby, and then he’s sobbing, crying his heart out, right into the fabric of Bobby’s Carhartt jacket. Bobby making quiet shushing noises and awkwardly pats his back. Dean feels fragile, hollow-boned, like a wounded bird desperate to take flight, and Bobby feels something inside of him shift.

‘What d’ya say you grab your brother, ’n the three of us sit down and have a conversation,’ he suggests gruffly. ‘You can keep that pigsticker ya got in your pocket ’n shove it right between my ribs if anything untoward starts takin’ place.’

Dean hesitates, but then he nods mutely and stumbles towards the closed bathroom door where he’s no doubt told the brother to hole up. There’s some hushed murmuring, and then the next minute, Dean reemerges, a gangly long-haired tween in his wake.

Bobby takes one look at the pair of them — these two lost vessels just trying to stay afloat on a stormy sea — and before they’ve even crossed the room, he already knows how this story is gonna end.

Chapter Text

It’s not easy, moving on, but nothing in Dean’s life ever is.

They stay at the motel for the time being, and some days it’s almost easy to forget that they’re alone, because these days aren’t all that different than all the ones that came before. The ones where they were sad or scared or hungry, and so very, very alone. The ones where they were more familiar with John’s absence than his presence, and found comfort and home in each other, because that’s all they had. Some days, it’s almost like nothing has changed.

Only, everything has changed.

Bobby, for whatever goddamn reason, has somehow decided he gives a shit what becomes of Dean and Sam, for reasons Dean can’t even begin to fathom. It starts with him coming around more to check on them, usually with some lame excuse about needing to fix the pipes in the bathroom or wanting to measure something so some shit can fit somewhere for some reason that everyone knows is a load of bull.

Then he starts dropping off food. At first it’s just a few boxes of cereal cos he ‘bought the wrong kind’ — that sugary name-brand shit that Dean could only afford to get for Sam on special occasions or when John was feeling especially generous. All too soon, however, it progresses to full grocery runs that Bobby dumps at their door with only a few grumbled words about ‘not doin’ the food shopping on an empty stomach’, cos then he just happens to go overboard, so Dean and Sam might as well take the food so it don’t go to waste. A few times around dinner time, a delivery guy from the pizza place or Chinese food joint shows up at their door with enough food to feed a small army.

Every ounce of Dean’s stupid stubbornness and pride screams for him to refuse these things. It’s like watching a car crash (which is actually a terrible comparison, all things considered), watching tally after tally pile up on the debt side of the metaphorical ledger between him Bobby. Part of him spends far too much time wondering what the man is going to want from him when it’s time to collect. Only… it’s things they need — things he needs to make sure Sam is fed and happy (or as happy as it’s possible to be, given the circumstances.)

It all comes to a head on Christmas Day.

The temperature had been steadily dropping, and Dean hasn’t been sneaking out for ‘work’ nearly as much as he had previously. This is both because of the steady supply of food Bobby has not-so-subtly been dumping on him and Sam, coupled with the fact that very few people — even the lowlife kind Dean tends to attract — are interested in having their dick sucked in the freezing cold, and Dean was absolutely not going anywhere with these scumbags. He might have considered it at one point, had he been desperate enough, but these days he’s playing it a lot safer. He can’t risk something happening to him, now that he and Sam are each other’s only family.

As a result of this newfound cautiousness, however, Christmas ends up being even more pathetic than usual. He’s able to pick up a few little bullshit things for Sam — a used book from the thrift store, a pack of gum, a knockoff of a knockoff Swiss Army knife — but it’s probably the saddest haul he’s ever had in a lifetime of sad hauls. Sam is, of course, grateful for all of it and he, in turn, gives Dean an ugly as shit pillow he made in home ec class that Dean actually loves, and a weird little demon head necklace thing that’s cool as hell that he’d found at a pawn shop in town.

They’re just getting ready to share a dinner of leftover Chinese food, real Dr Pepper, and those stupid sprinkle jingle Christmas cookies that Bobby had ‘bought by mistake’ and given to them a few days earlier, when there’s a knock at the door. Dean freezes out of habit, ready to tell Sam to go hide in the bathroom with his new knife, but when he gets up to check the peephole, there’s no one there. Frowning, he opens the door, about to take a step outside when he nearly trips on the thing on the ground outside their room that can really only be called a sack.

The damn thing is made of cheap red felt with a kitschy picture of Santa Claus printed on the side. The drawstring’s done up tight, but the bag itself is nearly full to bursting. The tag hanging from the ribbon drawstring reads simply: TO: DEAN + SAM. MERRY XMAS with no return sender, but Dean has a good enough idea of who it’s from. Uneasily, as though it might contain a live bomb or a crate of pissed off rattlesnakes, Dean gingerly picks it up and brings it inside the room where a baffled-looking Sam is watching the events unfold.

‘What is that?’ he asks, confused but interested. ‘Where’d it come from?’

‘Santa, obviously, bitch,’ Dean answers, trying to calm the wave of emotion that’s rising inside of him, because he’s not quite sure if he’s about to punch something in indignation, or break down completely. ‘I, uh- I guess you might as well see if you made the nice list this year, kid.’

Sam rolls his eyes, but he pulls out his new knife to cut the ribbon around the top anyway, then reaches inside to start pulling packages out. Each one’s wrapped in newspaper in a slapdash sort of way with far too much tape, but Dean stops noticing the quality of the wrapping job as the small mountain of gifts grows. Sam separates the ones marked DEAN from the ones marked SAM in what looks like red Sharpie marker, and when he’s done, there’s over half a dozen gifts in each pile.

Well, what the fuck.

Dean has another moment of almost wanting to reject this unfounded generosity strictly on principle, but he forces that urge to quiet when he sees the bashful eager curiosity on his brother’s face. Sam is watching him closely, clearly waiting to follow Dean’s lead, so he sighs and gestures towards one of the packages in the SAM pile, then goes about opening one of his own.

Slowly, but surely, the uncover packages of thick socks, a few long sleeve shirts, some packs of snacks. Sam gets a few books — the Hunger Games, Percy Jackson, the Maze Runner. All titles that a guy like Bobby should have no clue about, so Dean wonders if he’d had to ask someone what a twelve year old kid would like. The idea should seem far more ludicrous than it actually does.

For Dean, he’s included a few books as well. There’s a copy of the Lord of the Rings and one of Slaughterhouse-Five. Dean has no idea why Bobby picked these ones for him, but he sets them down carefully, eyeing his two remaining packages.

Sam has two packages left as well, and they’re pretty sizeable ones at that. The first one Sam opens to reveal a pair of brand new snow boots. The second holds a puffy winter coat. Dean freezes.

He’s been worrying himself sick over how he was ever going to be able to save enough money to afford boots or a coat for Sam this winter — never mind both. He’d spent more than a few periods of math or history class letting his thoughts run around the same closed circuit track of how even a warm jacket didn’t really help if your feet were wet and cold, but on the other hand, with Sam growing like a fucking weed, if Dean got him a jacket big enough, it could probably last a good few years, while shoes probably wouldn’t fit after only one. And then Bobby went and gave him both like it was- like it was nothing at all. Didn’t even stick around long enough to be thanked.

Numbly, Dean opens his own packages and is not exactly shocked to find that Bobby’s gotten boots and a coat for him as well. He dazedly looks at the sizes on his and Sam’s new treasures and they’re remarkably accurate. He wonders again who Bobby would have asked for advice to have managed to gotten it so right.

Dean’s on his feet before he really knows what he’s doing, and he’s out the door before he can even throw on a jacket — his old one or new one — or acknowledge a shocked Sam calling after him. He barks at his brother to stay put and slams the door behind him.

The next thing he knows, he’s bursting into Bobby’s office, eyes blazing and wild, something in his chest cracking wide open, and he has no earthly idea what’s about to come spilling out.

‘What the fuck,’ is all he can manage from between his gritted teeth. Any other words he might have had lodge themself in his throat like broken glass he can’t swallow around.

Bobby looks up from his desk, startled. He has his hat sitting high on his head, like he’d pushed it back from his face in frustration, and a pair of reading glasses perched on the end of his nose. In his hand is — ironically — the office ledger, and all at once Dean imagines all those figurative debt tallies being counted up. And here he is, yelling at the man for giving him a fucking coat.

‘Somethin’ got your panties in a twist?’ Bobby asks wryly after a beat of silence. Dean glowers.

‘I still don’t understand what the hell you’re gettin’ at,’ he spits. His throat feels tight and it’s like there’s hundreds of bugs burrowing under his skin, making him wish he could tear it all right off. ‘What the fuck are you tryna accomplish here? You already said you don’t want my ass, and I can’t believe that foldin’ fuckin’ towels or shovellin’ the damn parking lot’s enough to cover one friggin’ t-shirt, never mind all that shit. So what do you want from me?!’

He- he’s yelling now, possibly crying. He realises distantly that he’s acting like a complete psycho — anger and indignation and embarrassment and that bone-deep sadness that feels like it’s been wicking the will to live from his beating heart since he found out that Dad is dead making him irrational and volatile. This is not how to treat the man who’s done more for him and Sam in the last month than their father has in the last — well, ever, really.

It occurs to him in the next breath that if he’d ever dared to speak to his father like this, he’d’ve been flat on his back already, and that gives him the mental kick in the ass he needs for him to come to his senses.

‘Sorry,’ he manages to grind out resentfully. His breath is coming in sharp, painful bursts and his fists are clenched at his sides. All at once he deeply regrets the choice to not grab his jacket, because he’s shivering. Shaking, actually, like he might fall apart right there on the warm office carpet.

‘Sit your ass down,’ Bobby orders gruffly, getting up and stalking over to the ancient thermostat and bumping it up a few degrees. ‘For God’s sake, didja forget that December means it’s friggin’ cold out? The hell you tryna do, give yourself pneumonia?’

The heat kicks out at about the same time Dean’s knees give out, and he does actually slump down into the chair next to Bobby’s desk. He can’t stop shaking, though, and he’s beginning to suspect it’s got nothing to do with the damn weather.

‘What do you want from me, Bobby?’ Dean repeats, fatigue and frustration seeping into every word. ‘Why are you doing this? I don’t- I don’t get it. Just stop fuckin’ me around, man, and tell me what the fuck you want.’

‘Is it really so goddamn hard to believe that I don’t want a friggin’ thing from you?!’ Bobby snaps. ‘I just figured you boys needed some shit ’n ain’t like I got anyone I gotta buy Christmas shit for, so it was either givin’ the stuff to you or the friggin’ bell ringer Santa down at the supermarket, ’n those fuckers always piss me off.’

‘And I don’t?’ Dean counters petulantly, not believing for a second that he hasn’t been driving the man crazy ever since he had the misfortune to cross paths with him.

Bobby lets out a frustrated growl, but somehow it seems like his annoyance is more directed at himself than at Dean. ‘Oh, trust me, kid, you sure as shit do,’ he grumbles. His hand drifts up to nudge his baseball cap out of the way and he rubs his temples tiredly, closing his eyes briefly. ‘But that don’t change the fact that- that someone oughta be lookin’ out for you ’n your brother.’

‘And you think that someone oughta be you,’ Dean says flatly. It’s not a question, the words coming out more like an accusation, though he doesn’t really know why he’s so offended at the idea that Bobby gives a shit.

‘Yeah,’ Bobby retorts shortly. ‘Yeah, apparently I do.’ He doesn’t sound all that happy about it, either. ‘You’re too- just- ain’t no kid your age who should be worryin’ ’bout handlin’ all this shit you gotta deal with. ’

He’s speaking to Dean like he’s- like he’s some helpless little kid who don’t know how to make ends meet, and it grates against Dean’s raw nerves like road rash. Dean’s been taking care of everything for his family for as long as he can remember, for years and years and years before he met this- this interfering do-gooder asshole who thinks he’s gonna swoop in and save the poor wayward orphans with a box of Lucky Charms and pair of boots.

‘I’ve been sucking cock in alleys and truck stop bathrooms since I was thirteen fucking years old,’ Dean says slowly, deliberately, the words landing like blows that make Bobby flinch, and for one wild moment, Dean’s glad. ‘They’d pay me twenty bucks and I’d let ’em fuck my throat ’til I thought I was gonna pass out. And I’d do it again and again, no matter where the fuck we were, because my goddamn father would take off and leave us with no word, no money, no return date in sight.’ Dean presses his lips together, blinks hard, then says, ‘My own goddamn father didn’t- he didn’t care what the hell we got up to, so why the fuck do you?’ Dean’s voice is saturated with shame and anger and exhaustion, even as it breaks.

‘Because you always shoulda had someone who gave a damn,’ Bobby snaps, and there’s something about how he says it that makes Dean pause, makes him wonder if there’s more to the story — Bobby’s story — than what meets the eye. ‘Now I can’t help not bein’ there when you were- were goin’ through your shit then, but I damn well can make sure you ain’t goin’ through this shit alone. Like it or not, kid, I ain’t givin’ up on your dumb ass.’

They’re both breathing hard now, just breathing through the moment, through their anger. Through their pain.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ Dean says. He’s a live wire, raw and dangerous and half a second from mass destruction, lethal energy without an outlet. ‘I don’t know how- how to live in a world without him, Bobby, but I am still so- I’m so goddamn angry that sometimes I think it’s gonna- gonna kill me. I wake up and I’m fine until I remember, ’n then I- I’m so fuckin’ sad, it’s like I can’t breathe. But then right before I start wantin’ to take the toaster into the damn bathtub, I remember how he- how he just fuckin’ left us, over ’n over, ’n now he left us for good, ’n then I just- I wanna burn the whole fuckin’ world to the ground. But I can’t, cos I gotta be- be strong, act right — for Sammy. I can’t fall the fuck apart, cos I’m all he’s got now.’

Dean clenches his jaw and scrunches his nose, trying to keep from crying — again. He opens his mouth, but it takes several long moments before he’s able to say again, ‘I’m- I'm all he’s got.’

The words are quiet this time, soft, like a confession.

‘I know, kid,’ Bobby says, far more gently than Dean expected or — frankly — deserves. ‘I know what it’s like to- to wanna piss on someone’s grave just as much as you wanna cry over it, ’n to feel like ya gotta carry the whole wide world on your own, but what I’m tryin’ to tell you is that you don’t. I- I ain’t your dad. I ain’t even your kin, but… for some fuckin’ reason seems like you ’n me, we’re stuck with each other for the time being, so might as well try ’n make the best of things, right? If not for you, then how ’bout for your brother?’

‘You really- ya really don’t want…’ Dean trails off. He’s definitely crying again, despite his best efforts, and he has the thought that if John was alive, he’d smack the shit out of Dean for being such a bitch. Bobby, on the other hand, just shoves a box of Kleenex at him without so much a batting an eye.

‘Told you before, all I want is to know you boys are alright,’ Bobby replies, and this time the bemused grouchiness of his tone makes Dean snort. Bobby claps him on the shoulder, takes a deep breath and says, ‘I was ’bout to take off for the day — got some roast beef ’n potatas ’n cherry pie waitin’ for me at home… you boys eat yet?’

Dean regards him suspiciously and can’t help but ask, ‘You make all that shit yourself?’

‘Do I look like Betty friggin’ Crocker to you?’ Bobby snaps, though it seems like he’s suppressing a smile. ‘’Course I didn’t — got takeout from the diner up the street the other day, but they went ’n gave me too much food, so I just thought-’

‘No,’ Dean interrupts as steadily as he can. Bobby seems to deflate for a minute before Dean elaborates, ‘I mean. No, we didn’t eat yet… and- and I guess it’d be wrong to let all that shit go to waste, right? Since the diner messed up your order ’n all?’

‘Right, kid,’ Bobby says quietly. ‘So… go grab your brother and I’ll wrap up here, then we can get the show on the road.’

Dean nods and stands. He makes it all the way to the door, his hand on the knob, when he hears Bobby add, ‘And wear a friggin’ coat, for Christ’s sake. It’s twenty friggin’ degrees outside.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Dean replies. He exits the office before he has a chance to get choked up all over again.

Chapter Text

Over the course of one Christmas dinner, Dean’s entire friggin’ life changes.

Sammy had been thrilled at the prospect of having a ‘real’ Christmas dinner for once — all that Hallmark, Norman What’s-his-face bullshit has always appealed to Sam, and at the very least, Dean’s grateful to Bobby for giving it to him.

And so, that’s how Dean finds himself strapped into the front seat of Bobby’s Chevelle, something in his chest lurching again at the familiar rumble of a big-block Chevy engine and an overeager little brother yammering away in the backseat. Bobby, to his credit, humours Sam far more than Dean could have anticipated, even going so far as to ask him questions about school and his friends and if he plays any sports or is in any clubs. Something about this earnest interaction makes Dean’s stomach clench, and it’s only when they pull into Bobby’s driveway that he realises it’s because no one other than him has ever taken this kind of interest in his brother. It gives him just one more thing to feel indebted to Bobby for.

Bobby’s house isn’t anything too exciting to look at and looks like it hasn’t been updated in Dean’s lifetime, but Dean figures he really shouldn’t be too surprised, considering that the Woodstock seems to be perpetually stuck in 1972.

‘It ain’t much to look at,’ Bobby says gruffly as they trudge inside and kick the snow from their shoes, ‘but it’s home.’

What a novel concept.

Once Dean and Sam have shed their brand new boots and coats, Bobby leads them into the ancient looking kitchen. He pulls a plastic bag full of takeout containers from the fridge and plops it down on the scratched kitchen table.

‘Plates’re in that cupboard over there ’n silverware’s in the drawer underneath,’ he tells Sam, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. ‘Go ahead ’n grab us what we need, alright?’

‘Yes, sir!’ Sammy replies eagerly. He crosses the kitchen, sliding a little in his socked feet in his hurry. Dean catches Bobby watching him with a faintly amused smile before he turns back to Dean.

‘You boys like carrots or green beans better?’ he asks, back to Dean as he rummages in what appears to be his pantry. ‘Aw, hell, let’s just mix ’em together, can’t hurt none.’ He hands two cans of veg to Dean and points to the stove. ‘Just dump ’em in that pot over there ’n heat it up on the stove. Don’t burn my friggin’ house down.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Dean mumbles, far less enthusiastically than his brother.

Bobby sighs at the use of the honorific, but doesn’t call him out for it, instead opening the takeout containers showing Sam how to plate the food. They ‘nuke’ each plate in the microwave while Dean idly stirs the pot of carrots and green beans. Once everyone is finished with their tasks, they’ve put together one of the best meals Dean thinks he’s ever seen.

‘Y’all don’t… say grace or whatever, do ya?’ Bobby asks uncertainly, when Dean doesn’t immediately begin shovelling food into his face like his brother.

Dean shakes his head and presses his lips together, not quite able to speak, but Bobby seems to get it then, and turns to Sam, giving Dean a moment to of privacy to get his shit together.

‘So, tell me more ’bout this whole greenhouse effect whatsit thing you think you’re gonna be settin’ up in your motel room,’ he says, revisiting their conversation from earlier in which Sam was detailing his latest science project. ‘And explain it to me slow — back in my day, the kid who made a friggin’ volcano for the science fair was like the next Alvin Einstein.’

Sam actually laughs at Bobby’s dumb joke and begins chattering away about CO2 and fossil fuel and solar radiation and all other sorts of shit Dean is too dumb to understand. Bobby doesn’t look like he gets too much of what Sam’s saying either, but it doesn’t stop him from asking questions and keeping the conversation going, even bringing up some of the projects he had to do ‘back in his day’ as well.

It’s corny as all get out, Bobby’s trying too hard attempt at bonding with Sam, but it makes something in Dean’s chest uncoil nonetheless. It makes it easier to breathe, which makes it easier to eat, and eventually makes it easier to talk. Dean knows he doesn’t add much worth saying to the conversation, but he’s trying, even though it’s hard as hell, which Sam and Bobby seem to understand.

‘I don’t know about you boys, but I can’t eat another bite right now,’ Bobby says with a groan once the conversation peters off, and Dean and Sam have been offered seconds — and thirds. ‘What d’ya think ’bout turnin’ the TV on or somethin’ for a little bit before breakin’ into that pie? I think they’re playin’ Die Hard on TNT all day.’

‘Okay!’ Sam agrees eagerly, pushing his chair out from the table and taking a few steps towards the living room before Dean hisses his name. He stops short and turns around, clearly perplexed until Dean shoots a pointed look to his abandoned empty dishes. ‘Oh. Yeah, sorry ’bout that, Bobby.’

‘I can take care’a that,’ Bobby says, standing and reaching for Sam’s plate, but Dean shakes his head.

‘Sammy can take care of his own dishes,’ he says as Sam quickly clears his place, looking chagrined. ‘And… and I can clean up in here if you wanna, uh- go relax or whatever. ’Long as you don’t mind me touchin’ your stuff, I mean- I just, uh- thought I could, you know, help if you want…’ He trails off, knowing he sounds like a damn idiot even without Sam staring at him like he’s grown a second head.

‘Kid, you don’t gotta-’ Bobby starts, but Dean interrupts with, ‘I, uh- I want to- to help. If that’s alright. I promise I won’t break nothin’.’

Bobby studies him for a minute, but then claps Dean on the back and says, ‘good man,’ before heading towards the living room. Dean can hear the indistinct murmur of Sam saying something and Bobby laughing. He lets out a slow breath, and sets about piling dishes in the sink and boxing up the leftovers, glad to finally be useful again.

It’s not until the dishes are washed and dried and Dean’s putting the leftovers into the fridge and wiping down the counters that he sees the receipt from the diner in the bottom of the takeout bag for three Christmas specials and a cherry pie.

After that, every few days, the boys end up over Bobby’s for dinner. As it turns out, despite his initial warnings that ‘he’s no friggin’ Betty Crocker’, Bobby actually isn’t a half bad cook. It starts off with simple stuff like spaghetti or sloppy Joes or even breakfast for dinner, which is actually kind of awesome, but then they start having things like roasted chicken and garlic parm pork chops and homemade lasagna. Bobby’s refrigerator starts housing things like fresh fruits and vegetables and milk and eggs and cheese, rather than a twelve pack of beer, a bottle of ketchup, and a few questionable takeout containers.

Dean can’t remember a time when he and Sam ate this well or this regularly. Though the guilt and unease is still present, seeing Sam lose the gaunt, haggard look of a kid who’s never known what it’s like to feel full makes great strides towards letting it go.

On Dean’s birthday, Bobby surprises him with a slightly smushed, lopsided cake with HAPPY BDAY DEAN written on it in blue icing. Sam watches smugly as Bobby lights the candles, making Dean all but certain his brother is the one who ratted him out. This is the first birthday cake Dean’s had in probably about a decade. He bites the inside of his cheek so he doesn’t get all stupid and sappy all over the place because of it.

(He also doesn’t make a wish as he blows the candle out, because all he’s ever wanted was to know that Sam was being taken care of, plus he’s turning seventeen, which is much too old for that bullshit, anyway.)

Dinner a few times a week quickly turns into a daily thing. Bobby almost always gets off work sometime between five and six, then he goes to collect Dean and Sam, and they all pile into the Chevelle and go back to his house for a few hours to eat dinner and hang out before getting dropped back off around nine so they can ‘get a good night’s worth’a shuteye’. On days Bobby works late, he either brings leftovers or orders takeout, and they eat dinner in his office. On days he’s off altogether, he drives over to pick them up anyway. It’s like they’ve all become… friends or something, without any of them realising.

It’s super fucking weird.

It occurs to Dean that Bobby is wasting a hell of a lot of time and money on them, not to mention gas, driving them back and forth like Miss Daisy, but the man never says a word about it. Dean spends his free time wracking his brain to figure out how to pay Bobby back, other than just washing the damn dishes after dinner, but he keeps coming up frustratingly empty.

Everything changes when Sam starts coughing like crazy every day while doing his homework before it’s time to go to Bobby’s for dinner. Miraculously, the cough goes away when they get to Bobby’s, so Dean starts teasing him that he must be allergic to homework, which makes Sam give him his patented bitchface, and all is as well as it can be while one of them is coughing up a lung.

After another day or two, Dean stops by the nurse’s office at school (Mrs Butters is his good buddy now, after his dramatic episode passing out in gym that one time), and begs for a few cough drops. Mrs B gives him a whole package that he takes home and gives to Sam, but they don’t seem to do much good.

It gets to the point where Sam’s coughing in his sleep and his breathing starts sounding all asthmatic, and Dean’s just about beside himself, cos there’s no way he has the money for Sam to go to the doctor. On the other hand, listening to Sam wheeze all night causes this knot of anxiety in his stomach, because he’s told Bobby that he’s all Sam has left, which is why he’s gotta keep on keepin’ on, but the reverse is also true. Without Sam, Dean would have no one, and that is goddamn terrifying.

Dean starts feeling that familiar sinking sensation of shame and dread when he realises he’s going to have to go out and make money so he can take Sammy to the doc. It- it’s been months now since he’s had to do- that, and it’s like the time off has made him soft or something, because the idea of it makes him feel like he might puke or cry. He pushes those feelings down and promises if Sammy doesn’t get better within the next few days, he’ll do what he’s gotta.

(Sam doesn’t get better, but he doesn’t get worse, so Dean thinks maybe they can wait it out a while longer, and hates himself a little for it.)

Things aren’t great, but at least they’re stable, until Dean starts coughing as well.

‘Aw, what the fuck, bitch, you gave me your cooties,’ he complains after a few days of this new hell. His eyes are itching something awful, too. ‘I know misery loves company and all, but damn, dude.’

‘Shut up, jerk,’ Sam wheezes right back. He’s tired and irritable from shitty sleep, and keeps rubbing his eyes and blowing his nose. Dean opens his mouth to retort, and instead sneezes snot all over himself.

For fuck’s sake, they’re falling a-goddamn-part.

Someone knocks on the door at quarter to six and Dean stumbles across the room to open it. His head hurts and his eyes are puffy, and he just wants to go to bed. He opens the door to an impatient looking Bobby — normally he and Sam would have met him in the office by now, but today they were both too preoccupied with being miserable, disgusting lumps, that they’d apparently both managed to forget.

‘Heya, Bobby,’ Dean says blearily. ‘Listen, I think me ’n Sammy got the same thing now — I started this stupid cough ’n feel like shit, so maybe we oughta skip comin’ over tonight… don’t wanna get you sick, too.’

‘I can run up to the store ’n get some soup or somethin’ for you boys if ya want,’ Bobby offers, leaning away slightly, though his brow is furrowed in concern. ‘Damn, kid, you look like shit, too.’

‘Thanks for that,’ Dean replies sarcastically. ‘Anyone ever tell you that your bedside manner sucks?’ Bobby just raises an unimpressed eyebrow at him. Dean sighs. ‘Don’t worry about gettin’ us soup or whatever… don’t think I can stomach anything right now, but worst case, we got snacks ’n leftovers, or whatever.’

‘Ask him about the bathroom fan,’ Sam calls out stuffily, because that’s what the hell matters right now. Maybe the kid’s delirious or something.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ Dean mutters, huffing in annoyance, but he turns back to Bobby and says, ‘Well, before I forget, I guess — the bathroom fan don’t work, so when someone takes a shower and opens the door too slow, the smoke alarm goes off. I was gonna just take the batteries outta the damn thing, but Sammy went all Smokey the Bear on me about fire hazards.’

Bobby sighs, looking as though he would very much not like to be walking into the Petrie dish that is their room right now, but he comes in anyway and heads towards the bathroom. Dean means to follow him in, but somewhere between the door and the bathroom, his bed starts looking really tempting, so he sits down on that instead. He hears a bang and a curse, followed by a long string of curses, running water from the sink, and then Bobby reappears, drying his hands on his jeans.

‘How in the hell did you idjits not see that the friggin’ bathroom was packed full’a friggin’ mold?!’ he demands, groaning. Dean thinks he knows Bobby well enough by now to know he’s not actually mad at him or Sam, but the unwanted surprise he’d found in their bathroom — or at the very least, he’s too tired to care if it is them. Bobby looks back over his shoulder and makes a disgusted noise and continues, ‘It’s all in the vent ’n under the wallpaper, ’n behind the sink… I mean, for fuck’s sake. That’s probably what’s been making you boys so sick.’

‘Really?’ Dean asks, momentarily distracted, so relieved by this news he feels even weaker for a moment. ‘Shit, I thought somethin’ was really wrong ’n I was gonna hafta find a doctor or somethin’ for Sammy. I mean, mold sucks, but… ’least it’s not the plague, I guess? How do I get rid’a it?’

‘You don’t,’ Bobby replies tersely, eyes scanning the walls of their room. He walks over to the spot behind he TV where the wallpaper is peeling and groans again. ‘I’m gonna need to call someone in to gut the room. It’s under the wallpaper out here, too. You boys can’t keep staying here.’

‘Oh,’ Dean says, suddenly feeling a lot less relieved. Even he can hear how small his voice sounds. ‘How long do we got?’

Bobby turns back to him, frowning, but then a look of realisation dawns on his face. ‘I meant in this room, kid,’ he says, sounding like he’s trying very hard not to sound exasperated. ‘I toldja before I’m not gonna throw ya out on your ass, only- damn. I might not have a free room for ya for another day or two.’ He does the baseball cap/head scratching thing, looking far more distressed at the idea that he doesn’t have a rent free room for two freeloading teenagers than Dean thinks is reasonable.

‘We can just st-stay h-h-here,’ he offers, sneezing again. Bobby winces, then wordlessly picks up the box of tissues and hands it to Dean.

‘I don’t know if you’ve looked in the mirror lately, but you look like somethin’ outta a horror flick about the friggin’ apocalypse,’ Bobby informs him bluntly. He shifts uncomfortably, which does nothing to make Dean feel any less on edge, but before Dean can start to spiral over it, Bobby says quietly, ‘What would you think ’bout crashin’ at my place a few days while all this mess gets sorted out? I, uh- I got a spare room ’n the door locks in case you’re- you know. There’s only the one bed, but I got a cot out in the garage…’ He trails off, looking uncomfortable as hell, and eyes Dean apprehensively, like he’s waiting for him to blow up and accuse him of- well, all the things Dean’s already accused him of.

But for some reason — some stupid, weak reason that John would have undoubtedly kicked his ass for if he was still alive — over the last few months, Dean’s come to trust Bobby. Either the guy is playing one hell of a long con, or he’d really meant what he’d said when he’d told Dean all he wanted was to know he and Sammy were okay. Dean still doesn’t understand why the hell the guy gives a shit, but he thinks he finally believes that he really does.

Still, there’s no such thing as being too careful. ‘Any funny business…’ Dean threatens weakly, coughing again. Bobby snorts at this somewhat pathetic attempt at intimidation, but nods anyway.

‘Yeah, yeah, I know, you’ll take me out in my sleep. Ya already know where I keep the good knives,’ he retorts, making Dean laugh, despite himself.

‘Well… alrighty, then,’ he says. There’s a strange, fluttering feeling in his chest, but he’ll have time to figure that out later. For now, he goes over and gives Sam’s chair a kick, startling the kid awake from where he’d passed out at the table, pencil still in hand. ‘Wake up, little Susie,’ Dean says, in a thick voice that, for once, has nothing to do with the head cold from hell. ‘We’re goin’ for a slumber party.’

Chapter Text

As it turns out… their room back at the Woodstock is something out of an OSHA official’s worst nightmare. When the contractor comes to take a look at the damage a few days later, it turns out that not only is there mold in the bathroom, it’s also under the carpet, and a good portion of the wall as well.

Dean holds his breath when Bobby relays this to him that afternoon while he’s doing his off jobs around the motel. Dean’s waiting for him to lash out at him for being too stupid to notice all those problems, but instead he just rubs his temples and sighs.

‘The whole room’s gotta get gutted,’ he grumbles, scrubbing his hands over his face. ‘No wonder you boys have been so sick — the whole thing is a goddamn health hazard.’

‘Sorry, sir,’ Dean says quietly, steeling himself. ‘I- I’ll find a way to pay you back, I swear.’ He gets that urge to bawl or vomit again at the idea of having to go earn actual cash, especially since the repair’s bound to cost hundreds, if not thousands of dollars.

He feels his breathing become quick and shallow at the overwhelming hopelessness of the situation, and it’s not until Bobby loudly claps his hands together in front of his face that he realises he’d been gearing up for a pretty impressive panic attack.

‘Huh- wha-?’ Dean shakes his head, trying to clear it, but that just makes him dizzy. Bobby lets out a long, slow breath, like he is trying very hard not to show how irritated or stressed he is.

‘I said,’ Bobby says tersely, ‘that it ain’t your fault it happened and it ain’t your responsibility to fix. Shit like this’s why I pay through the nose for property insurance. Plus the place is more’n twice as old as you are; these kinds’a things happen. It’s the nature of the beast. I just feel bad it took the two’a you gettin’ so sick before we figured out what the hell was goin’ on.’

‘Oh,’ Dean says, somewhat stupidly. He’d been bracing for a beatdown, so the fact that he’s not being handed his ass right now feels surreal as hell. ‘Well, uh- whatever it was cleared up pretty quick once we got to your place, ya know? But, uhm, if the room is super fucked, what- what does that mean for Sammy ’n me?’

It occurs to him that this is the first time he hasn’t immediately assumed that an issue with the room meant he and Sam were about to be out on their asses, and he doesn’t quire know what to do with that. He doesn’t know when he became so soft.

Bobby doesn’t quite look at him, which makes Dean think that maybe he should have been coming up with a contingency plan, but then Bobby clears his throat and says, ‘Well… I could put ya up in another room, but, uh- I was thinkin’… what d’ya think about stayin’ put for the time bein’? I know it ain’t the most comfortable set-up, but mi casa es su casa ’n all’a that.’

He’s got that same unsteady, uncertain tone of voice that he uses almost every time he offers something new to Dean and Sam, like he’s not sure he should be saying the words coming out of his mouth. Dean wonders if it’s because the guy don’t like kids or just don’t like them or if it’s something else altogether. Somehow, he doesn’t think it’s them.

‘Aren’t you sick of us yet?’ Dean blurts out, surprising both himself and Bobby. ‘I mean- you- you already- and you don’t- want- I mean-’

He’s stuttering like an ungrateful idiot and not making one lick of sense, but Bobby seems to get it anyway. He folds his arms, but rather than imposing, he just looks uncomfortable.

‘Listen, I know ya- ya ain’t had an easy go of it,’ he starts, but he holds a hand up to stop Dean’s protests at this and barrels on. ‘And I know that shit’s all- messed up for ya right now, but… ain’t nothin’ wrong with takin’ a helping hand every now ’n then.’ He lets out an annoyed huff and adds, ‘And truth be told, I don’t exactly hate havin’ you boys around for some damn reason.’

‘Oh,’ Dean says again, and now he’s getting all stupid-emotional over hearing that the guy doesn’t mind being around him and Sam. He tries not to think about how this might be the first time anyone’s ever told him that. ‘I… thank you, Bobby. I don’t know why you- but- thank you anyway.’

‘Don’t worry ’bout it,’ Bobby says gruffly. ‘Now get to gettin’ — that trash ain’t gonna take itself out, ya know.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Dean replies, and he’s up and out the door before Bobby has a chance to finish telling him not to call him sir.

It only takes one trip for Dean to clear his and Sam’s crap out of their old room. He knows this setup at Bobby’s isn’t for forever, but if the construction guys are gonna be tearing the whole room apart, he might as well grab their shit ahead of time.

Sam is handling all these changes way better than Dean is, but Dean supposes it’s because this is what Sam has always wanted, this ‘normal’ after school special kinda life. He wants to warn Sammy not to get too attached, because that just means it’s gonna hurt all the more when they have to move on again, but he’s never seen his brother this happy before, and he just can’t be the one to take it from him.

The motel room repair ends up taking a long ass time, but Dean gets the impression that Bobby isn’t exactly making it a priority, and he isn’t exactly complaining. In fact, as the days melt into weeks, and the weeks turn into a month, and the world as Dean knows it has not ended, he starts kind of, sort of letting himself enjoy the stability, temporary though it may be.

When Bobby announces that the room is finally inhabitable again over dinner one night, Dean doesn’t even have time to feel disappointed before Bobby asks if they want to go back to the motel or just keep doing what they’re doing. He tells them they’re welcome to stay as long as they’d like, seeing as that he’s ‘kinda gotten used to seein’ their dumb asses wandering around the place’, which is about as close as he gets to admitting having feelings, or whatever.

It’s really not a question at all.

And so, this is how Dean finds, for the first time in ten or so years, that he has a permanent address to come home to every day, with a fridge full of food, and heat and electric that’s never in jeopardy of being cut off. Bobby clears out his office/man cave/dumping-ground-for-random-bullshit room upstairs so, also for the first time ever, Dean and Sam have separate bedrooms.

(Bobby even suggests they paint and hang shit on the walls to ‘make the place look less like a goddamn prison cell’, so Dean paints his room blue and hangs a Zepp poster over his bed. When he looks around the space, it might be small, but it’s his. His own little corner of the world that Bobby says is his for as long as he wants it.)

It’s wild — definitely the weirdest thing he’s ever experienced.

The months pass. It’s Sam’s birthday before anyone can blink. The kid’s turning thirteen, and that fucks Dean right up because Sammy’s still a goddamn kid, a child. Dean had been thirteen the first time he’d let a man push him down to his knees in a filthy truck stop bathroom. If anyone so much as looked at Sam with that kind of intent, Dean would flay them alive.

Summer comes, and it’s hot and miserable (Bobby’s house, for all its great qualities does not have central air). Both Dean and Sam work around the motel part-time, as much for the opportunity to hang out in Bobby’s air conditioned office, as to earn some pocket money.

(This is another thing that blows Dean’s mind — he gets a friggin’ allowance now for helping out, like some hunky dory Leave it to Beaver motherfucker. There’s a uncomfortable, prickly feeling of embarrassment and shame low in his gut when he realises it’s probably so he doesn’t sneak out again to earn cash his own way, but Bobby never mentions it, just hands Dean a couple twenty dollar bills every Friday like it’s nothing. It might not be as lucrative as hustling, but no one’s called him a whore in almost six months, so Dean figures it’s worth it.)

The school year starts, and Dean’s officially updated his and Sam’s contact info to Bobby’s phone number and address, in case some dumbass gets knocked out in gym class again. Just writing it down on an official form like that, knowing that he won’t have to do the same thing all over again in a few weeks, or pray to God that no one in the office clocks that it’s the address to a truck stop or Burger King or pay by the hour motel is a complete head trip. He almost has a whole chick flick moment about it right there with the receptionist, before he gets a friggin’ grip. He finishes the form and hands it back over, then hightails it to economics class.

It’s his senior year of high school, and his counsellor claims he’s in good shape to graduate with the rest of the class, which is just insane, considering that until last year, Dean’s probably skipped more school days than he’s attended. Everyone around him talks about college or vocational school or the military, but Dean’s got none of those designs. He just wants to get through this year, then find a job somewhere where he can make decent enough money to at least start paying Bobby back for everything he’s done, not to mention put something aside for Sammy’s college tuition.

Cos Sam is definitely college bound. He’s in eighth grade, but already taking some high school classes, the friggin’ egghead. He’s absolutely thriving, even making some friends — Brady, Amy, and Jessica — who come over after school and hang out in Bobby’s living room, watching movies on the ancient TV, eating everything in sight, and chattering away like a hoard of rabid raccoons. Dean spends most of his allowance just keeping the damn kid and his buddies in Dr Pepper and Funyuns, but despite giving Sam shit about it, in true older brother style, it’s such a stark and welcome difference from where they were at at the same time last year, that he can’t find it in himself to complain.

He does save some of his money for a nice shirt, one of them flower bracelet thingies, and the first tie he’s ever worn in his life so he can take Robin Adams to the Homecoming Dance, because apparently when you’re not the weird, homeless new kid every month or so, it’s possible to make friends.

(He’s never- well, he’s never felt like a real person before. Since he was a kid — not even double digits when Mom left and Dad lost it — life has been about survival. He hasn’t had the time or space to develop a personality outside of anger, suspicion, and hurt. Now that those things are — well, not gone, per se, but certainly significantly decreased — the idea that he’s someone that people even want to get to know, much less like, never fails to freak Dean out if he thinks about it too long.)

Homecoming is awesome, in the cheesiest, cringiest of ways. Robin wears some ridiculous pink and purple frou-frou dress that makes her look like a cupcake, they dance to A Thousand Years by what’s-her-face, drink watery punch that some kid, Dirk, gets suspended for trying to spike, and take super awkward pictures next to some faded fake flowers and a wicker chair. At the end of the night, Dean walks Robin to her door when Bobby drops them off, and gets his first kiss. When they get home, he spends a long time lying in bed, contemplating about how until tonight, he’s been fucked, but not kissed, but in the end decides not to dwell on it and let his past ruin what has honestly been one of the best nights of his life.

It’s weird, being so normal.

But, at the end of the day, he’s still a Winchester, and Winchesters have the shittiest of shit luck, so it really should be no surprise to him that in the beginning of November, he feels a weird split-second pain behind his navel while eating breakfast. He eyes the box of cereal (Raisin Ban), and wonders if there’s too much healthy shit in there or something, and vows to pick up some Pop Tarts on the way home. He laughs at himself a little while brushing his teeth, because who would have thought that he’d ever be in a position to be picky about what he got to eat, and ignores the little poking sensation in his gut again.

By lunchtime, the pain has spread to most of his lower right side, but it’s still only every now and then. He struggles through the rest of the day, determined not to cause a scene like the dodgeball debacle again, feeling embarrassed as hell that this probably means he needs to take a shit or something, and just hoping he makes it home without humiliating himself by, like, farting in Trigonometry class or something.

That afternoon, when he gets home, however, the pain is worse, and now there’s only minutes of relief, and the rest of the time is excruciating. It’s Sam’s turn to make dinner, so Dean mumbles something about having a stomachache, and sends himself to bed while there’s still light in the sky. He rummages in the bathroom cabinet, finds a few chalky Tums to choke down, then goes to his room and passes out.

When Dean wakes again, it’s pitch black out, but that’s the least of his worries. It feels like someone is stabbing him in the side, and for a moment, he actually checks to make sure he hasn’t fallen asleep on his knife or something. He grapples with the covers, trying to turn the bedside lamp on, but even that brief movement makes him yelp.

He lies there for several more long moments, trying and failing to go back to sleep, then just tries to remember to breathe, before forcing himself to get up and stagger down the hall towards the bathroom. The light is harsh and awful when Dean flips it on, and he makes the mistake of looking in the mirror over the vanity. He’s pale and sweaty and looks like he might pass out any second. He lets out a groan that sounds more like a growl, and opens the cabinet again, looking for some Pepto Bismol or something.

All that’s there are the Tums that did exactly fuck all, Bobby’s ancient can of Barbasol, a couple loose bandaids, and a bottle of calamine lotion. Dean braces his hands on the vanity, hangs his head, and breathes hard, trying to decide what he should do. Normally, he’d try to slip out and run up to the 7-11 a few blocks away, but there’s no way he’ll make it in his condition, and he’s not about to send Sammy out on this asinine errand at this time of night. It seems like his only option is to wake Bobby and ask him to drive him up there.

Dean hesitates, gripping the sink so tightly his knuckles are white and his wrists hurt. He hates to ask Bobby for more, after everything the man has given them already, but he’s starting to feel nauseous now as well, and the idea of getting any sort of remedy for his stupid stomach is too strong a siren song to ignore.

He stumbles from the bathroom to the landing and pauses a moment before knocking on Bobby’s door, still reluctant to be an even bigger pain in the man’s ass. The only answer is Bobby’s snoring, even when Dean knocks again, so he finally decides to ease the door open and knock on the doorframe just as the worst wave of pain yet seems to shock his whole body.

‘Bobby?’ Even Dean can hear how scared and weak he sounds. He’s never felt this kind of pain before, and he’s known his fair share of pain. Another lightning stab of pain shoots through him and he whimpers, doubling over to grab the door frame.

‘Dean?’ Bobby struggles to sit up, one hand coming up to shield his eyes against the harsh hallway light. ‘Kid? What’s goin’ on?’

‘I-’ Dean starts to say, but before he can get anything else out, he finds himself puking all over the landing. He’s absolutely wretched, doubled over with his hands on his knees, just a useless pile of puke and snot and tears. ‘’m s-sorry, I’m- ’ll clean-’

‘No, the hell you will not,’ Bobby snaps, rushing over. He crouches down at Dean’s side, seemingly oblivious to the mess, and puts one hand on Dean’s shoulder and the other on his forehead. Dean groans and leans into the coolness of his palm, not even caring that he must look pathetic.

‘You’re burnin’ up,’ Bobby mutters, flipping his hand over so the backside is against Dean’s skin. ‘How you feelin’?’

‘Hurts,’ is all Dean can manage, gesturing sloppily to his lower right side near his bellybutton. ‘Bobby, ’m sorry, I tried t-to go back to s-s-sleep-’

‘You idjit,’ Bobby interrupts, but he sounds as worried as he does exasperated. ‘Could be that your appendix is actin’ up or somethin’. For God’s sake, kid, don’t try to grin ’n bear it, not for somethin’ like this. Idjit,’ he repeats, and he definitely sounds more worried this time. ‘Alright, okay, so here’s what we’re gonna do — think you can walk?’

‘Where-’ Dean gasps from between his gritted teeth. He tries to calm his breathing, tries to force himself to his feet, but he only makes it as far as leaning heavily against the door frame, panting.

‘To the friggin’ moon, Major Tom.’ Bobby tries to help Dean to his feet, and though Dean knows Bobby is trying to be as gentle as he can, he still can’t help the pathetic pained yelping noises he’s making.

Bobby huffs and manoeuvres himself next to Dean so one of Dean’s arms is around Bobby’s shoulders, and both of Bobby’s hands are pulling Dean into a nearly standing position. Tears spring into Dean’s eyes again of their own accord and Bobby makes a sympathetic humming noise.

‘I know, kid,’ he grunts, slowly leading Dean towards the stairs. ‘I know it hurts, but you need’ta go to the hospital, so we gotta at least getcha down the stairs or we’re gonna have’ta call an ambulance.’

‘Oh, God,’ Dean moans, mortified. ‘No, no, I can- I’ll- don’t waste your money, Bobby, I- I got it.’ He hauls himself up for sheer force of will, swaying slightly, but finally mostly upright, and tries to smile self-deprecatingly. ‘’m fine, don’ need no- no hospital. Think… ’s just somethin’ I ate. S’not worth wastin’ your money on me.’

‘Well that’s a load of crap, cos ya just upchucked everything ya ate,’ Bobby retorts. He sounds almost angry, and Dean’s about to apologise again and offer to clean the mess when Bobby jabs his finger in Dean’s direction and growls, ‘And don’t you ever say that gettin’ you help when you need it is a waste’a my money, ya hear? If this is your damn appendix and we don’t get it looked at and the damn thing bursts, that could be the end of ya.’

Dean groans, unable to say much more, but the idea that this could kill him and leave his brother completely alone is just about enough to convince him. He’s able to make it down the stairs, anyway.

Bobby asks him if he wants to lie on the sofa, but Dean knows if he goes down again, there’ll be no gettin’ him back on his feet. Instead, he leans heavily against the wall by the front door, eyes closed, breathing heavily. Once he’s satisfied that Dean isn’t going to drop dead or fall over, Bobby heads back upstairs to wake Sam. Dean has the briefest moment of guilt that Sammy’s gonna get shit sleep and be exhausted tomorrow at school, but then another shooting pain stabs him in the gut, and his guilt is long forgotten.

Sam appears in Dean’s line of vision a few moments later, looking absolutely terrified. Dean tries to look reassuring, but the pathetic whine coming from his throat undoes any strides he makes towards accomplishing that task.

The drive to the hospital passes in a blur. Dean is sprawled across the back seat of Bobby’s Chevelle clutching his side, trying very hard not to yelp every time the car goes over a bump. Bobby keeps wincing every time that happens and shooting concerned, apologetic looks at him in the rearview mirror, while Sam stays fully turned around in his seat, just watching Dean with huge, scared eyes.

‘Take a picture, it’ll last longer,’ Dean manages to grit out, along with another pitiful attempt at a grin.

It does the trick, though, because Sam snorts and rolls his eyes. ‘Shut up, jerk.’

‘Make me, bitch,’ Dean replies, and for a second everything is alright again… then Bobby hits a pothole, and Dean’s entire vision whites out.

Bobby stops in front of the ER doors and jumps out, leaving the engine running as he whips around the back of the car to help Dean out. The sweat drying on Dean’s flushed face makes him feel clammy and sick in the cool night air, but they’re inside quickly enough. A stern-faced nurse rushes over with a wheelchair when she sees them.

It’s a surprisingly short time from collapsing into the chair and being wheeled around like somebody’s grandpa, to being set up in a semi-private curtained off area in the corner. Dean is transferred to the uncomfortable as fuck bed and thinks it might just about kill him, but Bobby is there every step of the way, helping him up and rubbing his back sympathetically. It doesn’t help the pain, but it feels nice, nonetheless.

The nurse starts asking rapid-fire questions for his personal information, some of which he knows, some of which he doesn’t, and apparently all of which she expects Bobby to know, who is becoming more and more agitated by the second.

‘Why the hell d’ya need all this horseshit before fixin’ the damn kid?’ Bobby snaps when she asks about vaccines and family medical history, clearly trying to buy for time. ‘Thought you people took an oath to do no harm.’

‘My personal oath is to do no harm, but take no shit,’ the nurse replies in a steely voice that surprisingly shuts Bobby right up. ‘Now, this is your son, correct?’ she asks Bobby, eyes raised. Sam, the damn Boy Scout, nearly gives them all away with the startled look he shoots Bobby when he gruffly confirms the lie.

It doesn’t go unnoticed by the nurse, but she, thankfully, does not push the issue, just continues with her line of questioning. Dean continues attempting to answer as many questions as he can, and makes up something that sounds reasonable for the ones he doesn’t. He doesn’t think he quite convinces her, but she seems to be reading the situation for what it is, and just keeps making notes. Eventually it appears that she has enough information about his symptoms to determine he’s got a fucked up appendix, just like Bobby had suspected.

‘Alrighty, I think I got everything I need here,’ she says finally, setting down the tablet she’d been typing on. ‘We gotta get this young man ready for surgery, and you gotta go move that tin can ya left idlin’ out front,’ she informs Bobby, who looks startled and confused at these instructions. She snorts and explains, ‘You’re blockin’ the damn entrance,’ in a slow, clear voice like she’s used to talking to morons. Bobby opens his mouth as if to protest, but she levels him with a glare and says, ‘Go on now — git. I got your boys here. The longer you take, the longer the boy’s gonna have to wait.’

Bobby shoots one more look at Dean before giving his shoulder a squeeze, nodding mutely, and turning to go move his car. Dean can’t help but smile at that.

‘That’s some magic trick, ma’am,’ he says, watching through the window as Bobby drives off towards the parking lot. ‘Never seen anyone get Bob- I mean, Dad to move that fast.’

‘I don’t know ’bout that, kiddo, he was haulin’ ass pretty quick gettin’ you in here,’ the nurse says, opening a cabinet and handing Dean an ugly as hell hospital gown. ‘And none’a that ‘ma’am’ baloney. You can call me Ellen.’

The surgery goes surprisingly smoothly, considering how much life typically enjoys kicking Dean in the ass at every given opportunity. Even so, he has the sneaking suspicion that something happened when he was out cold, because everyone has been treating him like he’s got HANDLE WITH CARE stamped on his forehead, but no one will tell him why.

His own brother won’t look at him, and that… well, that hurts. Way worse than a busted appendix, anyway. The awkward, stilted silence of it all feels as though it’s slowly killing him.

Only then, the truth comes out just before he’s discharged, and it makes him wish for silence all over again.

‘The fuck do you mean, ‘talk to somebody’?!’ he rages at Bobby and that damn nurse, Ellen, who’s been keeping close tabs on him like he’s her own kin. ‘I- I ain’t fuckin’- I’m not crazy, I don’t need no fuckin’ shrink poking around in my head asking how I feel about shit. We know why I’m fucked up, don’t need to go lie on a fucking couch and cry about it.’

‘Boy, I got no problem shovin’ a whole bar’a soap in that mouth’a yours if you don’t shut the hell up with all that cussin’,’ Ellen says, somewhat hypocritically. ‘Fine, ya want it straight? When you came outta surgery, ya started acting all kindsa scared as the anaesthesia started wearin’ off. You, ah- shall we say propositioned just about everyone in the room ’n begged ’em not to take your brother. Needless t’say, kid, there were more’n a few eyebrows raised after that. Your dad here agreed to help you seek treatment so you could get the all clear to walk outta here today, if you understand what I’m sayin’.’

Goddamnit. Dean sure as shit understands what she’s saying… it’s what John had been warning him about his whole stupid life.

‘Can I talk to my dad alone?’ he grumbles, glaring at the opposite wall until Ellen leaves. He turns to Bobby, just thanking whatever the fuck’s out there that Sammy ain’t here to hear this shit at least. ‘Bobby, can’t you just tell ’em I’ll go get my head shrunk to get me outta here, ’n then we put this whole thing behind us?’

He’s begging, whether or not he wants to admit it, but he feels like he’s justified. He feels cagey, almost feral — like a wild dog that’s been backed into a corner. He just hopes that Bobby’ll be on his side.

Of fucking course he isn’t.

‘Kid…’ Bobby says, somewhat helplessly. Dean’s reminded all over again that this is a man who didn’t ask for this, didn’t ask to get saddled with not one, but two teenagers that basically fell off the backend of a truck. ‘Listen — ain’t nothing wrong with talkin’ to somebody to just… getcha through the hard times. If ya had a broken leg, ya wouldn’t be feelin’ any kinda way ’bout goin’ to the doc for a cast ’n an x-ray, right?’ He eyes Dean, who’s just about positive he still looks like he wants to rip out his IV and run out the door, and lets out an exasperated sigh. ‘Well, knowin’ you, you’d probably try ’n fix that shit with duct tape and a big stick or somethin’, but- if it were Sammy… you’d want him to get the help he needs, right? This ain’t no different.’

‘What happens if I talk to someone ’n then they try ’n take ’im away from me?’ Dean asks quietly. This is the crux of the matter — it always has been. John had always told them that them catching the eye of any authority figure would only result in them being separated by the state, and so Dean had done everything within his power to always fly below the radar. ‘I can’t lose my brother, Bobby.’

‘The hell’d you get that idea from?!’ Bobby asks, sounding almost angry, but when Dean feels his shoulders curling in on themselves, Bobby groans and scrubs his hands over his face. ‘Your daddy, I shoulda known,’ he says, voice muffled. He lowers his hands and looks Dean square in the eye. ‘I will not let that happen, ya hear? Ain’t no doctor in the world who’s gonna look at you boys and think you’d be better off apart, but even if they did, I fight tooth and nail to keep you boys together, got it? You’re not goin’ into this alone, kid, you’ve got someone who’s got your back every step’a the way.’

‘And how the hell d’ya think you’re gonna manage that?’ Dean asks. He’s still not convinced — Bobby might think differently, but Dean’s dealt with uninterested adults all his life. There’s not a single argument that his fake uncle/fake dad/landlord/random motel owner can make to social services that’d be enough for them to listen. ‘What’re you gonna tell ’em, that the kid you met at a motel and let move into your house so he don’t gotta suck dick to make rent’s only reason for living is to make sure the same shit don’t happen to his brother, so pretty please don’t take Sammy away? Ain’t no one who’ll listen to that.’

‘What if,’ Bobby says quietly, slowly. He looks uncomfortable as hell all of a sudden and swallows audibly before trying again. ‘What if it were- what if we made this whole living arrangement official — got right with the good Lord ’n the state’a ’n all’a that? Then ain’t nobody that could force you two apart. I mean- we been doin’ this song ’n dance for almost a year now, anyway.’

They really have, Dean’s shocked to realise. Almost a whole year of this normal looking glass world. It seems impossible to believe. Almost as impossible as this bullshit fucking plan Bobby’s concocted.

‘I’m almost eighteen, Bobby, what’d be the damn point?’ Dean asks bluntly. ‘And once I’m legal, I can- I can get a job or somethin’. Start payin’ you back, stop bein’ some useless piece of shit for you to worry about. Hell, if you wanted to have your house back, I’d be old enough to- to be Sammy’s guardian or whatever, we could- we could get our own-’

He breaks off, surprised by the sharp wave of emotion that’s making it hard to speak. The idea of leaving Bobby’s house — of leaving Bobby — hurts to even think about. Somehow, the three of them have become a fa- a unit while no one was paying attention. He grits his teeth and breathes through his nose until he gets it together enough that he’s not going to burst into tears.

(The quote from Lilo & Stitch about family meaning no one gets left behind pops into Dean’s head, and he almost gets teary all over again. He never liked that quote — Sam is the only family who hasn’t left Dean behind — but for some reason it seems- it seems appropriate just then.)

To his surprise, Bobby sniffs then, drawing Dean’s attention just in time to see him scrub a hand over his face and triy to hide it all with a very obviously fake cough. ‘If- if that’s whatcha want, then a’course that’s fine, ’n I help ya any way I can. But, uh- if ya… if ya wanted to stick around for a while, well- it’d save me from havin’ to turn your room back into my den.’ He clears his throat and adds, ‘And as far as you turnin’ eighteen in a couple’a months… well- alright, I guess on my end, it ain’t about the age thing so much as- as it is about family.’

‘Family,’ Dean repeats dazedly, wondering if Bobby’s suddenly become a mind reader. ‘I don’t know if you’ve realised, but most of my family’s dead or as good as. Not that they were much good to begin with, the kinda folks that’d run out on their own blood.’

‘I didn’t say blood, boy, open your damn ears — I said family,’ Bobby huffs, his customary exasperated fondness overpowering the vulnerable, emotional moment. ‘Family ain’t about blood. It don’t end there, and it sure as shit don’t start there either. All I’m sayin’ is if ya wanna make this dog ’n pony show official, I’m ready and willing, but if ya don’t, you’re still- you can- well, it wouldn’t change anything on my end, far as I’m concerned.’

‘Why?’ Dean asks, and damn it all to hell, he’s lost the battle with keeping his emotions in check. He wipes his own eyes and chokes out, ‘Why’d you even- even bother with us in the first place? I was- am- a fucking asshole, and you- you just- for no goddamn good reason. Why would you do that?’

‘I don’t know why I did it at the time,’ Bobby replies thickly, honesty heavy in his words like wine in a sponge, ‘but- but now I think it was cos I saw a kid who… reminded me of me, ’n who needed a family. And apparently, so did I, even if that weren’t the point in the beginning. So- I guess maybe it worked out for the both of us in the end.’ He sighs, then says, ‘Listen- ya don’t gotta make a decision right now, or even if the near future, if you don’t wanna, but the offer is, and will always, be there. But whatever happens, you have my word that I will not let anyone on this Earth take your brother away from you.’

And finally, maybe Dean lets himself believe him. He swallows hard, wets his lips, and waits until he’s sure his voice is steady before he asks, ‘Would I have to change my last name?’

Bobby blinks. For just a second they lock eyes, both seeing the moment for what it is, and there is gratitude there on both ends. Then, the moment passes, and Bobby snorts. ‘I’m not goddamn proposing here, ya know.’ Dean gives him a watery smile.

‘Well then… okay.’

Chapter Text

It strikes Dean as almost ironic, how much work Bobby ends up having to go through to legally become his and Sam’s father. Ish. Thing. He doesn’t know if he’ll ever be able to call Bobby his ‘dad’, but that’s what he is now, at least according to the great state of South Dakota.

There’s hoops to jump through and red tape to fight and about a million forms and meetings with social workers and all that other shit. Bobby has to complete hours and hours of training, sign up for a home study, and attend a whole bunch of interviews to prove he’s not some creepy piece of shit. It’s frustrating and tedious, but Bobby does it all with minimal complaining, which Dean is well aware is not his default setting. It just makes it mean all the more that he’s willing to even consider putting up with all this crap just to end up saddled with Dean and Sam for the rest of his life.

It seems stupid unfair to Dean that a guy who — for some bizarre, ungodly reason — wants to legally be their parent has to do so much legwork when any dude off the street could just knock someone up. In his Health class last year, they’d watched some old ass flick called Parenthood where Keanu Reeves went on a whole rant about how you need a license to catch a fucking fish, but any douchecanoe can become a dad, and, well-

Dean can attest to that fact.

And that’s another thing that occupies more of his brain space than is probably healthy — now that he sees how much work Bobby is putting into taking care of him and Sam for literally no goddamn good reason, it’s hard as hell to ignore how much work John put into not doing a damn thing for them. For so many years, Dean had been the one to justify to himself and to Sam that their father worked so hard in every other aspect of his life that it only made sense that something had to slide, and that it was okay, because Dean was there to pick up the slack. At the time it had made him feel useful — even proud — to know that Dad trusted him enough to know he’d watch out for Sammy no matter what, so that Dad could go off and take care of more important things.

Only… Dean’s never met anyone who works harder than Bobby, and the man still manages to make sure Dean and Sam have food for dinner or clothes on their backs or notebooks and pencils and all sorts of other shit they need to be ‘regular snot-nosed little jerks’ as Bobby likes to affectionately call anyone under the age of twenty-five.

And what’s worth even more than that is that he give them his time and attention without the expectation of anything in return. He asks Sam about school and Dean about his ‘lady friend’ that he took to Homecoming. He signs permission slips for Sammy to go on his school field trip and for Dean to join varsity wrestling when his friend, Aaron, finally wears him down and convinces him to try out. And sure as shit, Bobby’s there at his first match, front and centre, and takes him and Sam out for ice cream after, even though Dean had gotten his ass handed to him by his opponent in the first match.

(‘S’alright, kid,’ Bobby had said, whipped cream stuck in his moustache between spoonfuls of his hot fudge sundae. ‘Was only your first time out — ya got plenty’a time to go all Hulk Hogan, ’specially since now ya know what to expect.’

‘Bobby, I dunno if you missed it, but today I put on a leotard, then got pinned by a dude with braces who stunk like fucking corn chips in, like, the first ten seconds,’ Dean reminded him, disgusted with himself. ‘Maybe I oughta just pack it in.’

‘Maybe,’ Bobby replied nonchalantly. ‘’course then you’ll have t’say that for your entire wrestling career, you were 0-1 and lost to the braces kid. You don’t learn how to get better by quittin’ in the formation lap. But, you do you — I’m just along for the ride.’

Dean had glared at him and finished his ice cream in petulant silence, but in the end he’d stuck it out, and by the time the next match rolled around, he still lost, but it was a close one. The match after that, he won.)

When Thanksgiving rolls around, Bobby’s friend, Rufus, comes over for dinner, and it’s a fucking riot. They’d served together in the Army as young men, and had stayed friends ever since. Rufus had been Bobby’s best man when he’d married his late wife, Karen, and had come up from Tennessee to look out for Bobby when she’d passed. He’d come to stay at the Woodstock during that time, and basically just never left, which is something he and Bobby both relentlessly roast each other for.

(‘Well, the damn place is such a dump, I figure I’m doin’ a service to the community by classin’ this joint up,’ Rufus had told Dean the first time he’d met him at the Woodstock, deadpan. ‘Plus someone’s gotta keep an eye on this miserable old bastard ’n make sure he don’t run the business into the ground, you know — be the brains of this operation.’

‘We’d need an operation to even find your damn brain!’ Bobby had retorted without missing a beat. ‘Just remember, kid, if there’s a service call for room 153, it’s this piece’a crap lettin’ us know his dumb ass done broke the AC again.’

‘Maybe if you’d upgrade the damn system to somethin’ from this century, a man wouldn’t have to be fussin’ with the dials just to get some relief from the heat in the first place, Bobby,’ Rufus had fired back, and the two men had continued to the bicker long after Dean had slipped away to finish his chores.)

After dinner, Rufus slips outside while Dean’s sitting on the back porch, having just finished the dishes and needing some time with his thoughts. Dean nods his hello as Rufus reaches into the front pocket of his shirt and extracts one of Bobby’s Cuban cigars and a silver Zippo lighter.

‘If Bobby asks, you never saw this,’ he informs Dean, waving the cigar in his direction as he sits down on the rickety patio chair opposite Dean.

‘Saw what?’ Dean quips with a wry half-smile. ‘That was some bomb stuffing you brought, Rufus. Wouldn’ta pegged you for Susie Homemaker.’

‘Excuse me, but I’ll have you know that that mushroom challah stuffing recipe has been handed down from generation to generation of Turners going all the way back to my great-great-grandmomma Turner.’ Rufus takes an indignant puff on his stolen cigar. Dean’s just about to apologise for insulting his family tradition when the man’s face cracks into a shit-eating grin and he says, ‘Or maybe I just got one of the girls down at the synagogue to look at that pin board website they’re all nutty over all the time ’n send me one that I could use to show off ’n make Bobby feel like he had to bust out the good whiskey to keep up.’

‘Was wonderin’ why he offered ya the Johnnie Walker ’n not his usual rotgut,’ Dean says with a quiet laugh. When it fades, it leaves behind a melancholy silence that feels too big for even the wide open expanse of Bobby’s property that he and Rufus are gazing out over. He sighs, leaning forward until his elbows are resting on his knees, and stares hard at the worn wood of the porch between his feet.

Rufus doesn’t pry, because he’s good like that, but even so, Dean finds himself saying, ‘My dad’s favourite drink was Jack Daniels, but most of the time he’d just drink whatever was cheapest. Could always tell what kinda night it was gonna be, depending on what he brought home. Jameson meant he won big at pool or cards. Jack meant he was havin’ a good night — nothin’ special, but it meant we could talk to him, maybe watch a movie or somethin’ with him before he passed out. But, uh- that no-name $5.99 a bottle crap, y’know the stuff they keep on the bottom shelves way in the back? Well, that meant somethin’ big was goin’ wrong ’n the next morning we’d either be gettin’ the fuck outta dodge, or me ’n Sammy’d wake up to find him gone again. Hard to say which one sucked more.’

‘Sounds like the old man had his fair share’a demons,’ Rufus remarks mildly. ‘Hard, ain’t it, when the good memories are so mixed up with the bad. S’like ya don’t know if you’d kiss ’em or kill ’em all over again if you ever saw them again.’

‘Yeah,’ Dean says hoarsely, swiping an angry sleeve across his eyes, ‘S’like that.’

‘Comin’ up on a year, huh?’ Rufus asks, his tone casual, but he gives Dean a sidelong glance and snorts when he sees the surprised look on Dean’s face. ‘I pay attention; I know things.’ He takes a final puff on his cigar and drops it into the rarely used ashtray on the table between them. Dean watches it smoulder and gradually burn out.

‘Second of December,’ Dean says distantly. ‘S’kinda funny, I guess, cos Mom left second of November when I was a kid. Man, did Thanksgiving suck that year. And every year after that, come to think of it. This is the best one I’ve had since… well, fuck, probably ever, cos I don’t remember the ones before that.’ He scuffs the ground with toe of his shoe and huffs a self deprecating scoff. ‘Dunno why I’m sayin’ all this shit right now. Sorry, Rufus, ya probably just wanted to smoke in peace, ’n here I am spillin’ my guts all over like a bitch.’

‘You’re sayin’ all that because you’re feelin’ all that right now, kid,’ Rufus says matter of factly. ‘And you are feeling all that because today is a holiday, and holidays are full of family, and families,’ he pauses dramatically, ‘are full of drama and bullshit on the best of days, and you’re allowed to hate ’em sometimes.’

Dean laughs out loud, for real this time, because he’s never allowed himself to acknowledge those kinds of thoughts before. With a dead mom and a grieving, absent dad and a little brother who needed someone looking out for him, it had always seemed like he shouldn’t be allowed to complain about any of it, like he should just be grateful for what he had, even if it wasn’t much.

‘It does suck sometimes,’ Dean admits, feeling a thrill of anxiety pulse in his stomach at giving the words life. ‘Some days I got so much goin’ on in my head about it all, I feel like it’s gonna explode.’

‘Y’oughta get your ass into see the head doc, if ya ask me,’ Rufus says bluntly. ‘Now don’t be makin’ faces at me like that ’less you want it to freeze that way. There ain’t nothin’ wrong with seein’ someone who knows what they’re talkin’ about for this kinda stuff. Sure as shit helped me when I needed it.’

‘You went to see a shrink?’ Dean asks incredulously. ‘You?’

‘Yes, me — what, you don’t think I look like a sensitive soul searching guidance and enlightenment?!’ Rufus replies dryly. ‘Long time ago, I was a father and a husband. I had a daughter — a little baby girl we called Sarah. Now I’m still a father, but I don’t got a wife or daughter anymore. You do the math.’

‘Oh damn,’ Dean says, exhaling sharply. ‘I’m real sorry ’bout that.’

‘Me too,’ Rufus says, and it’s about as serious as Dean’s ever heard him. ‘But now, I got a therapist on-call, I got Chateau de Rufus at Casa de Woodstock, ’n now looks like I got three pains in my be-hind to spend the holidays with.’ He’s quiet for a few moments, a pensive look on his face, then he nods and makes a thoughtful humming noise. ‘Yeah, you’re right — this shit does suck. But at least there’s good food, good drinks when Bobby finds it in his cold, dead heart to stop being a cheapass, and occasionally good company, which I guess now includes you ’n the Encyclopaedia Brittanica in there.’

Dean bursts out laughing again. His heart still hurts, chest tight and aching, and his head still feels heavy, but everything feels a little clearer somehow. ‘Thanks, Rufus,’ he says. Both he and Rufus ignore how shaky those two little words comes out.

Rufus stands, using his chair to steady himself. He grimaces it creaks in protest, a perfectly angelic look on his face. ‘Thanks for what? I was never here,’ he says as he scoops up the ashtray and returns inside.

Christmas is remarkable in the fact that it’s not remarkable at all. There’s no crushing weight of panic the moment the calendar flips to December over whether or not Dean will be able to afford to get Sammy a Christmas gift. Thanks to his part-time ‘job’ at the Woodstock, he's got more money saved than he’s ever had in his life, to the point where he’s actually started keeping a stash in his sock drawer because only an idiot would walk around with that much cash on hand — it’s like begging to get mugged. He’s carefully counted and recounted what he’s squirrelled away, and for once he knows exactly what he wants to get for his brother.

He waits until Sammy’s off with the Future Brainiacs of America, or whatever the hell his smarty pants after school club is, to talk to Bobby about his idea, and Bobby is, unsurprisingly, totally on board.

The first Saturday in December, which also happens to be the first of the month, Dean and Bobby borrow Rufus’s truck with the promise of pizza, beer, and the boxing match the following weekend, and hit the local Walmart when Sam’s hanging out at Brady’s with Sully and Jess. Dean can’t remember the last time he’s ever been this excited to spend money, and that almost sets him off into one of his dark spirals, but he hangs onto his sanity by the skin of his teeth, and realises maybe everyone has a point about him needing a shrink.

That’s an issue for another day, however, because today he is buying his little brother his first bike… at thirteen friggin’ years old.

To be fair, learning to ride a bike had always seemed like some Leave it to Beaver bullshit, not to mention there was literally nowhere for them to have kept a damn bicycle while living on the road or in the damn Impala.

‘Maybe this is a stupid idea,’ Dean says for what feels like the hundredth time as they walk into the store. ‘I mean- he’s not some little kid, ya know? Like, maybe it’s kinda lame, getting a bike for Christmas?’

‘For God’s sake-’ Bobby starts, but stops himself, takes a breath, and says, ‘Boy, like I told ya the first twenty times — y’know Sam’s gonna appreciate anything you give him, but I think he’s really gonna like this one. Them kids he hangs around with all come over on their bikes when the weather’s good — cos they’re friggin’ kids, and that’s how kids get around — so Sam’ll probably be thrilled to be able to go around town with ’em now.’

‘Okay,’ Dean says, unsure why he’s so goddamn nervous. S’not like he’s givin’ the kid a trip to Disney World, it’s just a stupid bike.

Even so, when he sets eyes on the red and black mountain bike he’d seen online, he gets all stupid emotional. He’s never been able to do something like this for Sammy before, something nice and normal, that didn’t hurt to achieve. He nods mutely when Bobby asks if that’s the one, but he thinks he’s too shaky to wheel it up to the registers just yet. Bobby seems to realise this when several awkward seconds pass and Dean’s still just- just standing there breathing. (Kind of. It’s more like asthmatic panting, to be perfectly honest.)

Bobby gently claps Dean on the shoulder and reaches around to grab the bike’s handlebars and seat so he can pull it off the display rack.

‘Think maybe I’ll look into gettin’ the kid a helmet to protect that giant brain’a his, but I gotta hit the can first,’ Bobby says gruffly, using his boot to pop out the kickstand. ‘Why don’t you pick out somethin’ he’d like — y’know, somethin’ that won’t mess up that Justin Beaver hair he’s got goin’ on.’

Dean can’t help but crack a grin at that. ‘Bieber, Bobby,’ he says. His voice still sounds a little weird, but he appreciates the effort Bobby’s putting into giving him a minute to get his shit together. ‘But yeah. I’ll find somethin’ good.’

Bobby gives his shoulder another pat and ambles off towards the back of the store. Dean puts one hand on the bike seat as he turns to look at the wall of helmets, picking a cool black one with a few red lightning bolt lookin’ designs running through the middle. He hangs it off of one of the handlebars and eyes the sets of knee, elbow, and wrist pads, laughing to himself as he imagines the bitchface Sam would give him if he got him all that. He skips the protective gear, but does pick a sturdy looking bike lock and tire pump by the time Bobby returns.

‘Ya good?’ Bobby asks, and Dean knows he’s talking about more than just the helmet, but he nods nonetheless.

They make their way to the front of the store and over to the self-checkout and Dean rings the lock and pump out with no problem, but then he stares at the huge bike, wondering if he’s supposed to lift the thing onto the scanning pad . The woman working the little podium thingy in the middle of it all notices his hesitation and walks over to talk him through how to use the little attached hand scanner thing.

‘Looks like someone’s getting a special Christmas present this year,’ she says cheerfully, handing the scanner to Dean so he can zap the barcode on the cardboard insert between the tire spokes.

‘My brother,’ Dean says uncomfortably, handing it back to her. ‘He’s the only one’a his friends without a bike, so-’ he gestures vaguely to the bike, and pulls out his wallet to put his money into the slot when his total comes up.

It’s nearly two hundred bucks after tax. The realisation that this time last year two hundred bucks was a week’s rent with maybe a little left over for granola bars and Spaghetti-Os and that he would have had to suck off about ten scumbags to earn it hits him in the chest, and it’s like he can’t breathe again.

Somehow, he manages to cram his cash into the machine and numbly take his change and receipt. He waits silently for Bobby to pay for the helmet and wish the cashier happy holidays, and doesn’t speak again until they’ve loaded Sammy’s new bike into the back of Rufus’s truck and climbed back inside.

Bobby gives him a look after the third or fourth time he’s taken a breath like he wants to say something, but the words won’t come out.

‘Spit it out so ya don’t choke on it,’ Bobby says, but his tone has a soft edge to it where Dean can hear his concern. He takes another breath, then forces himself to speak.

‘I… I think maybe y’all are right,’ he mumbles, fixings his gaze out the front windshield on the cart corral across from them. He watches some lady with a toddler push her cart inside and say something to the kid that makes him throw his head back and giggle. She lifts him from the seat and gives him a big, dramatic kiss on the cheek as she grabs her bags, making the kid laugh like crazy again. It’s so- pure, something he’s pretty sure he must have experienced when he was little, before his mom took off, but he can’t remember it. He can’t remember ever having someone treat him with that kind of gentle affection.

‘I think maybe I oughta, y’know, talk to one’a them friggin’-’ He makes a reluctant gesture towards his head, an unhappy look on his face. He can’t face Bobby when he says this, because all he can see is his father’s disgust at his weakness, but…

But he can’t keep doing what he’s doing, getting punched in the chest with self-loathing and anger and- and shame out of nowhere, and having it knock him on his ass like it has been. The only way out is through.

‘Oh yeah?’ Bobby asks, and he’s not quite using his talking to scared animals voice, but there’s a hint of it, like he’s afraid if he says too much, Dean’ll freak out (again) and call the whole thing off. Dean wants to be offended, but there’s no denying that the man has a point.

Dean nods. ‘Yeah,’ he says shortly, and that one word seems like it just might be heavy enough to crush him. He swallows around the lump in his throat and clenches his fists, fingernails carving crescent shapes into the meat of his palms. He knows Bobby won’t judge him for it, but for some reason he’s scared to death anyway.

‘Proud of you, kid,’ Bobby says, and, whelp. That’s it, game over. Emotional bitch baby breakdown: 1, Dean Winchester: big fat goose egg.

But somehow… somehow, when Bobby puts his hand back on Dean’s shoulder and roots around in Rufus’s glove box to find a pile of friggin’ Wendy’s napkins for Dean to use to put himself back together, he thinks that maybe, just this once, he’s not ashamed of his tears.

Chapter Text

The day after Dean buys Sam’s bike is the second of December, which means he’s lived a full calendar year in a world his father no longer occupies. It’s a Sunday, which means there’s really fuck all to do, and thank God for that, because Dean is wrecked. He keeps thinking about his talk with Rufus after Thanksgiving dinner, about how the good memories of his dad mix with the bad ones, and it leaves him feeling so fucking confused.

Looking back, his dad had been a… well, not great dad, to put it mildly. But when Dean tries to puzzle it all out, to put his whirring hurricane of emotions under the microscope and figure out what the fuck is going on in his head, he finds that he can’t bring himself to believe that his dad was a terrible human at his core. Dean knows he might have only been four when Mom died, but he does have these soft focus memories of his very early life, just little flashes of the happiness he’d known before it all went wrong.

He distinctly remembers standing on two milk crates in the garage back in Lawrence, Kansas, watching his dad work on the engine of the Impala. He’d been ‘helping’ John by holding… something — he doesn’t quite remember what anymore, but he knows it wasn’t anything actually helpful; his dad had just wanted him to feel useful. Mom had come waddling out to check on them — it had been just before Sammy was born — and she handed Dad his ass for letting Dean stand on the crates that were definitely not stable enough for an idiot toddler to be perched on. Dad had laughed and scooped Dean up, tossing him into the air, which had been Dean’s favourite trick because back then he’d known Dad would always catch him.

And Dad did catch him as he jokingly said Mom was worried Dean might fall, only when he said ‘fall’, he pretended like he was going to drop Dean, making him shriek with glee, and Mom smack Dad in the arm and call him a smart ass. Everyone had been smiling, and Dad had let Dean swing like a sloth from his arms, then carried him over to Mom and leaned in to give her a kiss. Dean remembers getting squished against Mom’s gigantic stomach, making Sammy kick him from inside Mom’s belly and Mom smack Dad again and say he’d dropped Dean on her bladder. Dad had just laughed and called them all a handful.

That was the proof — Dean always told himself when he held that memory close to his chest, as though afraid that by exposing it to the elements, it might lose some of its shine — proof that they could have been happy, normal. If Mom hadn’t died, and Dad hadn’t gone right the fuck off the rails, maybe life would have turned out alright.

But Dad apparently wasn’t built to live in a world without Mom, because it was like all the lights had gone out the day she died, and now Dean doesn’t know if he was built to live in a world without either of his parents. Some days it feels like the weight of being Sammy’s only family just might end him, but the catch-22 is that it can’t, because then his brother would be alone.

Sam uses the excuse of having homework to spend the day at Jessica’s. Dean tries not to feel abandoned by his brother, tries to remind himself that it’s not Sammy’s job to babysit his emotions, even if it is a significant day for the both of them. He tries to remind himself that Sam has the right to spend his time with whomever he wants, and that it’s okay to let the kid grieve in his own way, but fuck almighty does he feel like he’s the only person left on planet Earth when he hears Sam run out the door when Jessica’s dad pulls into Bobby’s driveway.

Bobby’s at work, so Dean’ll be alone for the rest of the afternoon. He drifts restlessly from room to room, but nothing seems right, so he finally parks it on the sofa and stares at the ceiling for far too long. He wonders if he should, like, do something to honour his father’s memory, and tries to think of what that would even be. For one wild moment, he wonders if he should break into Bobby’s liquor cabinet and get shitfaced, because that’s what Dad did best towards the end, but he refrains.

Instead, he thinks back to those early days when he was so sure his dad would always be there to catch him. He turns them over in his mind, wearing the edges smooth in his hands just so he knows they were real once. He was real once. He holds on tight, tries to preserve those memories like fruit kept fresh in honey to keep it from spoiling.

He doesn’t want to think about what Dad became. He doesn’t want the memories to spoil.

But that’s also fucked up, isn’t it? To make a man perfect in death when in life he’d been so very, very flawed. Dean lives with the fallout of these failings every day — he sees them in waking and in sleep, feels the weight of it all grind him down and down and down until all he is is dust and ash.

Just like Dad.

He’d been cremated — Dean knows that much at least. Bobby’d tried to talk to him about Dad’s ‘wishes’, but for a guy who seemed to hate being alive, he’d never mentioned what to do with him once he was gone. And Dean had been so fucked up back then that he couldn’t deal with having to think about Dad’s body, couldn’t handle the idea of the empty sack of skin and bones that was the only thing left of the man he loved and hated with everything he had.

Dean doesn’t know where Dad’s ashes are now, and it occurs to him that that’s really kind of shitty of him, for it to have taken a whole friggin’ year before he realised he has no idea where his father’s final resting place is.

He’s contemplating this, the thought to do laps inside his head until he’s exhausted, when Bobby comes home. Dean glances at the clock on the VCR (because it’s Bobby’s house, and of course the man has a dinosaur of a DVD/VCR combo thing in the living room), and sees it’s hours earlier than he’d been expecting Bobby to return. He frowns, worried about what would have had to happen for Bobby to decide to dip out of work early.

‘What’s wrong?’ he blurts out before the man even has a chance to hang his keys on the hook. Bobby jumps a little, clearly not having expected Dean to be plastered to the sofa like melted ice cream.

‘Wear a friggin’ bell next time,’ Bobby groans, but he doesn’t seem angry. He kicks off his boots and comes over to sit in the armchair across from Dean. ‘I wrapped up my crap early. Thought maybe you’d like some company today or somethin’.’

Dean bristles. ‘I don’t need a fucking babysitter, Bobby,’ he growls like the ungrateful asshole he is. ‘I’m fine.’

‘Never said you weren’t,’ Bobby replies, nonplussed. ‘Don’t mean you can’t be bored outta your mind. Anyway, there’s a game on, and your brother’s off with his lady friend so there ain’t no one to give a lecture about that trans fat or whatever it is he’s got a bug up his ass about. I figured now’d be as good a time as any to watch the game ’n eat some deep fried shit before he gets home.’

That… actually sounds like a really good idea. Dean’s stomach decides that’s the moment it needs to make itself known by loudly announcing that Dean hasn’t eaten today, causing Bobby to give him a look.

‘Yeah, okay,’ Dean mumbles, embarrassed. He presses his fist into his gut like he used to do when he was hungry and afraid and alone, but as always, it does little to dull the ache of emptiness he feels inside.

Since Sam’s not home to lecture them to death or stink up the house after eating a burrito, Bobby orders from local Mexican joint and even springs for delivery, which is something he normally rails against, but Dean gets the feeling that Bobby doesn’t want to leave him alone. He wants to feel indignant over being babied or motherhenned, but that seems like more energy than he’s willing to expend, not to mention, he kind of appreciates having company he didn’t have to ask for.

By the time the food arrives, Bobby’s putting some football game on the TV and is setting up the tray tables for them to eat on in the living room, so Dean goes to grab plates and napkins and shit. Before leaving the kitchen, he catches himself staring at the canisters on the counter that hold flour and sugar and coffee or whatever, and he wanders back into the living room feeling distracted and pensive.

Bobby notices, because of course he does. He accepts his plate from Dean and grabs a few napkins, but before transferring his food from the takeaway container, he sets everything on his tray table and asks, ‘somethin’ got your panties in a twist?’ in a way that’s trying just a little too hard to seem nonchalant.

‘Where’re my dad’s ashes?’ Dean blurts out. His heart is suddenly racing and his palms feel like they’re tingling, though he’s not quite sure why. He remembers when he was a kid, there was a song about ‘shaking your sillies out’ that they used to dance to in music class at school, and he has the overwhelming urge to try to get up and move until this anxiety is out of his body. He sits down instead.

There’s a beat of silence, then Bobby says, ‘In the safe in my closet,’ in an even tone that implies he’s not sure if Dean’s going to cry or yell or not care at all. ‘I left my contact information with the hospital ’n when they called to say he was- well, you know, I went ’n picked ’em up, but you didn’t seem ready to talk about it, so I put the urn in the safe until you were. Maybe I shoulda pushed the issue with ya, but I didn’t want to force you to take on too much at once, ’n then it just seemed like it was never the right time to try ’n bring it up again. Maybe that was wrong of me, ’n if it was, I’m sorry, but just know that they’re someplace safe and been treated with respect.’

Dean nods. He wonders if this was a normal thing for Bobby to have done or a weird one, since he’s the adult and Dean’s the dumbass kid in this equation, but either way he knows it was done with kindness. He feels better knowing that Dad’s been taken care of, anyway, but he probably shouldn’t be surprised. Bobby’s good like that.

‘No, you were right,’ he tells Bobby honestly. ‘I wouldn’ta… couldn’ta dealt with it then, I don’t think, and I, uh- I just kinda… forgot to ask after, which… well, that kinda sucks of me, don’t it? I mean. He was still my dad, right? I shoulda… cared more?’

Bobby shakes his head. ‘You did just fine. You were takin’ care’a you ’n takin’ care’a Sam, and if other shit hadta be put on hold while you did that, then oh friggin’ well. You were- you were puttin’ your own mask on first, and there ain’t a damn thing wrong with that, ya hear?’ he says sternly.

Dean hears, but he’s got no friggin’ clue what that means. ‘What mask?’ he asks, brows knitting together, because- what the fuck?

‘Ain’tcha ever been on an airplane?’ Bobby grumbles, but he looks a little sheepish, like maybe he kind of regrets making the comparison in the first place. He groans quietly when Dean shakes his head. ‘If you’re on an airplane ’n it’s goin’ down or whatever, they tell ya to put your own oxygen mask on before you try ’n help the people around ya cos of self-sacrificing idjits like you who’d be takin’ care of everyone else until they passed the hell out. Or when someone’s drowning, they tell ya to throw ’em a life preserver, not jump in with ’em cos when they’re panicking like that, they’re liable to pull you under, too. Ya can’t help other folks if you can’t breathe yourself, ’n that means that sometimes you gotta put yourself first.’

‘Sounds selfish,’ Dean mumbles, but he gets the analogy now. ‘Only, I wasn’t on a crashin’ airplane, Bobby, ’n I wasn’t drowning.’

‘Weren’t ya?’ Bobby asks archly, and Dean’s got nothing at all to say in response to that, so he doesn’t even try.

It’s some time later that the second thought that it really shouldn’t have taken Dean almost a freaking year to have hits him. He’d actually sent himself to bed early, worn out from spending the day in thick of his confusing grief, and had been lying in the dark, staring at his ceiling for an indeterminate amount of time, trying to logic his way through his complicated feelings for his father yet again.

The thought that keeps occurring to him is that the way John died was almost a poetic parallel to how he’d lived — alone. Dad had been driving drunk ’n hit a telephone pole, and while that fucking sucks, Dean can’t help but be grateful no one else was on the road that night, that at least Dad didn’t ruin anyone else’s life with his own stupidity and selfishness. Only, there’s a sort of half-truth in those words — or maybe a lie by omission or some other shit that means no, Dean, that’s not quite right.

Because the thing is, it’s not that Dad hasn’t snuffed out someone’s last breath — not just that, anyway. It’s that he can’t hurt anyone anymore, that Dean — and Sam, but to a different degree — had borne the full brunt of their father’s struggle. Dean tries to consider that if he’s this fucked up after losing someone he’d loved and hated with equal intensity, that Dad losing someone he loved fully and unconditionally must’ve fucked him up, too.

But the thing is — even in his lifelong mourning, Dad was (theoretically) supposed to take care of Dean and Sam. It hadn’t really been so glaringly obvious how short he’d fallen until someone had been freely willing to take on that responsibility, and that’s another thing fucking Dean up now, too.

He feels like a self-martyring asshole, but he thinks about how now that Dad’s gone, there’ll be no one else who will have to carry memories of the anger and despair in his eyes during his drunken rages — or the physical and figurative scars that came after. It’s that no one else will hear the sound of fear and hatred and sadness lacing his words with poison. It’s that no one else will have to watch his grief swallow him whole, wear him down and down and down until all that remained of the man who’d thrown his son into the sky to show him what flying feels like is a generic canister of ashes and three and a half tons of twisted metal.

And that’s when the other shoe drops, and Dean sits bolt upright in bed.

The fucking Impala.

He scrambles gracelessly out of bed, the hem of his pyjama pants getting tangled in the sheets in his haste, and he has to hop around like an idiot before he can extract himself, but it doesn’t matter. Even though it’s been a whole damn year, he feels like he has to give voice to this question now before it slips through his fingers again.

It’s still not too late when he goes downstairs, so he’s not surprised when he finds Bobby on the sofa in the living room, watching some rerun of a rerun. He looks up with something close to alarm when Dean comes crashing into the living room like his ass is on fire.

‘Dean-’ he starts, half rising out of his seat, eyebrows knit together in concern, but Dean — apropos of nothing, as always — barrels right by.

‘Bobby, what happened to my dad’s car?’ Dean blurts these words out with the same amount of sensitivity and tact as when he’d asked about his father’s ashes earlier that day. Bobby blinks, understandably taken aback, but he recovers quickly enough, even if he does start giving Dean that handle with care; explosives inside look from the corner of his eye.

‘So… here’s the deal,’ Bobby says slowly, a cautious note underlying his normal gruffness. ‘Back in the beginning’a this year, I got a call from a fella I know who runs the salvage yard the next town over. He wanted to let me know that the ninety days he’ll hold a car for was comin’ to an end, cos he ends up with a lotta cars from police impounds. There was… there was a car he’d gotten in that I'd asked him to keep an eye on.’

Dean’s heart is a caged bird slamming its wings against the bars. It’s panicking and fluttering and it hurts, it hurts, it hurts, but he has to know.

‘So, uh- it ended up gettin’ crushed or whatever, then, I guess?’ he asks, and kind of feels like part of himself is being crushed as well. He sniffs, lets out a shuddery exhale. ‘’s probably better that way. After my da- well. After all that- shit, it probably was worth more as scrap anyway.’

But Bobby, true to fuckin’ form, pulls the rug right out from under him again.

‘Course not,’ he says, and the bird is back, still trying to break free. ‘I wouldn’ta done that to ya behind your back. I had the guy hold onto it for awhile longer, just until- well, until we could have a talk one’a these days ’n figure out what ya wanted to do with it.’

Dean’s knees feel weak, so he staggers over to one of the armchairs and allows himself to collapse into it. ‘You really still got it?’ he asks hoarsely. ‘I can’t believe- holy shit, man. All this time, I just- I didn’t wanna think about it, ya know? And I probably shoulda, but it just- I couldn’t think about her all smashed up ’n my dad…’ He can’t finish, the pain from those mental images still too near, even a full year later.

‘Hey,’ Bobby interjects gently. ‘Life preserver, remember?’ Dean chokes back a noise that might be a laugh or it might be a sob, but whatever it is, it’s like the sound of shattering glass.

‘Can I see her?’ Dean’s desperation is making him dizzy — he hadn’t realised how much he’d wanted this, but now that the thought is there, he can’t get it out of his head. It’s like a hunger gnawing at his guts; he presses his fist against his stomach again just to have something else to focus on.

‘Of course,’ Bobby says as though this is the only acceptable answer. ‘I’ll tell my buddy to haul her over, though I gotta admit, kid-’ he sighs, looking almost reluctant now, ‘I really got no clue what kinda shape she’s in. I’ve seen pictures, but, uh- never made it out there in person, so…’ He sighs again and rubs his temples. ‘I just need ya to prepare yourself for the idea that she might be lookin’ rough.’

‘I’m sure it ain’t pretty.’ Dean’s tries to swallow around the rising wave of nausea when he realises she might look like a whole friggin’ crime scene for all he knows. ‘But, uh- d’ya think maybe we could fix her up if it ain’t too bad? I mean- I’ll- I’d pay for parts ’n whatever, I just- I wouldn’t really know where to start.’

‘Of course,’ Bobby says again, with the same matter of factness as the last time he’d said the time. ‘We’ll figure it out together, alright? S’long as the frame ain’t twisted, it can’t be a bigger bitch’n the damn Chevelle.’

Dean laughs, now well acquainted with Bobby’s bitching about the never-ending list of things wrong with his car. ‘Thanks, Bobby,’ he says, even though the words are nowhere near enough.

Bobby calls his friend, and a few days later, a rollback tow truck pulls into the drive. Sam’s at Jessica’s again, but this time Dean’s relieved, rather than forsaken. He’d always had a different type of connection to the Impala than his brother did. He’s not sure if it’s because Dean has that precious memory of standing on those milk crates and working on her with their father, or if it’s because he’d had a different type of connection to John, but either way, he’s grateful this reunion is happening in semi-privacy.

It takes some time and effort for Bobby, his friend, and Dean to get her off the truck and into Bobby’s garage. The man has cleared a whole bay out for her, which chokes Dean up more than he’s willing to admit. Once she’s finally settled into her new home for the foreseeable future, Bobby pays the tow truck driver and he drives off, honking his goodbye as he pulls out of Bobby’s driveway.

Dean’s not really paying attention to them, though, because he has eyes only for the Impala. He circles her slowly, peering in every window, running his fingers over the scratched and splintered body. It’s like- like coming home to find someone’s moved all the furniture while you were gone — familiar unfamiliarity, or something.

But then, Dean catches sight of a glimpse of bright blue and red and yellow peeking out of the air vent. He leans in, just to be sure, but- yep. It’s the Legos he’d jammed in their more than half a lifetime ago. He’d gotten his ass tanned for that one, because Dad had never been able to get them out, and every time he turned on the defrost, they’d rattle around, but to Dean, that was the sound of home.

Eagerly, he squinted through the glass to the ashtray, and when he can just barely make out a dark green blob that can only be his and Sammy’s old Army men toys, he has to breathe in through his nose and out through his mouth several times to get himself under control. When he sees his and Sammy’s initials on the package tray, however, it’s game over.

The Impala is back. Despite everything, she’s still here, and it’s as beautiful as it is horrible, seeing her again. She’s hurt and twisted and broken, but maybe she’ll be okay, because Dean is hurt and twisted and broken, but he’s getting a little better every day — he thinks. Maybe they’ll both be okay. Maybe Dean can find a way to put them both back together piece by piece.

He knows that they’ll never be the same as they were before the crash, but maybe that’s okay, too. Maybe that’s even better.

Because… the friggin’ Army men are still in the ashtray. His initials are still carved into the package tray, side by side with his brother’s. There’s Legos in the vents, and a whole lifetime of memories between those four doors.

And Dean. Somehow, some way, Dean’s still here, too.

He can fix this — he can. He can fix fucking anything, can find a way, because he’s always done what he’s had to. Only now, it’s different. Because now, he doesn’t need to do it alone.

And maybe that’s better, too.

Chapter Text

Bobby had been right —Sam loves the bike. He definitely cries when Dean wheels it into the living room, and Dean definitely roasts the hell outta him for it… possibly through his own tears.

‘Just make sure you wear that fuckin’ helmet… bitch,’ he grumbles, trying like hell to hide how choked up he still is. ‘Gotta protect that giant egg head of yours.’

Sam makes Bitch Face #43. ‘‘Egghead’ means someone who’s smart, jerk. One word, not two words when you’re saying I have a head that’s shaped like an egg,’ he complains.

‘Not helpin’ your case, there, Sammy,’ Dean retorts, and Sam, like the mature thirteen year old that he is, sticks his tongue out at Dean in retaliation.

Sam gives Dean his gift, which is a freaking iPod. Dean gapes at his brother like an idiot, but Sam just rolls his eyes.

‘Don’t go giving yourself a heart attack, Dean, I just got it off Craigslist,’ he says, like it’s no big deal. Like having a damn iPod isn’t something Dean’s never even bothered to imagine having, because shit like electronics were an outlandish luxury when there were bills and rent and food and school supplies that needed to be taken care of first.

(That thought makes Dean pause. Sam never seems to have the same kind of reactions to shit like this the way Dean does. It’s not like he wants his brother to be traumatised from the way they were raised, but a horrible little voice in the back of his mind rails that it’s just not fair that Dean’s the only one fucked up.

Thankfully, a louder voice reminds him that Sam being alright means that he, Dean, did something right, and Dean decides that’s good enough for him. Usually.)

The rest of Christmas Day passes comfortably, and then they’re in that weird week between Christmas and New Year’s, where time ceases to exist. Dean works more around the motel, if only to keep his head on straight.

(Plus, he uses the opportunity to hook his new iPod up to Bobby’s work computer and download iTunes. It blows his friggin’ mind how much is out there — literally thousands and thousands of songs just a click away. Definitely one of the coolest gifts he’s ever received.)

New Year’s Eve finds him, Sam, Bobby, and Rufus sitting around the dining room table playing cards and stuffing themselves stupid on nachos and root beer floats. There was a time where New Year’s Eve meant more customers, but also more danger for Dean, but he tries his best to shove the memory away… for now.

It’s because of these unrelenting intrusive thoughts that Dean finally bites the bullet and starts therapy a week into the new year. He wants to hate it, wants to hate himself for forcing himself to go through with it in the first place. Hell, he wants to hate the fucking doctor, who he pictures as some pretentious, condescending, stuffy, old asshole, but he can’t even do that, because the doc turns out to be none of those things. Much to his chagrin, even Dean has to admit that she’s, surprisingly, actually pretty cool.

Dr Pamela Barnes is not at all what he’d been expecting. He’d figured a shrink would be some old white dude in spectacles and a sweater vest, taking notes in some fancy ass ledger, while Dean lay on a couch and spilled his guts. He’d expected a lot of and how does that make you feel? or now tell me about your relationship with your father…, though, he supposes that one would have at least made sense. He’d expected to feel like he was being judged and had figured the session would end with him getting defensive, possibly even storming right out of the room. He’d even warned Bobby that that was a pretty likely outcome.

What he hadn’t expected, however, was a hot as hell lady-doctor in an ACDC t-shirt, studded belt, and ripped jeans, the many bangle bracelets on her wrist jangling cheerfully while she shakes his hand.

‘Call me Pamela,’ she’d insisted warmly, so Dean does.

His first session with Pamela is mostly just unloading his dirty fucking laundry all over the dam place. They do talk about his parents, but only briefly. For today, Pam says she just wants to get to know Dean a little, and even though Dean suspects this is some reverse psychology bullshit, he still plays along.

(He figures it probably can’t be considered reverse psychology when the person doing it is a bonafide shrink, anyway.)

So, Dean talks, and he kinda, sorta, maybe doesn’t hate it. It’s almost kinda, sorta, maybe… nice, being able to talk to someone about all the shit that’s always running around inside of his stupid head. Sometimes it feels like the Roadrunner and Wile E Coyote are having a friggin’ rave up there, just going round and round in circles until nothing makes sense anymore.

He talks about getting the bike for Sam (but not his breakdown about earning money now versus earning money then), which leads him into talking about Christmas, which leads him to talking about last Christmas, which leads him right back to not talking and not thinking about how he used to earn money so hard that it hurts.

Pam notices, because of course she does, but she doesn’t force it out of him or anything, just asks, ‘Is there anything else you’d like to talk about today, Dean?’

He sits back in his chair and studies his boots that Bobby gave him for Christmas. They’re Carhartt boots, to go with his Carhartt jacket, and just those two items add up to way more than- well, than everything else Dean owns in the world combined. Bobby’d grumbled something about Dean needing ‘halfway decent shit’ if he was going to be working full-time after graduation, and then he and Sam had very kindly given Dean a moment of privacy to stare at his new stuff like a goddamn idiot.

He’s definitely staring at his shoes like a goddamn idiot again now. The Roadrunner flips him the bird while the Coyote falls off another fucking cliff. And Dean doesn’t say a damn thing.

The minutes tick by until it’s just about time to leave, and Pam’s giving him a reassuring smile and making plans to meet again in two weeks. Dean nods, taking the appointment card she’d written the date and time on, and goes to leave, but just before he walks out the door, he hesitates. Pam seems to have expected something like this might happen, because when he slowly turns back around, she’s looking back at him with that same look of gentle expectation.

‘I-’ Dean tries, but the words get caught between his teeth, where they’ve stayed trapped for so many years and for so many people, because, for once, he wants to tell the truth without someone forcing it out of him, and it’s a truth that hurts. He lets out a frustrated growl, clears his throat, and looks down at his stupid-expensive shoes again. He looks up.

‘I was a whore,’ he says. His words aren’t loud, but they’re clear, and he supposes that’s what really matters. He steals a look in Pamela’s direction, but her expression hasn’t changed. She’s not judging or condemning or pitying him — she’s just listening, so he keeps going. ‘For- for, like- a while, and, uhm- and it’s kind of- fucking me up, so… so next time, can we maybe…’

He can’t go on, but it seems like Pam might have been expecting that as well.

‘Of course, kiddo,’ she says evenly. ‘We can talk about anything you’d like.’

He nods again without speaking, because now he’s got nothing left in the tank. He raises a hand in an awkward half-wave, then books it out the door.

Dean’s got another therapy session under his belt by the time he turns eighteen a few weeks later, and he still doesn’t hate it, which is just wild. Pamela’s got him set up on a two week schedule, and he finds he might actually, kinda, sorta, maybe be looking forward to the next one.

For Dean’s birthday, Bobby takes him and Sam out to dinner at the diner, but when they walk in, they’re greeted with a whole lobby full of Dean’s friends from school, as well as Rufus and even some other regulars from the Woodstock. All those assholes yell ‘surprise!’ and Dean just- he just stands there ‘gapin’ and gaspin’ like a friggin’ fish outta water,’ as Bobby grumbles, giving him a little push into the restaurant.

That night, there’s good food, and good music (one of Dean’s buddies from the wrestling team, Victor Henriksen, puts himself on playlist duty, and staunchly refuses to give in to Anna’s begging for Bieber and that godawful Call Me, Maybe song), and good company. Dean catches himself just gazing around the room like a friggin’ sap more than once, completely fucking blown away that this many damn people give enough of shit about him to waste their night celebrating his stupid birthday.

He gets spoiled rotten with new CDs and iTunes gift cards, t-shirts, gift cards to go out to eat or to the movies. Bobby’s friend, Missouri, bakes him a whole ass apple pie, and that just might be the best gift of the evening. By the time the party wraps up and it’s time to head home, Dean’s face actually hurts from smiling so much.

Bobby follows Dean and Sam into the house, all three of them laden down with bags and bags and bags stuffed full of Dean’s gifts and leftover food and deflated decorations. Kicking off his boots, Bobby tells Dean and Sam to just dump everything on the couch and that they’ll deal with them in the morning, which they gratefully do.

‘Go ’n sit down for a tick; I got somethin’ to tell you boys,’ Bobby says, sounding almost nervous or something, once they’re all free of their various bundles and burdens.

Dean drops into the chair behind him, blood suddenly pounding in his ears, knees weak. He’s suddenly scared to death of what Bobby’s about to tell them. Jesus Christ, what if the news is that he’s got, like, six months to live or some shit — what a fuckin’ birthday present.

‘What’s wrong?’ he blurts out, anxious and desperate. He swallows hard because, fuck, his voice is already trembling. ‘You- you’re not dyin’ or anything, right?’

‘What? No, ’course not!’ Bobby replies, instantly indignant. ‘’m healthy as a horse ’n twice as stubborn, ya idjit; I ain’t goin’ nowhere. What I, uh- what I gotta tell ya is ’bout them adoption papers we sent in a few months back.’

‘Oh,’ Dean breaths, relief making him dizzy. ‘Oh, thank fuck. Bobby, don’t worry ’bout that, man. I knew right away that it was gonna be a long shot, since I was almost legal anyway. It’s alright — honest. Just knowin’ ya made the effort is more’n enough, I swear.’ He glances at Sam from the corner of his eye, then frowns. ‘You can still get Sammy, though, right? Since he’s still a pint-sized pain in the ass?’

‘Knock it off, jerk!’ Sam retorts, but he settles down right away as well, and worry creeps back onto his face. ‘Did something go wrong, Bobby? I mean- I figured it might be hard, since, you know, both our biological parents are dead, so I took some family law books out from the library at school, and-’

‘For God’s sake, can’t you two friggin’ parakeets keep your chirpin’ to a minimum ’n let a man get a friggin’ word in?!’ Bobby huffs. He waits until both Dean and Sam’s mouths snap shut before continuing. ‘Anyway, as I was sayin’ before the two’a you decided I was dyin’ and trippin’ all over the friggin’ red tape — I heard back from the social worker this week, ’n all our T’s are dotted ’n I’s are crossed, so if you boys still wanna make this a permanent thing, the good state’a South Dakota’ll put the stamp of approval on it, ’n you’ll legally be my problem forever ’n ever, amen.’

Despite saying all this in his usual brash way, Dean can see that Bobby is genuinely nervous under it all. He’s cracking his knuckles against his thighs, and his eyes keep darting over to the liquor cabinet, like he’s itching for a drink.

‘Uh, ain’t it too late for me?’ Dean asks, suppressing the little wave of disappointment he feels in the pit of his stomach at this realisation, despite his earlier assertion that he was totally fine with it all. He had really meant most of what he’d said — just knowing that Bobby even wanted to try to adopt him was more than he’d ever even imagined anyone ever doing for him. Still, it would have been nice to- to belong somewhere, officially, or whatever.

‘Alright, so- technically, yes,’ Bobby says, but then he pauses, like he wants to make sure he says the next thing exactly right. Dean’s feeling lightheaded all over again after all this emotional upheaval, but before he can say anything else, Bobby continues. ‘But, there’s a thing called adult adoption that me ’n the social worker been talkin’ about, since you were so close t’bein’ legal when we started the whole thing. It, uh- it don’t mean that I’m… tryin’ to- to tell ya what to do or any’a that, since you are a whole ass adult now, but it, uh- it just means that as far as Uncle Sam’s concerned, we’ll be considered — you know — kin. Family.’

Family. The word makes everything around Dean slow down and go quiet. Sam’s saying something, but it’s like he’s calling to Dean from the opposite end of a football field or something, because Dean can’t seem to comprehend a single word he’s saying. All he can think about is that Bobby — the man who was a complete freaking stranger not two years ago — wants- wants Dean to be his… his son.

‘But why?’ he asks, voice hoarse, and still sounding like it’s coming from somewhere far away. ‘There’s- it’s not like you gotta do it for social services or whatever. I mean- Sammy, I get, to keep him outta the system, but… but why would you want- s’not like we’re blood or any’a that, so…’

He can’t find the words to articulate what he really wants to ask, which is why in the Bobby would want to saddle himself with Dean if there was really no benefit to him. He just can wrap his stupid mind around it.

‘Because-’ Bobby’s voice is as hoarse as Dean’s now; whiskey rough, but warm enough that something in Dean settles. He clears his throat. ‘Because like I told you back at the hospital — if there’s one damn point that really got driven home this past year ’n a half, it’s that family don’t end in blood. Now, I ain’t tryna replace your dad, ’n if ya don’t feel like this thing is for you, then that’s your choice and it’s totally fine — I won’t take it personal, and there won’t be any hard feelings about it. But as far as I’m concerned, on my end, you two pains in the ass are ’bout as close to havin’ a family as this crotchety old drunk woulda ever thought was possible.’

‘So, you really, y’know… want me?’ Dean asks before he can stop himself. He knows he sounds totally pathetic, but he doesn’t even care. It’s just- it’s been so fucking long since anyone has wanted him just for being him that it feels like a foreign concept.

Bobby studies him for a moment, and Dean can’t blame him. There are so many ways that an answer to a question that freaking stupid could go wrong, plus Dean hasn’t exactly proven himself to be an exceptionally reasonable individual. But, after another beat or two of silence passes, Bobby nods anyway.

Well, after that, it’s not like there’s a whole lot left to say, and a short while later, when Dean’s putting himself to bed, he just lies back and tries to figure out how the hell this is his life. He wonders when the hell his luck changed, and why the hell Bobby ever decided he’s worth bothering with.

These thoughts ricochet through his mind, the Roadrunner and Coyote running laps, as his eyes drift closed. The last thing he thinks before sleep takes him is that this might be the first time ever that he’s felt like he’s where he’s meant to be. Then, he slips into a deep and restful sleep.

For once, the nightmares leave him be.

Chapter Text

The process for adult adoption seems like it’s a hell of a lot easier than for the kind involving kids. The paperwork goes through without a hitch, and just like that, Dean suddenly has… a dad. A new dad? Another dad?

Whatever it’s called, it’s like everything changes and nothing changes, and all in all, that’s alright by Dean.

True to his word, Bobby doesn’t suddenly become some Ward Cleaver (or worse: John Winchester) wannabe. Instead, he still affectionately calls Dean an idjit for not taking out the trash, sits front and centre at his wrestling matches, and helps him start rebuilding the Impala on the weekends they’re both not working at the motel.

There’s no denying, however, that there’s a feeling of security now that Dean’s never known before. Things are… good. And for the first time ever, Dean thinks maybe it’s okay to trust that they’ll stay that way.

He keeps up with the therapy thing, because as much as he hates to admit it, it does seem to be working, at least a little. Other than Sam, Bobby, and Rufus, no one else knows Dean’s going, which he’s glad for, because there are still times when his dad’s voice is in his ear, calling him a bitch for talking about his feelings to ‘some quack’. It hurts to hear — Dean thinks that maybe it will always hurt — but it helps that his found family is often louder and drowns out Dad’s toxicity with their overwhelming support.

(It also helps that Pamela is easily the coolest doctor he’s ever met… not that he’s met many, of course. The only times since hitting the road when he was a little kid that John had bothered to seek medical care for him was on the rare occasions he’d fucked Dean up so badly that it warranted a visit to the emergency room or something. Other than that nurse who’d let him and Bobby lie about being related when Dean’s appendix went kaput — no one in an ER was ever cool about having to deal with some POS kid with his POS dad with no insurance and obviously no intention of ever paying the bill.)

Pamela lets him talk about anything and everything, and never makes him feel like he’s dirty or wrong or disgusting or crazy. She listens with the same rapt attention and non-judgement when he tells her about what he’s up to at school, as she does when he talks about what it was like when his mom died when he was a kid, or even when he tells her about the first trucker he sucked off when he was thirteen. They work on distinguishing Dean’s past circumstances from his past actions, and even begin chipping away at the boatload of abandonment and trust issues he’s got swirling around his busted brain.

And slowly but surely, some days he starts thinking that maybe — just maybe — it’s a little less busted than he’d originally thought. Pamela assures him time and again, with far more patience than Dean feels he deserves, that he’s not some sort of broken down freak, that the things he thinks and feels are normal (or at least not entirely abnormal), and that the things he’s been through and done weren’t his fault despite what John, or even Dean himself, have led him to believe.

So, all in all, therapy hasn’t been anywhere near as bad as he’d anticipated. It almost makes him wonder what he thought the big deal was in the first place, because as it turns out, sometimes he does want to just unload about his past, and not always because it’s fucking him up.

Sometimes he wants to talk about back when Mary was around and John was still a real person. Sometimes he wishes someone else knew that these memories existed once, because if someone else remembers, then maybe he doesn’t have to cling to them quite so tightly, like he’s afraid that if he were to forget them, they would cease to exist altogether.

Pamela suggests he write them down in a notebook or journal. He scoffs at her and says he’s not a twelve year old girl who needs to keep a diary, but his voice might tremble just a little at the end of his sentence, the delivery not landing quite as sharply as he’d intended. At his next appointment, there’s a small black notebook on the table next to his chair, and when he leaves, he’s surprised at how comforting he finds the weight of it in the pocket of his coat.

Bobby catches him some nights, curled up on one of the chairs in the living room, scribbling away in his stupid little notebook, but he never says a word about it, which Dean appreciates. When he gets to the last few pages, however, a new notebook appears on his desk in his room, and when he goes to work next, he finds a whole package of them in one of the boxes for that month’s supply order.

Dean doesn’t know what to think or say about this, so he just stacks them in one of the cabinets, but now he knows they’re there, and Bobby knows he knows. When Bobby sees him taking a new one out one day, he just gives Dean a curt not, then moves on to continuing cursing a blue streak at the new computer he’s trying to set up.

The days pass. The weeks pass. Dean keeps working at school, working at wrestling, working at the motel. He keeps working on himself, too, tries to really consider if the things he thinks and feels about himself are just because he’s been taught to hate himself that much, or because they’re actually true.

Writing things down helps a little. Talking to Pamela helps a lot more. The anxiety death spirals of his shitty past slamming headfirst into his present have lessened significantly, and just that fact alone makes him feel lightheaded with relief.

(Even his freakouts about money have begun to lessen. When Dean goes to the ‘U Pull It’ junkyard with Bobby to pick up parts for the Impala on the first weekend that it’s not below freezing, he drops almost a buck fifty of his own money on a rear axel and doors for the front and back driver’s side. He has a split second of sticker shock, but then he just wordlessly hands the cash over and he and Bobby load it all onto a platform truck and haul it all out to the Rufus’s pickup that they’d borrowed again. Bobby doesn’t comment, but he does clap a hand on Dean’s shoulder as they cross the parking lot, and he doesn’t remove it until they’re loaded up and ready to head home.)

Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean that it’s a foolproof system. There are definitely setbacks, but Pamela says that that’s to be expected and that healing is not linear, whatever that means. Dean hears her and sometimes even agrees, but that doesn’t mean he has to like it. And he doesn’t.

‘I shouldn’t be so fucked up!’ he snaps one day, after a particularly bad nightmare had somehow managed to set him off for the next three days. ‘I ain’t supposed to be such a- such a bitch about a friggin’ bad dream. I never let myself feel any kinda way ’bout the shit I was doin’, cos I did what I had to to keep Sammy safe, so now that he is safe, why’s it gotta get all fucked to hell?’

‘Because you’re no longer living in survival mode,’ Pamela explains, like she’s done on at least two other occasions in recent memory. God, she must be so sick of him and his shit. ‘And, Dean, let’s back up for just a second to talk about something you just said. You said that you wanted to keep your brother safe, right? Why is that?’

Dean stares at her like she started spouting off in French or something. ‘Why did I want my little brother to be safe? What kinda dumbass question is that?!’ He’s being rude, he knows, but nothing puts his back up like someone implying that Sam didn’t deserve to be taken care of.

But Pamela doesn’t rise to the bait. Instead, she tells him to bear with her and she asks her stupid as fuck question again, completely ignoring the way Dean glowers at her.

‘Fine,’ he grumbles, throwing himself back and slumping down in his chair until he’s doing a marvellous imitation of a pouting toddler. ‘I wanted to keep him safe because that’s my job as his big brother — to look out for him, take care of him, whatever. It… it was my job. Is my job.’

For some reason, for the first time, the words sound hollow. He thinks about how things always were, and how different they are now. He thinks about how he hasn’t had to worry about any of that, really, in the past year or so, and Sam’s doing just fine. He thinks about how Sam is about to turn fourteen — a year older than Dean was when he started turning tricks — and how the idea of Sam being desperate enough to resort to doing that makes him physically sick to his stomach. Dean’ll sell a fucking body organ on the black market before he allows that to happen.

He says this to Pamela, and when she asks why, he gets pissed all over again, because why the fuck is that even a question, but when he reluctantly tells her it’s because Sam’s still a friggin’ kid, and no kid deserves to be treated like that.

Pamela asks him to say that again, so he does: no kid deserves to be treated like that.

When she asks what a kid does deserve, he’s less pissed off by that question, and really thinks about it for a good, long moment before answering.

‘A kid deserves to be… taken care of.’ He scuffs the floor with the toe of his boot, frowning as he tries to organise his thoughts into something coherent. ‘To, uh- to not be scared that something’s gonna happen to them or that someone’s gonna hurt them.’ He swallows. ‘And to feel safe. Loved. Like there’s at least one person in the whole stupid world who gives a damn about them.’

Pamela doesn’t say anything in response. She settles back in her chair and chews on the end of her glittery pen that says SHITSHOW SATURDAY, watching him patiently, a completely neutral expression on her face.

(It’s Thursday. Dean likes those pens, because each one is some froufy, pastel, glittery thing, and it’s not obvious that they all have sayings like WISH A BITCH WOULD WEDNESDAY or FUCK OFF, IT’S FRIDAY engraved on the barrel until someone gets close enough to read what’s on them. They’re pretty and shiny and seem innocent enough, until you really pay attention and realise that something that appears respectable can also be obscene.

Pamela says she prefers looking at it the other way ’round — finding beauty in something that some people might find offensive or uncomfortable. Somehow, Dean’s not surprised that that’s her perspective, even if he doesn’t think he could ever see it that way.)

A few more beats of silence pass between them, and then it hits Dean, the point Pamela’s waiting for him to find.

‘So, maybe… maybe I deserved it, too?’ he answers hesitantly. ‘Maybe I…’

He can’t finish that sentence out loud, and thankfully, Pamela doesn’t make him. But later that night, when he’s laying in his own bed, in his own bedroom with the blue walls and rock band posters, all alone, but so very safe, he thinks about it again. This time, he forces himself to see the thought through to the end.

Maybe I deserved it, too. Maybe I deserved to be safe. Maybe I deserved to be loved.

It’s gross. Sappy and sentimental and cringey — a total bullshit chick flick, Lifetime movie worthy pukefest of a thought, but there it is.

Dean knows he won’t ever say that shit out loud, but every now and then, in the safety and privacy of his room, he lets himself think them. And each time he does, he finds that he wants to puke a little less.

A few months later, as the wrestling season is winding down, the post-graduation/college talk fervour amps right the fuck up. College acceptance letters start rolling in around the middle of March, and by the beginning of April, almost all of Dean’s friends are either strutting around with the self-satisfied swagger of high school seniors who’ve gotten into their first choice university, or going out of their minds with worry over having not heard back, and lamenting the horrors of potentially having to go to their safety school.

Dean… does not fall in either of these camps.

Instead, he focusses on ending the wrestling season as triumphantly as possible, and ends up winning his division when they go to state. Right after the ref counts down the pinfall and Dean rises to his feet, victorious, his gaze snaps to where Bobby is sitting in the front row, clapping and cheering like a goddamn madman.

Dean bites his lip, but even that can’t keep the smile from his face or the swell of emotion in his chest. He looks down at the ground for a moment, trying to get a grip, but when he looks up again, Bobby’s still there, still beaming like he’s just witnessed the Second Coming.

Dean’s senior year, his last year in school, probably for forever, is very quickly coming to a close, and Dean really doesn’t know how to feel about it. All around him, his friends oscillate between ecstatic and and optimistic for their future plans, and uncomfortably sentimental and nostalgic. It’s a weird time for Dean, seeing as he’s got exactly zero big plans for after graduation, but he also hasn’t been around these people for long enough to get weepy over the ‘remember when…’s.

Still, he’s looking forward to the end of the year, if only because right now, school seems almost… pointless, like everyone, even the teachers have begun checking out.

(It’s not that he doesn’t still like going, because he kind of does. So sue him, maybe he’s a little more of an egghead — one word, as per Sammy — than he originally let on.

He feels kind of stupid about it, to be honest, because what it is, is that he kind of likes getting confirmation that he’s not quite as dumb as he’d always let himself believe. He pulls good grades — not as high as Sam, of course, but still a solid fifteen to twenty percentage points higher than he ever had before moving in with Bobby. When he gets called on in class, it’s because he actually has the answer to something, not to be used as an example of how not to be, a warning to the other kids that if they don’t keep on the straight and narrow, they might end up an idiot degenerate like Dean.)

Around the second week of May, his friends start pairing off like they’re about to board the fucking Ark or something, because everyone and their mother has lost their damn minds over the upcoming prom.

This is one end of the year senior tradition that Dean can’t help but find himself getting swept up in, at least a little. He laughs when Isaac announces he’s going to wear a top hat and tails, and his girlfriend, Tamara, playfully whacks him upside the head with her history notebook. He dies of secondhand sympathy embarrassment when Becky starts cooing about wanting to arrive in a horse-drawn carriage, and the look on her boyfriend, Chuck’s, face is one of complete and total horror. And he nods and uh-huh’s in all the right places when Rhonda, his partner in chem lab, talks at length about her dress, and what flower-bracelet-whatever-thing she wants, but how she might not get a wrist-flower-thing at all, because prom’s ‘only’ three weeks away, and she still doesn’t have a date. He has no idea what the hell she’s going on about, but he handles it like a pro, nonetheless.

Or rather… he thought he’d handled it like a pro, until he makes the mistake of mentioning the weird as hell conversation at lunch the following day, and everyone gives him a look like he’s just announced he wants to go to the prom dressed as a friggin’ Teletubby.

‘Aw, come on, Winchester.’ Victor shakes his head dramatically. ‘She was practically telling you to ask her to the prom. What the hell, man, I thought you said you had game.’

‘I got plenty of game, I just didn’t know that forty minutes talkin’ ’bout roses versus lilies for the flower thing or if I thought a pink dress would make her look too much like a Barbie doll meant she was into me!’ Dean protests, glaring at the table at large when they all laugh.

‘Honestly, Dean.’ Anna sounds like she’s resisting the urge to smack the stupid out of him. ‘You’re going to have to come up with one heck of an amazing promposal to make up for being such an unbelievable bonehead, and just pray no one else has asked her already.’

She makes it sound like it’s a matter of life or death, and Dean doesn’t think prom is anywhere close to that level of importance, but before he can tell her she sounds ridiculous, his brain snags on something else she said.

‘Wait, wait wait — what the fuck’s a ‘promposal’?’ Dean asks incredulously. Anna rolls her eyes, Tamara laughs, and Victor gives him one hell of a sympathetic look.

‘It’s an opportunity for you to make a colossal ass of yourself,’ Victor says, giving Dean a slap on the shoulder. ‘You can’t just ask her to prom, you gotta, like, hire a skywriter or something. Write a love ballad and play it on a boombox outside her window. Organise a flash mob to a Rick Astley song or something. Whatever it is, it’s gotta be big.’

‘Well, what the fuck, dude,’ Dean says, already mortified at the very idea. ‘Everyone does this shit?’

‘Everyone who wants the hot girl in chemistry to say yes,’ Isaac answers with a grin. Tamara smacks his arm, and he quickly adds, ‘Unless you’re lucky enough to already be dating the hot girl, of course, and she’s wonderful and loving and awesome enough to not make a guy go through all that shit.’

‘Just for that, you can consider yourself going solo until I get one hell of a promposal,’ Tamara announces, making Dean and Victor burst out laughing, and Isaac cover his face with his hands and groan dramatically. ‘And don’t even think about getting lucky after prom unless it’s amazing.’

Victor laughs again, but Dean’s suddenly hit with an overwhelming wave of nausea. He’d somehow managed to forget that fucking on prom night is one of the biggest high school cliches out there. Rhonda’s hot and fun and cool and sexy, but oh fucking fuck, what if she wants to screw after the dance?

Dean hasn’t- he hasn’t even tried to fool around with anyone since moving in with Bobby, mostly because he kind of feels like he’s fucked around enough to last a lifetime. It wasn’t even two years ago that he was dragging his ass to this damn building after three hours of sleep and five hours of trying to find a scum bag to shove his dick down his throat. There were times Dean had been paid extra to get himself off in front of one of those assholes, and it was the most degrading, humiliating shit ever, so needless to say, he hasn’t had any desire to get off with a partner basically at all.

Luckily his friends don’t notice the dark and twisted path his mind starts taking him down, and continue to tease him about what kind of stupid ass proposal thing he’s going to do for Rhonda. He does his best to plaster a grin back on his face and say all the right cocky things about how his charisma and good looks oughta be enough.

He must fake well enough because no one calls him out on his bullshit. Tamara promises to look up some shit on Pinterest (Dean does genuinely laugh at this, remembering Rufus talking about getting recipes off that thing for Thanksgiving), while Isaac and Victor make noises of mock sympathy. Dean decides to just let himself feel grateful for these assholes he calls his friends and deal with his impending mental breakdown once he’s in the privacy of his own home.

And hoo boy, does it come.

He somehow manages to zombie his way through the rest of the day, holding his shit together by sheer force of will, but once he gets home, he drops his backpack somewhere between the door and stairway, and staggers his ass up to the bathroom. As though on autopilot, he runs a shower, then strips down and steps inside. The shower has always been his safe place; always the spot he could break the fuck down in private. No matter where the fuck they were, there was always a shower for him to cry like a bitch in. And he does.

It’s ugly and pathetic and damn near feral, the way he falls apart in the damn shower. He’s desperately grateful for Sammy’s Ecology Club or whatever the hell meeting, because the last thing he needs is for all this shit to get dumped in his brother’s lap again.

(He still feels fucking sick with humiliation at the idea that Sam saw Dean high as hell on painkillers, begging to suck cock after his appendix surgery to keep the imaginary bad guys away from Sam. They’d never really talked about it, and Dean hopes they never will.)

Dean sinks to the ground in the old porcelain tub, draws his knees up to his chest, and wraps his arms around himself, like if he makes himself small enough, maybe the stupid fucking memories will have less of a target to pummel. The water beating down on his back goes from gloriously hot to lukewarm to frigid, but he can’t move, not yet. He’s being held in place by every awful fucking thing he’s let happen to himself, pinned down by his self-loathing like a twenty dollar whore being fucked against a brick wall.

And this is exactly how Bobby finds him some time later — Dean’s not sure how long, exactly, but long enough that Bobby bursts into the small room yelling his name. He can’t answer — he’s still fucking frozen — but now he doesn’t know if it’s because of his busted ass brain, or because he’s been sitting in a cold fucking shower for God knows how long.

Bobby pulls the shower curtain aside, and normally Dean would be mortified, but right now he can’t quite manage more than staring up blankly at the man. He remembers seeing Bobby from this vantage point once before, that very first time he’d gone with him to his office, thinking Bobby was going to take all Dean was so freely offering. He’d been sick and terrified and exhausted at that time, and he realises distantly that, while he feels sick and terrified and exhausted now, at least he no longer fears that Bobby is pretending to care because he wants to fuck him, and he supposes that’s progress.

When Bobby spots Dean on the ground, curled up like a fucking idiot under the freezing spray of water, he curses violently and jerks the shower handle back into the OFF position. Wordlessly, he opens the linen closet and shakes out a towel for Dean, then turns respectfully his back and steps away as Dean reaches for the towel and tries to stand.

His joints hurt, after being locked in the same position for so long, so he unfolds himself gingerly, trying to preserve what little modesty he has remaining to the best of his pathetic ability. He’s shivering, like the little fucking matchstick girl or whatever the hell she was called, and when he looks down at his hands, he realises they’re gross and wrinkly and pale.

‘For fuck’s sake, kid, were you tryna give yourself friggin’ hypothermia?’ Bobby asks, but there is genuine concern under his gruff words. Dean’s teeth are chattering too aggressively for him to do anything more than shake his head. Bobby sighs, his hands hovering helplessly a few inches from Dean, like he wants to touch him, but is worried that that might make Dean explode or something. He might be right.

‘Just gotta- just wanna go to bed,’ Dean mumbles, using a corner of his towel to wipe away some of the cold rivulets of water streaming down from his soaked hair. ‘Sorry for hoggin’ the shower, Bobby. I can pay you ba-’

‘Boy,’ Bobby snaps, scrubbing a hand down his face when Dean shrinks back at the frustration in his tone. ‘It ain’t about the money — it ain’t ever about the money. I just wanna know what the hell happened ’n if you’re alright.’

‘’m always alright,’ Dean replies automatically, but everyone in the fucking room knows it’s a lie. He looks down at the puddle of water gathering around his pale, frozen feet. ‘Just had a freak out, but- but I’m snapped outta it now. I’ll be fine.’

Bobby regards him carefully, then nonchalantly asks, ‘Think maybe we oughta give the good doc a ring? She said you can call her any time, remember.’

‘Yeah, I know.’ Dean’s words are short, terse. He doesn’t know why he’s so angry at the reminder, and tries to think it through to the root of the problem the way Pamela’s been teaching him to do. ‘Sorry, Bobby, I’m just- I shouldn’ta- it wasn’t anything big or bad that happened, I just… bitched out, I guess.’ He sighs, eyes burning and throat feeling tight, and he’s pretty damn sure he’d be crying again if he had anything left to give. ‘You’re probably right, though. Ain’t an emergency, but maybe I’ll give her a call tomorrow ’n see when she can get me in.’

‘Sounds like a good idea.’ Bobby backs out of the bathroom looking a little more settled, but still like he thinks Dean might be a nuclear warhead that could go off at any second. ‘Why don’t you go get some friggin’ clothes on and I’ll make some hot chocolate or something.’

‘We got hot chocolate?’ Dean asks, actually perking up a little. He’s surprised at how good that sounds — now that he’s no longer fucking catatonic, all he wants in life is to be warm.

‘Yeah, kid, we do,’ Bobby says, but now he sounds a little funny, too. He clears his throat and his hand only hesitates a second before he claps Dean on the shoulder. ‘Go get dressed ’n I’ll meet ya downstairs. We’ll getcha warmed up in no time.’

Dean does. He puts on his warmest sweats and hoodie and two pairs of socks, then heads downstairs to find a mug of hot chocolate with honest to God mini marshmallows floating around in it. The wave of appreciation he feels for Bobby just then could take him out at the knees. Again.

Bobby doesn’t force him to talk — not then, anyway — but he does sit there in silence with Dean at the kitchen table, pretending to read the newspaper from two days ago, while Dean sucks down his hot chocolate. And when he’s still shivering by the time he reaches the bottom of the mug, Bobby gets up and refills it without Dean having to say a word.

Dean watches the man — his ex-landlord/fake uncle/new dad — as he pulls a bag of mini marshmallows from the cupboard next to the stove, and drops a larger than necessary handful into the mug. Bobby, in his worn jeans and ratty baseball cap, with his gruff and tough way of talking, and his short temper, and giant fucking heart, standing there, in his kitchen, making hot cocoa for the kid (who’s technically no longer a kid) that got dumped on him like a bad hand at a poker game.

As he sips his second mug of perfect hot chocolate, Dean thinks again about Pamela’s crazy pens, and how she says that something that some people might find rude or harsh, can still be kind of wonderful, and finally, he thinks that maybe he understands what she meant after all.