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Dean Winchester is four years old, and he’s forgotten how to speak. He used to know, he thinks, he used to be able to talk like everyone else does—but he thinks he must’ve forgotten everything that happened before the fire. His mind has been wiped clean and now all he knows is his baby brother and someone who looks like his dad but can’t be him because his dad never used to drink like this or cry like this or beg Dean to talk with words he doesn’t know. His dad must have gotten replaced when his mom went away.
But that’s okay, because Sammy is the same, ever the same—so Dean doesn’t need a mom or a dad, and he doesn’t need a home, and he doesn’t need to talk, because Sam is here and he’s safe. In the quiet hours of the night, Dean will whisper a promise to Sam using the very few words he remembers how to say—I’ll protect you. Because Mom is gone and not-Dad surely won’t do it, so it’s up to Dean.
Dean tries to remember the words he used to know, for his dad’s sake—he listens to him talk so carefully, watches the movements of his mouth and tries to replicate them, but his throat closes up and everything closes up and sometimes, he starts crying, just trying to tell his dad something, anything, and his dad will gather Dean up in his arms and tell him it’ll be okay—but it always sounds like he’s telling it more to himself than to Dean.
Sam is unaware of all of this, because Sam is a baby. Dean doesn’t even know if Sam knows anything is different. Dean would give anything to be a baby like Sam.
Dean Winchester is five years old, and he remembers how to speak. It starts with little things, like saying yes instead of nodding, or no instead of shaking his head, and it comes surprisingly easy to him after a year of silence. The first time he does it, his dad is ecstatic—he picks Dean up and laughs with joy, and Dean thinks he even cries a little bit. To celebrate, he gets Dean ice cream, and gets Sam whatever the equivalent of ice cream is for a one-year-old who can’t actually have ice cream. Dean has never liked ice cream—the way it gets on his hands when it melts and makes him all sticky freaks him out. But it’s the thought that counts.
Talking is still difficult for Dean, and he knows he’s a lot less talkative than most kids his age, but he still makes an effort because he knows it makes his dad happy.
Sam can’t talk yet except for a few short words consisting of Dee (his attempt at saying Dean), Da (his way of saying Dad), and yee (his version of yes. Or possibly yay. Dean isn’t sure.) One of Dean’s favorite things to do is listen to Sam babble and parrot back the baby-talk, which always frustrates their dad, and he always says, you just started talking again, Dean, I don’t need you doin’ that crap.
But he doesn’t even realize it’s not just Sam’s noises that Dean likes to mimic—it’s sounds and words he hears everywhere else, too. Sometimes his dad will talk and Dean will find himself echoing back the words in the same intonation, without even thinking about it, which always earns him a stern cut it out when it goes on for too long. One time, Dean parroted back the cut it out.
His dad didn’t like that very much.
Dean Winchester is seven years old, and he’s been introduced to his dad’s friend. Or coworker. Maybe both? Dean isn’t actually sure what his dad does for work, but when he meets Bobby Singer, he’s told that Bobby worked with John. (Dean has recently learned that his dad’s name is John. He never knew that before, but it makes sense that he has a name, Dean supposes.)
Bobby is shorter than John and always wears a denim cap, and he has a very kind smile. He speaks with a slight accent that Dean thinks is southern. He says the word idiot strangely, like idjit, which has quickly become another one of Dean’s favorite things to mimic saying. When he first did it, Bobby thought Dean was calling him an idjit, but John quickly clarified that Dean just does that. Sorry, I know it’s annoying.
Bobby didn’t seem too annoyed by it, though.
Bobby is kind to Dean. Kind like his mom was—gentle. Kind like Dean sees other adults be kind to kids. When Bobby plays a song on his old, beat-up cassette player, and Dean starts jumping around and flapping his hands, Bobby doesn’t glare at him or say anything about it being childish—he just says, you like this one, huh? And he doesn’t shush Dean when he starts repeating words or noises because they feel nice to say, he doesn’t tell him to sit still when he fidgets. Dean can’t figure out why his own dad doesn’t treat Dean like that, it seems to come so easily to Bobby.
He's kind to Sammy, too, always speaks in a quiet voice to him. Dean was protective of his little brother at first—he always is, it’s his job to protect Sam—but the wary feeling he had faded quickly. Bobby Singer is kind, and there’s nothing to worry about when they’re with him.
One day, Dean is all alone at Bobby’s house—he doesn’t know where Sammy is, or where his dad is; sometimes John will drop him off at Bobby’s and come pick him up anywhere from a few hours to a day to a week later—and he starts having a meltdown. One of the meltdowns that his dad never knows what to do about, always just yells at Dean to calm down, even though Dean is very clearly trying his best to calm down. He doesn’t even remember what starts it this time, maybe it’s a too-loud noise or a broken toy or something, but the next thing he knows, he’s crying, and he can’t breathe, and everything is too much.
“Hey,” he hears Bobby say, “Hey, kid, what’s goin’ on?” And Dean can’t say anything, he’s gone all quiet again, throat closed up just like it used to. He sobs and waves his arms around as if that answers Bobby’s question. Every time this happens, he feels like he’s right back at square one—a little kid who can’t so much as say a single word, who cries when anything goes wrong.
Bobby keeps talking—something that sounds like he’s saying, Dean, buddy, you gotta tell me what’s wrong—and Dean just keeps crying and when he tries to talk, all that comes out are strangled sorts of noises from somewhere in his shut-tight throat, and his hands move of their own accord. After a few moments, Bobby seems to realize that Dean isn’t going to say anything, no matter how much either of them want him to.
Dean ends up sitting on the couch with a pair of foam earplugs in his ears—somehow, Dean doesn’t know how, Bobby managed to figure out that too much noise bothers him—and the flow of tears has stopped. He didn’t know it could be this easy to calm down—or, well. Easier. It only takes him about five or ten minutes to leave the earplugs on the couch and go tell Bobby that he’s sorry—but Bobby just says it’s fine, he has nothing to be sorry about, which Dean doesn’t understand, but he doesn’t say anything about it.
Bobby asks if he wants to watch a movie—Dean says yes, of course, he always wants to watch a movie, he rarely ever gets to watch a whole one, can never catch them at the right time on the TVs in motels. So Bobby puts a tape in his VHS player—it says Tombstone on it.
From the moment the movie starts, Dean is enthralled. He’s never seen a movie anything like this. The guns, the music, the outfits—it’s the best movie he’s ever seen and even if he was better at talking, he wouldn’t have the words to describe how much he loves it.
When it’s over, he looks at Bobby with wide, awestruck eyes, and Bobby laughs and says, it’s good, ain’t it? Westerns were always my favorite. Dean asks what a western is, and Bobby explains they’re a type of movie—that there are more movies like this, which has Dean more excited than he’s ever been in his life. It’s early enough in the day that Bobby digs out a couple more tapes and lets Dean watch them—similar movies with similar music and similar settings and similar plotlines, and they’re all outrageously good, but none of them quite live up to Tombstone.
When John comes back the next day, Dean tells him all about the movies, every last detail he can think of and what he thinks of them. He can tell it’s tiring for his dad, but he couldn’t make himself shut up even if he wanted to, he’s so excited about all of it.
They end up staying for about an hour before they’re back on the road because Bobby wanted to talk to Dean’s dad—Dean can’t imagine what about. But it doesn’t matter, because Dean stays in the living room and paces around and thinks thinks thinks about the movies, until he hears raised voices in the other room, and stops in his tracks. It only lasts for a second before they’re quiet again, but Dean definitely heard them.
He knows he’s not supposed to eavesdrop, but if Bobby and his dad are yelling, he wants to know what it’s about. So, he pokes his head through the crack in the door to Bobby’s office room, and:
“—your boy ain’t normal, John, you can’t expect me to not fuckin’ notice—”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. He’s just a kid.”
“Yeah, he is, but I ain’t met a lot’a kids like him, and he’s—it’s not a bad thing—”
“I don’t care if it’s a bad thing or not, Singer, it’s none of your damn business. Dean is fine. Leave it alone.”
“I’d like to know your definition of fine—”
Dean hurries back out to the living room after that. They were talking about him—why were they talking about him? Did he do something wrong? Was it the meltdown? It was probably the meltdown, it’s always the meltdowns, but this one was easier, so shouldn’t that be a good thing? He doesn’t have any time to voice these questions before John leads him out of the house, without even letting him say goodbye to Bobby, or thank him for showing him the movies.
In the car, Dean thinks about asking why they were talking about him, and why Bobby thinks he isn’t normal, but his dad has a furious look on his face, and Dean doesn’t know what would happen if he spoke right now.
He doesn’t see Bobby for a while after that.
Dean Winchester is thirteen years old, and middle school is hell. He’s pretty sure middle school is hell for everyone, but especially him, because he doesn’t understand the material and he always gets detention because he can’t sit still and be quiet in class and the bell is so damn loud he’s started staring at the clock near the end of class and holding his hands over his ears when he knows it’s about to ring. His teachers all hate him except for one of them who lets Dean wear headphones in her class and takes extra time to explain the work to him, who is Dean’s favorite person in the entire fucking world at the moment. Besides Sam, obviously.
John really doesn’t seem to care how Dean does in school, because they always leave town after a few weeks, so it doesn’t really matter, and so Dean has pretty much stopped trying. He’s also stopped telling his dad about anything that happens to him in school, because, well. If he cries in class because a girl is chewing gum obnoxiously loud, or eats his lunch in a storage closet, or gets called retarded by every single bully in every single school, John doesn’t need to know, because Dean doesn’t need his dad to be disappointed in him. He’s already disappointed enough in himself.
Dean Winchester is fourteen years old, and he thinks he’s cool. He tries to be cool. He dug out a leather jacket from the lost-and-found bin at a convenience store, and he’s started pretending that fluorescent lights don’t hurt his eyes, and he’s stopped using headphones when he isn’t strictly listening to music. When he feels like flapping his hands like he used to, he sits on them to keep still. When he thinks he might have a meltdown, he punches something until his knuckles bleed and that usually keeps him calm. Sometimes there’s nothing around for him to punch and his wires get a little crossed and he ends up hitting himself in the head until he has a headache, but that’s fine—if it keeps him from freaking out in front of other people, it’s fine.
He's started speaking up in school—not to answer questions teachers ask, but to tell jokes and say stupid shit he doesn’t think through and most of the time doesn’t even mean. It’s earned him a few friends, and a few people who think he’s a complete moron.
Most of all, Dean tries his absolute best to make his dad proud. He tries to fit right in his too-big leather jacket and he tries not to flinch when he fires off a gun, he tries to pretend he’s confident in himself or who he is or what he’s capable of, he tries to pretend he’s normal in any way, shape, or form, he tries to pretend he’s comfortable in his own skin, he tries to be like John. He thinks it’s working. He hopes it’s working. He thinks he’s less of a disappointment than he used to be, at the very least—which is an accomplishment. He can work his way up to the making-him-proud thing.
Sammy is ten, and he isn’t anything like Dean. For starters, he gets good grades, which is the most shocking thing Dean has heard in…ever. He didn’t think any Winchester had a chance at academics. And, for the most part, Sam is pretty normal—well, more normal than Dean was at his age.
Sometimes Dean catches Sam doing things he used to do; making strange, repetitive little noises, tapping his fingers against his thumb, rocking back and forth. Dean tries his best to make sure John never sees Sam doing that stuff, and to stop Sam from doing it at all, which never really works.
He doesn’t want Sam to be a disappointment, too. He needs one of them to be normal—and if it can’t be him, it’s gotta be Sam, and if Sam is fucked in the head, too, well, where the hell do you go from there? So Dean makes sure to shut Sam up if he’s making weird noises and get him to sit on his hands and lean against something solid, but it never works. It always just frustrates Sam and makes Dean feel such a heavy guilt he thinks it might crush his lungs, his heart. And he doesn’t have it in him to explain to Sam why he can’t do that stuff—how do you tell a ten-year-old shit like that?
He’s just trying to make life better for Sam than it is for him.
Lately, it feels like all he does is try.
Dean Winchester is sixteen years old, and he’s been arrested. For stealing some fucking bread, no less—what a way to go down. His dad didn’t take it well. Dean has marks on his arms from where he didn’t take it well.
The place he’s at is, Dean guesses, an alternative to juvie—juvie but run by hippies. It’s not too bad. Dean tells the guy who runs the place, Sonny, in a sarcastic tone of voice, that the marks on his arms—big red bruises, clearly from where someone grabbed him—are from a werewolf. It’s a lie that could be real, it’s a lie that makes him feel just a little bit better. He can pretend it was just a hunt gone wrong, even though he’s never even seen a werewolf before. He’s good at pretending.
Dean can tell that Sonny sees through his bullshit, his faux-confidence—he doesn’t care. Frankly, he’s too tired to care. He got arrested for trying to feed his twelve-year-old brother because his fucking dad wouldn’t do it, and he’s just—he’s tired.
He’s always tired, really.
He’s there for a couple of days before it really sinks in that he doesn’t know when he’s gonna see Sam again, or his dad. That he has no idea what he’s going to do. It’s such a crushing truth, and the reality of it all has him hyperventilating in under a minute—he’s stuck here, and Sam’s stuck with John, oh, God, Sam’s stuck with John, and he has bruises on his arms and, let’s be honest, his dad was glad to be rid of him, and—God, he can’t fucking do this, he can’t.
He ends up on the back porch, sitting on a long bench near the back door, rocking back and forth—it’s a nervous habit of his. Well, it’s a habit of his; he does it sometimes when he’s happy, too, though he’s always careful not to do it around his dad because he’ll get mad, and not to do it around Sammy because he’s too utterly and crushingly terrified that if he doesn’t act like he’s normal around Sam, his little brother will turn out just like him.
He freezes up when he hears wood creaking beside him, and sees a girl about his age standing by the door—he thinks her name is Robin or something like that. He’s seen her play the guitar, and she’s good, and he really doesn’t know what to say in this situation. She sits down next to him on the bench, looking at him with curious eyes and the hint of a smile on her lips. He tries to say hello, but no words come out, his heart beating much too fast.
After a few seconds, she starts rocking just like he had—smaller motions, tentative, but certainly visible. Dean doesn’t think she’s making fun of him—is she making fun of him? After a moment of him being perfectly still, she falters, her expression shifting—he decides she probably isn’t making fun of him. He mimics her movements, a gentle swaying, and her smile grows—it’s infectious, he can’t help but reciprocate it. She laughs a little bit, but it’s not like she’s laughing at him, it’s just a happy sound.
She raises her hands and starts flicking her fingers against her thumb, one by one, as she rocks, so he does the same. The knot in his chest loosens as he does it, and he lets out a shaky sigh. It’s kind of fun, actually, doing this with someone else—surprisingly so. The girl next to him tilts her head down and lets her long hair fall over her face, giggling again, and he just watches her, captivated by the easiness in her movements, the way she doesn’t even seem to hesitate before she does something.
“Hey,” a voice says from the back door, startling Dean out of his skin, and he immediately stills when he sees Sonny standing there. “The hell are y’all doing out here? The sun’s setting—c’mon, get inside,” he says casually before ducking back inside, not even commenting on what Dean and the girl next to him were doing.
The thing is, she doesn’t even stop rocking—she just looks up at Sonny and nods, then looks back at Dean, and sees him frozen in place, a terrified expression on his face. She seems to understand immediately—“Oh, don’t worry, he doesn’t care about that stuff,” she explains simply, standing up and holding a hand out to Dean. “Come on, let’s go.”
Dean takes her hand, standing up with her, unable to look away, way too many thoughts going through his head at once. “I’m Robin,” the girl grins, still holding onto his hand.
“I’m, um—Dean. My name is Dean,” Dean stumbles over his words, cringing at himself. Robin doesn’t seem to mind, though, she just smiles more—her eyes squinting with it—and tugs on his arm, leading him inside. Dean isn’t sure any of this is real.
His dad comes back, and Dean leaves. Robin gives him a guitar pick to remember her by, and when Dean steps into the passenger seat of the Impala, he feels every ounce of energy in him drain out all over again.
Dean Winchester is eighteen years old when he meets Lee Webb. He’s the son of a hunter John is working with, and he’s. Well, he’s pretty much everything Dean has ever tried to be. He’s cool, in the way Dean pretends he is but knows he isn’t—but with Lee, he isn’t pretending. He’s just like that. Dean is a little bit obsessed with it. It’s not a big deal.
Lee isn’t like Dean in the way Robin was, but he doesn’t have the same animosity towards Dean that everyone who wasn’t like him always had. Again, Dean is good at pretending, but underneath it all he’s still the way that he is and everyone else is still the way that they are, and it’s always kind of been him against the world. It doesn’t feel like him against Lee, though—Lee is different.
Or something. It’s not—he doesn’t have to think about it too much. He shouldn’t think about it too much. Actions first and debilitating overthinking later has always been the way Dean does things—so, he’s not going to think about it too much.
Lee is surprisingly nice for a hunter, though. They end up hanging out a lot while their dads work whatever case they’re working on, and when he asks Dean what his favorite movie is, he isn’t annoyed when Dean’s eyes light up and he starts rambling about old westerns and Tombstone and cowboys. In fact, he asks more questions in-between Dean’s run-on sentences and overly long explanations—he seems genuinely interested. Nobody has ever been interested in the stuff Dean likes before.
Dean has never really had friends—he’s had acquaintances throughout high school who thought he was mildly cool and then immediately stopped hanging out with him once they realized he had zero actual social skills and was a complete freak, but never anyone he’d call a friend.
It’s nice. And that’s definitely what he feels when he’s around Lee—platonic, friend feelings. And if they’re dangerously close to what he felt for Robin, he doesn’t have to worry about it, because he’ll be back on the road in a week and never see him again. If they get drunk off of cheap beer and make out in a dim motel room, it doesn’t matter, because they were drunk, and they’re teenagers, and Dean can write it off as just another stupid thing he did because he didn’t think it through. If Sam asks him, with dawning realization on his face, if he likes Lee, and Dean nearly has a heart attack, he’ll just sit Sam down and tell him in a hushed, frantic voice, that he’s wrong and that’s ridiculous and I’ll give you twenty bucks if you don’t tell Dad.
Dean is already a fuck-up for a myriad of reasons—he doesn’t need being a queer on the list, too.
Not that he is one. Because he’s not. He’s not. One drunken fling does not a queer make.
He tries his best to forget about it once they leave town.
Dean Winchester is twenty-six years old, and he hasn’t seen his father in a few weeks. He’s not answering Dean’s calls, and he’s been gone longer than he said he would. Dean has been sick with worry for the past couple of days, pacing around the perimeter of his motel room instead of sleeping and trying to figure out where he must have gone.
He was on a hunt. It is fully possible that whatever he was hunting got him. Dean knows his dad is a damn good hunter, but there are also some damn good monsters out there—namely, the one that killed his mom.
He calls John five times in one night after he realizes that.
But it’s fine. He’s not panicking. Or maybe he is.
The problem isn’t that he’s panicking, though—there is a different, huge, ridiculous other problem, which is that Dean can’t fucking talk anymore.
I mean, he can. Technically speaking, he is able to force out enough words to order food or rent a motel room or something like that, but other than that, if he tries to say anything, the words come out stilted and wrong and painful, in a way they haven’t in a long time. And it’s not just that he can’t talk normally—he’s been freaking out for the past couple days, and since he hasn’t been sleeping, he feels like a raw wire, or a rubber band stretched tight enough to snap. A day ago, he tried to go into a gas station to buy chips and immediately had to turn on his heel and walk right out because of the overhead lights.
So, that’s cool. Dean is broken.
He knows he isn’t going to find his dad by himself, not when he’s like this. So, he takes the only other possible course of action, and drives to Stanford.
He hasn’t seen Sam in about four years. Turns out that chance in academics actually got him somewhere—college. Like, an actual, real college, where people study to do real things. Sam always said he wanted to be a lawyer. Dean always thought he was bluffing. He doesn’t know what Sam is up to, or, hell, if he’s even still there. Might’ve dropped out and done something else with his life, not even thought to tell Dean or John. Dean hopes he’s still there—if he isn’t, Dean’s pretty much fucked.
He does a little snooping and finds out that Sam does still go there, and that he lives in a little apartment close to the college. He figures he probably won’t be very welcomed if he knocks on the door, so, here he is, climbing through the fire escape of his little brother’s apartment.
It suddenly occurs to him, as he hauls himself through the window, that oh, God, what if he breaks in and he can’t talk? What makes him think that being around Sam will magically fix him? He’s starting to realize he didn’t think this through—he never thinks anything through, we’ve been through this already—but he’s already through the window and in the kitchen, so what the hell, amiright?
He sees Sam’s face and something in him shifts, like his brain is saying—this is family, and you’re safe, and the words come out easy, falling out of his mouth without a thought behind them just like they used to. He flirts with Sam’s girlfriend and tells Sam what happened to their dad and acts like just a day ago he wasn’t struggling to order food from a diner and forgetting how to talk all over again.
Dean doesn’t tell Sam about not being able to talk. He doesn’t need to know. It’s better he doesn’t know.
Dean Winchester is thirty years old, and he thinks he finally has a friend again. Can you call an angel of the Lord your friend? He thinks you can. You probably can, if said angel of the Lord ruined their entire immortal life for you.
So, yeah. He’s pretty sure him and Cas are friends. But he’s never been friends with anyone for very long—he always either gets back on the road and they can’t follow, or they gruesomely die. So far, Cas has come pretty close to the latter, but he’s still here, and they’re still friends, and Dean is going to keep it that way. Dean has very few good things in his life, all of which he makes sure to hold onto as best he can. Castiel is a good thing. Dean is going to hold onto him.
Cas doesn’t treat Dean like he’s any different from other people. Well, he does, but he treats it like it’s just a fact of life. Dean tells him the sound of people chattering in a bar is freaking him out, and Cas just says, I understand. The amount of noise in here is causing you sensory overload. Would you like to leave? Dean unconsciously repeats something Cas has said, and Cas doesn’t even blink.
It’s refreshing, not being treated like a freak, but it weirds him out. He thought an angel, of all people, would probably turn down their noise at his oddities. He’s asked Castiel before—don’t you think I’m weird? And Cas frowned and said, I was under the impression that I am also “weird” to most people, finger quotes and all, and that was the end of that conversation.
Cas is a good thing, a surprisingly good thing—Dean doesn’t know how long he’ll be able to hold onto him, but he’s going to try. He’s going to try.
Dean Winchester is forty years old, and there’s a kid who he thinks is like him. Jack isn’t human, but he isn’t an angel like Cas, either, and technically speaking he’s only about a year old, so, you can’t really measure this stuff based off of normal standards in this situation.
Jack is a lot like Cas. He looks like Cas and acts like Cas and has that same cluelessness about how the world works that Cas had when Dean first met him. But when it comes down to it, all Dean can see in him is how he was as a kid, before school and life and his dad and the world broke him—before he started putting impenetrable walls around himself to try to make it look like he has any idea what he’s doing.
He’s sure that most of it is just Jack being a Nephilim or being a kid, (because even though he doesn’t look like one, Dean knows he is) but. He’s easily overwhelmed and easily upset, and he doesn’t talk like a normal kid, and he makes too much eye contact just like Cas used to, and he takes things too literally and Dean doesn’t know what to do with it all. He knows it’s probably not—Jack isn’t like him. What would be the odds of that?
He tries not to think about it too much.
Dean Winchester is forty-three years old when he gets diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder.
It makes sense. Dean knows it makes sense—it’s really not shocking at all. So it shouldn’t be the revelation that it feels like it is. It’s not like Dean ever thought he was normal, he just never really thought to put a name to what made him not normal.
Being the way he was without a diagnosis kind of felt like having the flu, but nobody would actually tell you that you had the flu, and they wouldn’t even admit that you were sick, and just kept insisting that you were fine and healthy despite the fact that you, very clearly, had the fucking flu.
I mean—autism is a little different than the flu. But the point stands.
And it’s not like having a diagnosis is gonna make it go away, because autism isn’t like the flu—but he has a name for it, now. He has a name for it and a family that doesn’t shun him for it and Cas, who couldn’t care less about what Dean has or how weird he is, who Dean loves more than anything in the entire godforsaken world.
The first person he told was Cas—the first person he always tells stuff to is Cas nowadays, because Cas is honest and unfaltering and doesn’t bullshit Dean like other people do, and in this case, because he suggested Dean should go and see a psychiatrist about this crap in the first place. Dean was unreasonably nervous about it, because if he did have this, it meant no more lying to himself about it, no more saying, oh, yeah, there’s something undoubtably wrong with my brain, and I’ve spent every second of my life since I was fourteen trying to pretend that there wasn’t, but it’s fine and it’s not a big deal and it’s not like we ever have to talk about it or mention it or act like it exists.
Cas had very little reaction to the news, which Dean is pretty sure is because he’s known since they met, what with seeing his bare soul and piecing his body back together and knowing him inside and out since before Dean even knew his name. It was actually kind of comforting—when Dean told him, all Cas did was smile and ask if it felt nice to finally know. (Which, yes. It did. It does.)
Dean knows he shouldn’t feel anxious about telling Sam, because Sam knows. As much as Dean tried to hide it from Sam for most of their lives, he knows—he’s always known. Sam is smart like that, a quality Dean has always envied. Sam knew Dean was bisexual, knew he was in love with Cas—he just fucking knows that stuff, all the shit Dean always tried so hard to bury deep down and never let see the light of day, Sam just knows it.
He tells him in some ungodly hour of the night, after everyone else had gone to sleep and they’re still awake, silently drinking together on opposite ends of the kitchen table. Dean has never known if just existing in the same room together counts as hanging out, but it’s what he and Sam have always done, since they were little.
At some point, Dean steels himself and blurts out—“So, I found out I’m autistic,” to which Sam chokes on his beer.
After the initial shock, he manages to collect himself enough to say, “First things first; good for you. Secondly, I kind of already knew that."
“I know you did,” Dean says, “I just wanted to—I don’t know. Get it out there, I guess. We never really…talked about it.”
Sam just looks at him, with an unreadable sort of expression, and blinks. “Well. There was never really a lot of…space for us to talk about that kinda stuff, I guess? I mean, I know how Dad was about this stuff,” he says, and a pit of dread forms in Dean’s chest. He doesn’t like talking about John, he’s never liked it. The man’s been dead for over a decade, why should they talk about him now? “How he was to you about it. To both of us. It wasn’t…we didn’t exactly grow up in a supportive environment. I’m just trying to say that I get why you wouldn’t want to talk about it.”
Dean clears his throat, nodding. “Yeah, well. We’re talkin’ about it now, I guess,” he mumbles.
After a couple seconds of awkward silence, Sam raises the bottle in his hand. “Well,” he says, and instantly looks like he has no idea what to say next. “Uh—congrats on the autism?”
Dean throws his head back and laughs, feeling more carefree than he has in years. “Sure, what the hell, I’ll cheers to that,” he says, and clinks his beer against Sam’s.
A week after that, he tells Eileen. He doesn’t plan to, exactly—he knew he was probably going to tell her at some point, she comes around the bunker so often it’d probably be more efficient if she just moved in, and, well, he likes Eileen. She’s kind, and she’s good to Sam, good for Sam, even. She and Dean are friends. It’d be nice for her to know.
They’re sat at the long table in the mission room, talking about foods they hate—Dean doesn’t know how they even got to this topic. Eileen is surprisingly talkative, (Dean thinks she might be lonely, being on the road all the time; he remembers what that’s like) even though lip-reading is clearly not as easy as TV makes it out to be. He tries his best to sign as many words as he knows as he talks, but he knows he’s shit at it.
The point is, they’re talking about foods, and Dean ends up on a rant—
“God, I fucking hate salad. The texture of it is just—first of all, lettuce is the worst food in the entire fucking world, it’s like eating paper, but worse. And then you go and put dressing on it which is just weird and wet and it feels wrong in my mouth—would now be a good time to tell you I’m autistic?”
It sends Eileen into a fit of laughter, and afterwards, the conversation carries on like normal. It’s shockingly casual. He really doesn’t know what to do with that.
Dean doesn’t know if he’s going to tell Jack. He knows that Jack will eventually find out, it’ll be mentioned around him or something—but he doesn’t know if he’s going to sit him down and tell him. He doesn’t know if he should. Should he? He feels like he probably should, but what would be the point? The point would be not to keep the kid in the dark about something for the millionth time, he thinks to himself, agonizing over it, over all of it.
Sam mentions it to Jack before Dean can, and it’s a fucking relief.
After he tells people, it’s actually surprising, how different he feels. Like a weight has been lifted off his shoulders. There’s something wrong with me has turned into I have autism, and it’s unexpectedly relieving.
He finds himself feeling endlessly curious about all of it, so does some research and figures out a million things he never thought there were names for, reasons for—he learns about special interests and immediately knows that’s what western movies and cowboys are to him, learns about safe foods and sensory issues and realizes why he’s always been such a picky eater (and, after he mentions it offhandedly to Sam, he notices that Sam stops giving him shit about that), learns about going nonverbal and thinks, oh.
It's probably stupid that he’s figuring all this out in his forties, but he also only came to terms with his sexuality a year or two ago, so. Better late than never for this kind of stuff, he supposes.
And it’s not just learning about stuff, knowing all of this—it feels like, now that it’s actually real, now that it’s all out there, it’s seeming more and more pointless to keep pretending that he’s normal. That he’s ever been normal. One of the first things Dean learned about autism was masking, and what it is, and that he’s been doing it his entire life, one long, agonizing charade.
And it’s just. He’s been diagnosed, and the show’s over, everyone’s out of their seats—he can step off of the stage. He can stop pretending for five fucking seconds and just be.
So, he does. It takes a while—a few weeks, probably—of internal pep-talks and trying to shut up the little voice in the back of his head that sounds suspiciously like his father, but after a while, he stops forcing himself to look people in the eye when it feels uncomfortable, stops biting down on the inside of his cheek to keep himself from rocking back and forth—now that he’s started doing that again, he’s noticed that Sam will sometimes do it too if they’re in the same room, which Dean isn’t going to say anything about—or flapping his hands, stops ignoring it when he feels overwhelmed. It isn’t easy, and it’s kind of mortifying when Sam asks about it and Dean has to explain it to him—explain that this isn’t actually new, it’s all stuff he’s wanted to do before but never let himself—but it’s nice. It kind of feels like he can breathe for the first time in years.
Dean is good at pretending, but he’s starting to think he doesn’t have to. Not all the time, at least, not around the people that matter. Life gets a little easier, afterwards—it goes back to normal, but with the underlying knowledge that this is normal, too.
The voice in the back of his head has gotten quieter. He talks to Cas all the time about this crap, every new realization he has, tells him things and asks, d’you think that’s an autistic thing, too? A couple days ago he opened Sam’s laptop to look something up because his phone wasn’t working and saw a tab open with a Google search that said, is autism genetic. It feels like he’s discovered something, some knew factor of life—achievement unlocked: diagnosed neurodivergence.
So, yeah. He’ll stop pretending for now.