Bobby tells himself he is not a man made of regrets. Regret is indulgent. Regret is the lie that naming the sin is the same as undoing it. Guilt doesn’t mend bone or raise the dead or bleach the stains once decay has soaked into the grain. It doesn’t make a wrong thing right just because you ache about it long enough.
And it sure as hell doesn’t absolve him of the sensation that clings to his hands whenever he looks at his youngest boy. A warm, sticky wetness coating his fingers, as if blood has a way of lingering even when it has long since dried, as if blood has a way of insisting on its truth long after it’s been washed away.
Sam is fourteen when he sits across from him at his desk. Books lie open between them, spines cracked, pages gaping like wounded mouths. Papers are stacked and restacked into careful, anxious piles, order pretending it means something.
Bobby gives him a glance, brief and distracted, before going back to scribbling notes, letting the silence do what silence always does best.
Children who learn how to survive learn how to wait.
The silence stretches anyway.
When Bobby finally looks up again, he takes him in properly. Sam is wearing one of Dean’s old shirts, the fabric swallowing him whole, too large, hanging off him like borrowed armor. He’s always been too thin, all narrow shoulders and angles, like something inside him has been quietly eating away at the edges.
His eyes flicker, hands worrying at a loose thread in his lap, pale fingers sawing at it with methodical persistence, like if he keeps going long enough the whole thing might come apart. His jaw is set. The look of a boy who has already decided and is bracing himself for what it will cost.
“What is it, kid?” Bobby asks.
When Sam finally speaks, it’s barely sound at all. A confession shaped like a question, careful and small.
Not just any rosary. The one buried deep in Bobby’s drawers. Beads once baby blue, now dulled to the color of old bone. Silver Mary worn smooth by mouths that needed mercy more than they deserved it, cross chipped and metal sharp where it shouldn’t be, catching light like a blade. Faith made weapon.
Bobby says yes. Because saying no feels like denying water to the thirsty. Because something in Sam’s face already looks desperate enough to be dangerous.
Sam’s brown-green eyes go wide with a joy that is almost obscene in its innocence. Dimples carve themselves into his cheeks. He looks like a child on Christmas morning, like a boy receiving a miracle, not a broken charm meant to ward off evil.
The look of a boy who believes salvation is something you can hold in your hands, like God finally looked his way.
He thanks Bobby softly, reverently, and hurries away, clutching the rosary like it might vanish if he loosens his grip. Like grace is a thing that runs if you don’t clutch to it tight enough.
It’s only after that Bobby notices the scars.
Thin, familiar lines carved into the boy’s palms, pale against his skin, like something sharp had been pressed there again and again. Like penance learned too young.
It’s only later, too much later, that he notices the drops beneath Sam’s bed. Darkened specks on the floor. Small. Careful. Almost tidy. Like prayer beads fallen from a broken string. Like the house itself has begun to bleed.
Sam is eleven when he asks Bobby if he remembers his own childhood.
He is at the sink, washing dishes, watching syrup-thick plates turn the water the color of old honey. Dean is long gone, pancakes eaten, knuckles deep in an engine out in the shed, already learning how to make noise so the quiet can’t get him. Sam sits at the table, small legs swinging, feet not quite reaching the floor.
“Not much,” Bobby answers. “Nothing worth keeping.”
Sam nods, slow and thoughtful, like the answer slots neatly into something he’s already decided. He stares at his plate for a long time, tracing the empty circle where food used to be, before telling him he can’t remember much of his either.
“It’s like what happened to me,” he says, choosing each word the way people choose which sins to confess, “happened to someone else. And that someone just happened to be me.”
“What do you think happened to you, Sam?”
Sam meets his eyes, and there’s something there that doesn’t belong.
His face is still soft, still round with childhood, hair falling into his lashes. Eyes holding something too heavy, pain without language. Like shame has already moved in, unpacked it's bags, learned the shape of his bones. Shame that no child should carry behind soft lashes and baby teeth.
“I don’t know,” Sam says at last, voice barely there, like confession filtered through static.
He picks up his plate and carries it to the sink, sets it beside Bobby’s wet hands with careful reverence. Like an offering. Like proof of goodness. Like if he does everything right, whatever it was might stay buried.
“I’ll be reading upstairs if you need me.”
The stairs creak under his weight. Bobby stands there long after the kitchen goes quiet.
Somewhere upstairs, a child is teaching himself how to disappear.
And there isn’t a prayer in the house strong enough to stop it.
By the time Sam is fifteen, the house has learned the sound of thunder. Bobby doesn’t know what changed, only that the air between the brothers feels tighter, sharper, like a wire pulled too thin. They can’t stay in the same room without something snapping.
Dean carries their father’s violence in his shoulders, his fists, his voice, hands trembling with the need to grab, tear, break. He learned love as obligation and protection as possession.
Sam carries it differently. He carries it in his mouth, words honed sharp to cut before he’s cut. In arms locked tight around his own ribs, as if he can keep himself from spilling if he just holds hard enough. He learned how to fold inward, how to reduce his shape, he learned how to make himself smaller in hopes his brother’s rage might pass over him like the angel of death sparing a marked door.
Both are inheritance. Neither is choice.
Sometimes Bobby hears things he pretends not to. Pleas whispered into darkness, bleeding through the door. Bargains struck in whispers between brothers too young to be negotiating mercy.
He doesn’t mean to listen. He really doesn’t.
“Please,” the younger boy begs, voice thin and wrecked. “I won’t do it again. I promise. Just—please, Dean. Look at me.”
Bobby tells Dean in the morning to go easy on his brother. To forgive. As if forgiveness isn’t sometimes just another word for silence dressed up as virtue.
Later, over dinner, Bobby asks Sam about the bruise blooming dark at his temple. Sam smiles.
“Me and Dean made up,” he says, and asks what’s for dinner.
Like peace is something you can manufacture if you say it sweetly enough.
Bobby thinks he should tell Dean to rein in his fists. But he doesn’t know how to say that to a boy who’s been carrying too much weight since he was four years old. To hands that learned early they were the only thing standing between family and loss.
Starving children don’t know what love tastes like, he supposes. They learn to lick it off blades and call it nourishment.
Sam is six when he asks about heaven. Six, and already afraid he won’t qualify.
He asks if being good is enough, eyes wide and voice careful in the way children get when they’re testing a rule they didn’t invent. Bobby says yes, because anything else would be cruelty, because the truth would have teeth.
Sam nods, then frowns anyway. Deep, serious, like goodness is a test he’s already failing. He asks if he can tell Bobby a secret.
He leans in close, like the walls might testify. Like the house itself has ears and judgment.
“I think I’m sick.” His voice drops to a whisper, hands press low against his stomach, small fingers uncertain, mapping pain he doesn’t have words for. “I feel it there.”
Says he feels it worse after his dad drinks. After being laid in bed. After breath on his forehead, on his cheeks.
He says it’s okay, because Dad says it will make him better. That it just takes time.
Bobby’s insides go cold all at once, hollow like a grave left open too long.
The next morning, he asks Dean if their dad ever made him uncomfortable. Dean stares at him like he’s gone clean out of his mind.
“Why would he? He’s my dad.”
As if fatherhood were sacrament. As if blood were baptism. As if God hadn’t already proven how often fathers mistake ownership for love.
Bobby’s mother used to say forgiveness was the greatest love God ever knew. She said it while hiding bruises beneath her sleeves. She said it like a prayer meant to keep men holy and women quiet.
When Sam is seventeen, the house finally spills blood loud enough to be seen.
John drops the boys off after a fight. The argument doesn’t end with the car door slamming; it follows them inside Bobby’s house, clattering into the kitchen, sharp and echoing and rotten. Words stack on top of words until they stop meaning anything, just noise and blame and old wounds reopening. A curse with no name.
Sam is the one who breaks first, says he’s tired. Says he doesn’t want to fight anymore.
Dean grabs his wrist like it’s the last thing keeping the world intact. Rage flashes hot and blind, something ancient and stupid, something he learned at his father’s knee.
Sam wrenches free. He’s taller now, stronger. Not the small, breakable thing Dean learned how to shield. The change feels like betrayal. Like theft.
So Dean shoves him, hard. Sam goes down wrong, the counter catching him before the floor does.
Red against tile. An offering nobody meant to make.
Bobby comes in just in time to see Dean go pale at the sight of it, staring like a man who’s just realized what his hands are capable of, like a man staring at proof of his own sin.
He drops to his knees so fast it hurts, breath only coming when pain crosses the young boy’s face, life asserting itself in a grimace and a sharp inhale. Brain where it belongs, not scattered across linoleum.
Dean comes back with a towel like it’s a holy thing, like it might absolve him if he presses it hard enough. He presses it too hard, then not hard enough, terrified of his own touch. He sits beside Sam, eyes already wrecked with guilt so deep it looks like grief.
Bobby knows the bleeding hurts Dean more than it hurts Sam.
He reaches out, slow and careful, rests a hand on Dean’s denim-covered knee, squinting up at him against the harsh kitchen light like a saint squinting into heaven.
“It’s okay,” Sam says softly. “You didn’t mean it, Dean. I forgive you.”
And Bobby feels something in himself recoil.
Because Sam forgives before anyone asks, the cruelest miracle of all.
Bobby tells himself Sam made his choices. That he invited evil in. That he failed to hold fast to faith, an option abandoned.
Ignoring the fact that faith never clung back.
If God is love, then Sam has been godless before he ever sinned.
And Bobby has no scripture cruel enough to explain how a child is supposed to repent for surviving the absence of it.
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