Welcome 9 Wincestmas
Thank you for fixing the gifs yesterday. I’m sorry tumblr put us through that, but hopefully today will go better. It’s a story so if it doesn’t then terry tumblr and I will need to have words.
Sam notices it early on, not long after Dad starts taking Dean out on the occasional easy hunt. Dean doesn’t talk to Sam about it, the way his eyes brighten when Dad says ‘I’ll need you on this one, Dean,’ or the serenity that suffuses his whole being when they’re successful, or the way he can’t sit still when he’s left behind, a frantic energy that’s different from before when he’d only been waiting their father’s safe return.
Dean’s stuck with Sam, and he’s cleaning the weapons. There’s pitiful few compared to what Dad keeps with him, but he dotes on one silver-plated blade anyway that it takes him as long to finish as when they have to clean the whole trunk. Sam pretends that he doesn’t see the twitch of his brother’s mouth in the gleaming reflection.
“I’m heading out for a bit.” Dean says. “Don’t leave. If Dad calls, the manager needed something taken care of, and he just missed me.”
Sam grunts in reply, figures Dean thinks he’s too caught up in Full House to notice the knife being slipped into a boot.
“Hey! Barf Breath! I’m talking to you.” Dean lobs a pillow at him.
“Yeah, I heard you! Bring me back a soda, and maybe I won’t tell Dad.”
“You won’t tell him.” Dean’s voice is deathly calm, unreasonably confident, considering Dean’d ratted out Sam skipping P.E. last week. He’s not wrong, though neither knows for sure in this moment.
Sam shrugs, and slouches back into the pillows he’s propped up on. Dean leaves, stepping lightly with his right foot. Something in Sam tells him he should follow, or at least peek out the window to see which direction his brother takes off in, but he ignores it, preferring to sulk about being left on his own again.
The memory of that first instinct tugs on Sam’s conscience when Dean saunters back in, hours later, calm in a way he hasn’t been in weeks, despite sporting an angry red welt across his cheek bone.
“What happened?” Sam demands, crowding Dean at the sink where he bee-lined to wash his hands.
“Bar fight.”
“You’re not old enough for bars.”
“Why do you think there was a fight, genius?”
Sam’s pretty sure not even a bouncer would hit a kid for trying to get in, and that’s what Dean is to the rest of the world, the ones that don’t know better, can’t tell what he’s become. So he’s incredulous at first, struggling to come up with a reply until he feels more than realises the way Dean is boxing him out, won’t let him look into the sink properly, blocking the mirror angle too.
“Whatever,” Sam hurries to lock himself in the bathroom, lets Dean think he won, but Sam needs to be alone, to freak out, hyperventilate, scream silently, die in the struggle between morality, and loyalty to the only person who’s ever loved him. Because he saw, Sam saw the damning bloody scratches along Dean’s arms.
When Dad gets back two days later, Sam starts asking to go on hunts too.
**********
Ooooh, eeeeenteresting! This tasty little nugget of things beginning to germinate. I love that unspent energy. LOVELY!
