Just thinking about how Dean calls Sam "little brother" so often and how that's always felt unnatural to me. I don't know any siblings I've ever met who actually use the phrase "big brother" or "little brother" when actually talking to their siblings.
And there's the fact that Sam doesn't really say it back. Like he says "he's my big brother" or even "you're my big brother", but he doesn't ever really seem to use it in place of Dean's name the way Dean does for Sam.
So I've always wondered where that came from, and when Dean picked it up.
I have a theory that it was actually at the very beginning. I can imagine Mary and John telling him "This is Sam. He's your little brother." And that standing out to him because Sam is clearly everyone's but he's only his little brother.
Maybe that hadn't fully set in though until the night of the fire, when his dad tells him "grab your brother and run!", and as his house is burning down behind him, and he sits on that back of the ambulance with his dad and knowing he's lost his mom, maybe that phrase repeats in his head. Your brother. Your brother. Your your your.
And I think that did something to Dean's brain. Especially as his Dad starts leaving them more and more. Houses? They can be lost. Mom's? They die. Dad's? They weren't really all there in the first place. But little brothers? The thing that's only his? They're his. They're his, he can grab them, and he can keep them, and as long as that stays, as long as he has a little brother, he's got one thing.
Maybe he repeats that in his head over and over until he can finally speak again after the fire. My little brother. Little brother. Mine. Maybe that stays even after he can speak again, after all Sammy is too young to really know any different or correct him. So maybe sometimes when Dean folds himself in his brother's crib he says that out loud, over and over, to reassure himself he's still got something to hold onto.
Little brother, little brother, little brother.
I think eventually he does clearly grow out of it, he grows old enough to start calling Sam Sammy. But I think when he gets stressed, when he feels like things are slipping away, it falls out like an old balm on wounds that never closed.
I think that's why it slips out sometimes in the show. Sometimes that habit he has still comes forward, and he just needs to know. Little brother? (Are you ok?) Little brother? (Do I still have you?) Little brother? (Am I ok?)
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