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It was the kind of thing John couldn’t let himself think about, the kind of thing he couldn’t stop thinking about. And so he drank.
Mary, Mary, Mary and worst of all, not just her.
Sam may not have had her long nose, or the flaxen hair that curled around her bare breasts, pink nipples swollen from his teeth, his tongue, his fingers, but he reminded John of Mary when he laid across the motel bed his brother had tainted with dirty socks and magazines rated XXX.
His hair was too long, it touched his shoulders now, in soft brown waves—he’d never have let Dean’s hair get that long, but then again, Dean was a different kind of boy. John would cut it soon, tomorrow or before they left, but not now. Let him splay it across the quilted floral mattress cover a little longer. Like his mother would’ve splayed on the bench chair back in Lawrence, some fucked up, incestuous, horror paper back in her thin fingers. John never cared for that gothic shit she loved, and decorated their bookshelves with, but it made her happy. Not much else mattered more than that.
“What’re you reading?” John asked, the bottle of jack he’d swiped from the Wine and Spirits back in Jersey nestled between his thighs, trapping his jean clad cock beneath the cool glass.
Sam turned over onto his belly, legs bending at the knee, bare feet in the air, soles soft and pink under the yellow motel light. “Oh it’s just… it’s stupid—for school. You know.”
“Thought you liked school,” John said, lifting the bottle to his lips, momentarily freeing his cock to twitch towards the sullen boy that’d come from his balls. He put it back, pressing it hard between his thighs until it hurt.
“I do,” Sam told him, “just sometimes… The books they make us read are, well, boring.”
“If your teacher thinks you oughta read something, it’s probably for good reason.”
John knew he’d said something wrong as soon as it came out of his mouth by the way Sam’s eyes flickered down to the floor, searching the crusted carpet for a way to escape his dear old dad. Dean would’ve said “yes Sir, true that Sir,” but they were different boys—so different John wondered if Sam was even a boy at all. Was there anything he could say that’d please Sam? Or like Mary, would it always be something, something he hadn’t really said, but how he said it.
“Maybe.” Sam rolled back over onto his back, his eyes shifting from John back to the page, it was his way of saying they were done talking.
Dean came back smelling like cigarettes and perfume around midnight, his hair brushed back away from his forehead and a pale flush rising high up his neck. John was still at the desk pushed against the wall opposite of the two twin beds, grimoires and the laptop he’d gotten for Sam spread out across the sticky surface, along with a dozen hastily scrawled notes and his journal flipped open to an old page he thought might help. It might’ve, if he could see straight, or even read.
“Hey,” Dean yawned.
John nodded in reply, and watched from the corner of his eye as his eldest stripped down to underwear and flopped beside his little brother. Too old for that, John had told himself a thousand times boys their age shouldn’t share a bed, it just wasn’t right, but hell, there were a lot of things boys their age shouldn’t do. Dean had killed his first man before he had hair on his chest—they’d just have to sleep curled against each other a little longer.
Later, much later, when John could barely walk in a straight line from the uncomfortable desk chair to his bed, he laid on his side and watched them where they slept. Sam curled against Dean’s side, under his arm like he was made to fit in that empty space that smelled like sweat, and the last lingering stench of teenage boy. Too old, too close. Not like brothers at all, but it was better than the kids he saw screaming at each other when he sat down with broken widows and asked: just how did your husband die? Wasn’t it?
Their chests rose and fell nice and slow in time with the other, like the breeze that rattled the leafless trees against the outside of the motel, and John’s vision bled until his two boys became one.
He dreamed of Mary. She laid in the long grass out in the backyard, he’d promised he’d cut it, and he would, but he liked how it hid them from the tall windows where Dean couldn’t peak out from behind the curtains and catch them.
His calloused hands brought the soft linen of her dress up around her thighs, and laid his stubbled cheek against the fabric of her underwear, smelling the patch of wetness down the center where he was hidden behind the swell of her full belly.
The next morning, they ate breakfast at the first diner they drove by, heading south towards Missouri. The vinyl seats stuck uncomfortably to the back of John’s arms when he shucked off his jacket, and the table stuck too, the remnants of spilled maple syrup and orange juice not whipped away quite right. He must’ve been to a hundred different places just like that one, but it was one of the few things he was content with—burnt coffee in ceramic mugs with thick lips, and sausage links that had been left on the stove too long with dry eggs. He’d liked it before… and so had Dean, extra bacon and chocolate chip pancakes that left streaks of chocolate in the corner of his mouth the rest of the day like he wasn’t bordering on adulthood.
Dean folded an empty sugar packet until it was shaped like a very small boat, and used his finger (still stained with black motor oil from the last job he’d picked up to get them some extra cash) to sail it towards Sam across the table, between the obstacles of their half empty plates and coffee cups. He made a crashing noise with his cheeks blown up wide with air as the sugar packet ship slammed into Sam’s arm, rested across the table, exploding up into the air and landing in John’s glass of water.
That made Sam laugh, if nothing else, because of course it did.
It was the longest they’d gone without a screaming fight breaking out like a match, faster than an eye could catch, and suddenly everything was on fire, since—John didn’t know. Maybe before that first patch of hair started growing between Sam’s legs, and he was still his pliable little boy that ran into his arms when he got back from a hunt, instead of nodding disinterestedly. Everything he did for that kid, everything he would do, and he didn’t have a smile or that sweet laugh for John. Only Dean. It was enough to make him want to drag them both outside by their collars into the wet morning air, and make them run until their legs gave out, but John wasn’t stupid. He’d savor the blissful mediated silence for as long as he could.
He sat, one arm over the back of his side of the booth, and drank his coffee, watching his sons across the table that kept them apart. It may as well have been miles of fake wood painted to look like a natural wood grain. And badly painted, at that.
It took them the rest of the day to get to the place Bobby had lined up for them to rent. A tall house about half an hour out of town, painted white with curling trim beneath the steepled roof, distinctly mid-western and nicer than most of their digs.
The first floor was occupied by a woman Bobby had known for nearly a decade who was kind enough to let no-good hunters rent her second floor, with their loud car mufflers and dirty boots. They took a pair of metal stairs around the back that moaned beneath their weight as they climbed up to the door, arms full of duffel bags and backpacks, only a small yellow light on the porch guiding them.
John dug the key out from under a welcome mat caked with mud, and let the boys in beneath his stretched arm.
For the first time in months, John had his own room, separated from Sam and Dean by a narrow hallway and a Jack and Jill bathroom. It was the rare sort of luxury he’d never anticipated to be so excited by when he’d been young, cradling Dean against his chest with his fat baby-fingers clutching the warm bottle Mary had filled and retrieved for him.
There was a time, in his recliner in front of the fat-back television, Dean asleep on the armrest and Sam, so small, in his arms, when he thought he’d never want them to stray too far he couldn’t pull them back against him. And still, that was true, but John was still a man.
A man with needs.
He showered, locking the door to the boys bedroom and dropping his clothes in a pile beside the sink. Everything smelled like menthols, and whiskey, and the gasoline still lingering where he’d spilled it on his jeans heading back from the bar.
Through the suds he’d worked up over his chest, he ran a hand over the coarse dark hair there, and slid it in slow circles down toward his heavy cock. It hung limply between his thighs, disinterested in the calloused hand that gave it a few soapy strokes. Pale breasts, swollen and full of milk, even paler thighs spreading around his hips, pink cunt weeping for him, pink nipples, pink feet, waving in the air where Sam read in the lawn. John ripped his hand away from between his legs, watching his cock curve into the beginning of hardness.
He turned the faucet handle toward the small ‘C’, and his skin rose with goose pimples, standing beneath it until he could barely feel his feet.
His bedroom was the bigger of the two, with a queen bed pushed to the furthest corner, done up with a frilly duvet that suited the almost-southern woman downstairs. He sat in the scratchy towel he’d wrapped around his hips, hair still dripping wet down his shoulders, and dragged his duffel from the ground for a fresh pair of underwear—well, as fresh as they’d get after being scrubbed in motel bathroom sinks for a lack of washing machines and quarters.
He unzipped it where it was laid across his lap, and only after digging through the center did he realize it wasn’t his duffel. He raised one of Dean’s metal band t-shirts up, where the obscene lettering struck through the center of the chest, and dropped it back down with the rest. A few of his dirty mags, a crumpled pack of Marlboros, and half a row of condoms were hidden in the side pocket. That much, John expected, what he didn’t expect was the small silver camera folded between two pairs of mud stained jeans.
He knew it was shitty, poking through his son’s things, shit, if someone had done that to his meager belongings when he’d been Dean’s age, he would’ve struck them clean across the face. But he was his father, he had to understand he worried about these sorts of things. Dean was a good boy, he really was, when he wasn’t fucking two dollar whores in the backseat of the Impala without whipping the vinyl down once he was done, or breaking the locks on some poor suburban family’s ranch house to clean them out. He listened to orders, and took his well deserved punishments with his head low and palms raised.
But… there were things he didn’t tell John. They talked over beers about the girls he fucked, and the jobs he took, with hillbillies and rednecks he wanted to beat bloody (John didn’t have the heart to tell Dean was just as much of a backwater hick as the people he complained about) like they were Marine buddies and not father and son. Still though, he got a look in those green eyes of his when John poked and prodded, like he’d snap and start something like his little brother if John touched the wrong thing.
John pressed a thumb down on the camera’s small power button, and hoped the sing-songy chime it made as the screen lit up didn’t make it through the walls.
There were a lot of pictures of the side of the road, open pastures of brown grass and tall power lines, horses tucked behind wide metal fences, and Sam. A hell of a lot of Sam.
John wasn’t sure what he expected, girls laying across motel beds with their tits out maybe. Not his son, turning shyly away from the camera flash with nothing but a pair of shorts on. It made his blood run cold, seeing Sam laid out like a doll across the brown carpet of the house they’d been staying at back east.
The look Sam gave the camera was anything but brother-like, and John had half the mind to drop the small camera on the ground and grind a boot against it, but there was another feeling stirring in the depths of his gut. The kind of feeling that made it impossible not to click the small arrow that delved deeper into Dean’s secret stache of what he’d been keeping from him.
He swallowed what felt like a mouth full of spit—sour and thick—before he kept going and saw a big triangle over the screen that waited for him to press ‘OK’ before it let the video start playing.
It was all too easy to let it play, watching in the dim light of the bedroom he’d only barely settled into, and maybe that was a good thing. He could almost pretend he wasn’t himself at all with the wind blowing gently at the lace trimmed curtains that hung over the window furthest from him, and the frilled duvet tickling the back of his calves.
So, he watched, as the sound of fabric rustling filled the small room. The image of Dean changed as he flipped the camera away from his face toward Sam, who sat on a bed that looked like the one he and Dean had shared when they’d taken up in the unfinished place down in Louisiana. The insulation had been pulled from the walls, and the floor was still plywood with the bathroom pipes sticking out awkwardly over their heads, but it hadn’t been the worst place they’d ever hunkered down in. He was barely wearing a lick of clothing, like the other pictures, and his hair stuck to his forehead with sweat.
“Dude,” Sam’s voice came out of the small speaker beside John’s hand softly, sounding like he’d just finished running a mile “turn that thing off.”
“No way.” Dean must’ve been sitting at the bottom of the bed. “Come on, do you know how much cash I’d make off this? Hardcore barely legal teen jailbait.” He pushed the camera toward Sam where he was sitting with his back against the head board and his knees under his chin. John bit down on nothing, and his teeth suddenly ached from being pressed together as hard as they were, like he was trying to shove them back up into his skull.
“I’m not legal,” Sam corrected him.
“Well, yeah. Most of the chicks in those tapes aren’t either.”
“Seriously, turn it off, D.”
“Jesus, Sammy, I’m kidding. It’s just for me. Okay? Don’t get your panties all twisted.” Dean moved up the bed further, and Sam made a serious sort of face like he was really turning over the idea in his head before he finally sighed.
“Fine.”
“That’s my boy,” Dean said, it came out low from the back of his throat. And somehow, that made John more mad than anything else had. Talking like Sam was his boy, like he’d fucked him into his mother. He hadn’t. That was all John.
Sam twisted under the words, like they tortured him, his cheeks turning darker as he glanced toward the camera through his long doe eyelashes. He smiled, something as close to a secret as anything else hidden away in that camera, something that had once been John’s had become completely foreign to him. Something that had turned into something for Dean, and Dean alone.
A small foot, pink on the bottom, went to kick Dean but he caught Sam around the ankle. He watched, his eyes blinking furiously as that foot went up to rest on Dean’s bare chest. The camera went down like it was just under his chin to show off how Sam brought his toes across the soft dusting of hair down the center of Dean’s chest, and lower toward the bulge in his underwear.
John paused the video, and pressed the camera screen down against the bed with his knuckles white around the small thing.
He could’ve just stopped watching when Dean first called Sam jailbait, but that strangely enough had seemed grounded and familiar to John he thought he had to watch more to know. Know what he’d long suspected, and turned an over eager blind eye to. He didn’t want to know, he’d decided that firmly when he’d first seen the bruises on Sam’s throat and knees. When Dean had shaken his head nice and slow when John turned to glance at the fifteen year old that tucked himself around his baby brother. When Sam pissed the bed, and walked around in Alabama summers with a hoodie tugged over his small body.
The seal had already been broken though, he desperately grasped at straws to defend himself to no one, because what could he do? Dean protected his brother, kept him safe and sat at the foot of their bed like a guard dog to keep yellow eyed demons at bay. And it had worked, hadn’t it? Sam was safe, and whole, and maybe food-stamp skinny, but growing. And dully, he knew the only way to put an end to the sin was at the root—to kill Dean, and he wasn’t sure he could do that. He knew he couldn’t.
He’d turn the camera off, shove it back into the duffel bag where he’d found it, hidden like it was always meant to be, and go to sleep. They’d sort out their things in the morning like it had all been a stupid mistake and nothing more. He would. He would… if he didn’t feel the stirring of his cock beneath the towel he still kept around his hips, twitching eagerly up through the scratchy fabric, harder than his hand had been able to manage.
Slowly, he took the camera back to where he’d had it in the middle of his lap, and with a shaking finger, pressed play.
He stared, like if he looked away for even a moment his eyes would fall right out, as Sam’s foot pressed against Dean’s cock, hard and tenting his underwear, ripped at the elastic.
Dean groaned from behind the camera, his fingers tightening around Sam’s ankles and forcing the pink sole like silk to press down harder.
Tentatively, John brought the heel of his palm against his cock, pressing against it the way Sam’s foot bent Dean’s hardness back toward his stomach until the tip threatened to poke out from the waistband of his briefs. The wrongness of it made his mouth dry like his tongue was cotton, and bitter bile fought its way up his throat, swallowing it down with a burn that turned his stomach—and he was harder than he’d been in years.
Pretty young things he maneuvered drunkenly onto bathroom sinks in dive bars, with small, manicured hands and pale hair couldn’t even do this to him. Who was he kidding? Sam was prettier than any barfly he’d ever seen.
“Tease,” Dean murmured, and Sam just kept on smiling, so sweetly.
The hand around his ankle lifted the foot away from his crotch, and used it as leverage to drag Sam down the length of the bed with a sudden, violent tug that brought Sam just to the edge. He gasped, and giggled when the camera fell face down on the bed, leaving the screen dark as the sound of kissing came through the speaker—wet, and messy sort of kisses that rang out loud enough he thought it could’ve woken the woman downstairs.
Dean picked the camera back up, and this time Sam was completely bare, with his legs hanging off the edge of the bed and his boy-parts all pink and wet from what he was sure must’ve been an assault on Dean’s part, standing at full mast. His cock leaked pathetically against his flat stomach, and his eyes, unlike anything else John had ever seen, blinked wetly at the camera.
“Shit, baby, look at you,” Dean said, a wide hand ran down the length of Sam’s chest until he could wrap a palm around his cock, weeping and curved up toward his belly. “Like a girl.” His thumb swept through the wet pearl of precum that cried out from the slit of Sam’s cockhead.
Sam moaned, falling apart from the honey smooth words Dean spewed. Really? John thought, that got Sam going? The sleazy lines Dean had probably used on a thousand girls from the Rust Belt out to California. He thought Sam would’ve found it all too fake, like cheap pornos, Sam seemed the type, but he flushed so deeply there wasn’t an inch of milky skin that hadn’t been tainted by it. And fuck, if it didn’t make John want more than the rough kneading he gave his hardon.
“Dean… Come on.” His hips bucked up into the painfully slow strokes Dean gave him, they were barely strokes really, more like he was playing with the decent length Sam had been blessed with, as if it were a toy.
“Slow down, kiddo.” John could hear the shit eating grin that must’ve split Dean’s face as he stopped touching Sam altogether. “We got all night, probably morning too.” Right, John must’ve been out, drinking or hunting. He was slightly contended to know he hadn’t been under the same roof when they’d been playing footsy on camera, as if that somehow made it better. If they did a good enough job hiding it, that meant they knew it was wrong, and John hadn’t completely failed. Right.
“You’re the fucking tease.” There he was, the Sam John saw. A brat that snarled and showed his teeth whenever something didn’t go quite his way.
Dean was better at calming him down than John was though, sticking a thumb in the waistband of his briefs and tugging them off into a pile around his ankles. John wondered if he did the same, if Sam would melt like he did on the small screen in front of him, or if he’d just keep on yelling for the sake of it.
Dean’s cock slapped his stomach, thick and a little longer than John’s, but not by much. Should thank me for that fucking thing, boy, John thought bitterly as he watched Dean palm it, stroking lazily as Sam took his swollen bottom lip between his white teeth.
With a bit more jostling than John would’ve liked, Dean shoved one of Sam’s legs back till his knee was bent against the bed, and that place beneath Sam’s balls was the center of attention. Furled, and hairless (no wonder John’s razors kept going missing), and so goddamn pink, Sam’s hole winked like it was begging for something. John guessed that answered his question about which one of them was doing the giving, and which one was doing the taking. It should’ve been obvious maybe, but somehow it satiated something low John didn’t want to admit. That Dean was still a man.
And Sam, well, he’d never been entirely sure just what Sam was.
With a carelessness he knew Dean was capable of, he pressed the head of his dry cock against the soft opening Sam spread for him. His youngest made a scared sort of squeak, and shoved at the hard curve of Dean’s lower stomach with thin fingers that barely made his oldest budge.
“What?” Dean asked, cocksure. “Thought you just couldn’t wait.”
“You’re a dick.” Sam’s brow furrowed, and John remembered a time he would’ve smoothed out the skin there with his thumb, and Sam would’ve let him. Now, the only thing that could do that was the spit Dean shot down the crack of his ass. It left a trail down the smooth skin under his balls, and collected in the furl of his hole.
Dean thumbed it around, his cock nudging the soft skin of his little brother’s thigh in the meantime.
“Don’t act like you wouldn’t like it,” Dean ignored the hissing noise Sam made when his thumb dove in, and kept talking with that smart mouth of his, “being split open dry. Come on, don’t act like a virgin, Sammy. Thought you were into that shit.”
“I—Ah, not… not like that.”
“What? You wouldn’t let me?” The camera must’ve been right under Dean’s nose, and John could’ve almost pretended he was the one leaning over Sam’s shaking body if not for the ever persistent dirty talk that only a twenty year old could spit out. “If I asked, you’d let me, wouldn’t you?”
Hesitantly, Sam nodded.
Just what kind of spell did Dean have over that boy? And as the thought crossed his mind, it became clear the drunken lust was mutual. Dean groaned as he sunk his forefinger all the way to the second knuckle, and desperately reached for something out of the camera’s view as it dropped to the bed for a few torturous seconds where John couldn’t see a thing.
He threw a bottle of lube, cheap shit from the back of the drugstore, onto Sam’s chest.
“Do I have to?” Sam asked, whining.
“Come on, you’re a big boy. Besides, I’m sort of short handed right now. Just get it wet, I’ll still do the work.”
John almost scoffed. He’d never been under any impression his son was a gentleman.
Sam did as he was told, more obedient than John had ever seen him. It was a side of him he’d long forgotten even existed. It wasn’t like Sam was a stranger to him now, no, there were moments where he let John muse his hair in passing—where he didn’t duck away and make a noise like he could throw up just from the touch. He savored them desperately, pathetically, because no matter what Sam thought, he loved him. He was a piece of him, a fragment of his heart he’d willingly parted with the day Sam had come into this world, crying wildly. The kid drove him crazy, up the goddamn wall, and sometimes he asked himself why he ever bothered, but he loved him.
John tried to remember if Dean ever had that phase, so utterly childish and selfish, and knew he hadn’t. He knew it wasn’t something John would put up with. So why did he let Sam get away with what he did?
The answer laid in between his thighs, and as the wet sounds of thick, calloused fingers pumping into Sam’s teenage-opening, barely touched and almost un-tainted, flowed into the small room, John unhooked the towel from around his waist and let the cool air hit his aching cock. He took it into his hand, finally, the feeling of his heartbeat thrumming through the heft of it sent his head spinning, but his eyes didn’t move from off of Sam.
Small, pixelated, poorly lit Sam. Sam. Sam.
His mouth hung open, revealing the red inside as Dean dug knuckle deep inside of him—two fingers then, when he finally panned the camera back down to where they met in a mess of sloppy noises.
“Fuck, Dean, okay—I’m ready, just—Ah, stop. Stop.”
“Yeah?” Dean laughed, and pulled out. “If it hurts, no complaining.”
“Fine.”
Unwrapped, Dean lined up, and slid in. Both his son’s obscene moans hit his ears like letting a buckshot loose, and he felt like he could’ve come right then if he just pumped his hand a little faster. Held on a little tighter. Instead, he held the base of his furious cock, thick and red, at the base and breathed through his nose.
It was filthy, disgusting, and John only spat into his palm and took it back in hand as Dean made a few shallow thrusts like he was seeing what he could get away with. Sam’s poor rim stretched, smooth and tight around the thick curve of his brother’s cock.
John’s tongue darted out to wet his lips. He thought he would’ve taken his time with Sam, made him beg with his eyes brimming with tears the way they did when he got so angry he couldn’t help but cry. He would’ve used his mouth, and admittedly, he was no stranger to the less-fair sex. Hell, he’d served his time before he met Mary. And served something completely different a hell of a long time after her.
The image he made of Sam’s soft cheeks burnt from his greying beard made him groan, quiet enough he didn’t bother trying to suck it back down.
He was sick, must be, and yet the urgency of putting down that sickness was pushed aside, filed away like he was telling himself they were running low on milk and he’d have to stop on his way home to get another carton. His mind was on a single path, one he couldn’t stray from, no matter how hard he tried to tell himself to turn the damn thing off. To get back in the shower, and let the cold water wash away what he’d done, what he was doing, but he couldn’t. He had to know—had to see.
“Dean…” Sam whined, like a much younger boy, begging for his brother to give the remote back. His head lolled back against the bed, sheets strewn across the bed in the wrong direction and crumpled up around Sam’s sharp shoulders.
Selfishly John imagined he’d said something else.
Daddy, sweet and boyish.
“Shit,” Dean groaned, cracking the fantasy. No, it wasn’t John plunging into Sam’s warmth. It was Dean, it always had been.
Dean fucked his little brother like he feared he might never get to do so again, pulling out until the heavy head caught around Sam’s delicate rim, and shoving back inside until his balls slapped the soft skin of Sam’s ass. It was endless, and punishing, and John had to hold his breath to keep from finishing too quickly. He should’ve wanted it to be done and over with, but somehow he wanted nothing more than to savor it.
Shadows from the room fell over half of Sam’s face, twisted into pleasure bordering on the precipice of pain. He was beautiful, and so much like his mother when Dean laid him on his back and fucked him so cruelly he lifted his hands up behind his head to keep the headboard from meeting his skull. The same open mouth, begging for more, more, more because nothing would ever be enough for them.
His youngest son came, splashing up onto his heaving chest and moving like a doll, lifeless, but beautiful as Dean kept going.
Finally, he pulled out, moving the camera to follow him as he kneeled over Sam’s face and jerked himself off so furiously he could’ve punched Sam square in the jaw if his hand slipped just a little. The splatter made Sam’s face scrunch up, but he kept his mouth open, welcoming the salty intrusion. Dean fingered the long hair around his collar bones, and wiped the cum down his chin and around his throat until it washed away in a mess of thumb prints.
John’s orgasm crashed against his back like a wave that sent him head first into the hard ground. He sat, completely still as his cock wet the dark hair that covered his soft gut.
By the time he willed himself to stare back down at the screen the video had ended, still and silent on the last frame of Sam’s face covered and stained by his brother’s spend.
For a long time he only stared, and sat, and didn’t move in fear of what might happen when he finally made that short walk to the bathroom and returned to his body. Like a zombie, dead and mindless, he turned the camera off and put everything back the way he’d found it—slipping it between two pairs of jeans and zipping the duffel back up like it had never been opened at all. He could pretend like it hadn’t, just like he pretended a hundred other things hadn’t happened, and the world still spun, and his sons were still safe and whole and at his side. And nothing else seemed to matter.
—
Dean left in the morning, swiping his bag back where John had left it outside his door. A single note sat on the kitchen table.
‘Job hunting, be back later.’
He had to be proud of that, didn’t he?
When Sam was done eating the breakfast John made them, scrambled eggs and bacon, he took him out on the stairs. The wind blew softly through the trees, keeping the heat from becoming entirely too oppressive.
He couldn’t have been sure why, but Sam was malleable then, and didn’t say a word as John flipped the small pair of scissors out of his Swiss Army Knife. The red body of it had faded against the keys in his pocket, and been bleached by the sun over the years, but it had never done him any wrong. Sam had gutted his first fish with the thing, and used it to cut away shirts and jeans to stitch up his old man and brother. He laid a big hand over Sam’s head to smooth his hair down against his skull.
“Good boy,” he murmured, and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d uttered those words to Sam, but it must’ve been a long damn time. The boy froze for a moment, before sighing, like he’d been holding his breath for years. “I’ll fix you up.”
And he did, well, the best he could. He’d been cutting his boys’ hair since Lawrence, and he’d like to think they looked just fine.
He cut off a few thick pieces at the back of his neck first, getting most of the length gone, and then snipped away the strands at the front, the hair Dean twisted around his thick fingers. He turned Sam around, looked at him head on to make sure it looked just right before he took a few more inches off until his bangs hung just below his brow and the hair at the back of his neck came off his skin with a sweet cowlick.
Nothing for Dean to grab, and pull, and move the way he’d liked to.
“Like a real Marine now.”