Chapter Text
Sam knew he should tell Dean what he was doing, no matter their current predicament. Doing spells like this, he should have someone who knew his whereabouts and intention, in case things went sideways. And usually, he would’ve, if it wasn’t for the nature of the particular spell.
He was workin a case of a particularly nasty spirit, belonging to a teenager who’d just gotten the letter that he had been the first of his family to get into college before a drunk driver took his life in an accident that left him to bleed out in excruciating pain on the side of a highway. To add insult to the already dangerous cocktail of injuries, the drunk had been left with barely a scratch, ran from the scene without stopping to help, and had been let out with a slap on the wrist due to political affiliations. Textbook motives for a vengeful ghost, and so he had come to be, already hacking up a body count from anyone unfortunate enough to pass by the stretch of highway he’d been senselessly killed in.
To make matters worse, the family had cremated the boy and scattered his ashes, then moved to the other side of the country without leaving behind an address, taking with them all of the possessions the ghost could be attached to. So he’d had to get creative, and Sam had managed to find a spell that could be used to detach the spirit, if adapted and tweaked from it’s original 19th century rigidity. Basically, the concoction needed to be a mix of everything that lead to his death and made it violent and unfair, turned around: the ashes of an elder who died peacefully in their sleep, blood of a man to never have touched alcohol, and the memory of a future willingly given up for a cause. Sam had managed the first two ingredients and now needed to perform an incantation that’d give him the last one: A simple location and projection charm, and the nearest person to the caster to have given up their future in some meaningful way, would be unknowingly showing them the memory of it the next time they fell asleep. All he’d have to do was collect the essence of the memory and mix it with the other two and some herbs, then an incantation would be all he’d need to dispatch the poor boy and hopefully set him at peace, at last.
So, considering everything that had been going on lately, he didn’t want Dean to be involved, not with talks of sacrifice and justice and lives needlessly taken, not when the young boy’s picture reminded him so much of Kevin that he’d had to take a moment to breathe through his nose after seeing it, not when he had a sneaking suspicion that the spell would just show Dean’s deal and that’d make him feel so much worse.
I'll give you this much, you are certainly willing to do the sacrificing as long as you're not the one being hurt.
So that’s how the night ended with him, alone in a forgotten storage room well after midnight, Dean unaware of his activities, chanting as a match fell into the crystal bowl, igniting the powders in there until a fine myst rose, swirled like smoke in the air and went on to track it’s target.
He stands up, intent on making some coffee, knowing he can’t sleep in order to see the memory. He crosses Dean’s path, clearly on the way to bed after another day exhausting the research on… Whatever he’s currently obsessed about.
It takes a while, so long that Sam knows it has to be Dean whose memory will be shown because his brother has been sleeping less and less as of late, but the mist returns eventually, finding him in his hunched over position at the table in the War Room, hitting him in the face before everything goes dark.
When he opens his eyes again, he’s standing in a small apartment, so tiny he’s sure he could touch the sink, couch, tv and kitchen table with each of his limbs without stretching. There’s a vague familiarity to the water-damaged wallpaper and the puke-toned green cabinets. It was obviously one of the shacks their dad had left them in when he’d be gone for long. The distinctively ugly deco on the walls and the tattered soccer gear on the shoe rack by the door jostle his memories: Dodge City, Kansas, 1997. Dean’s senior year, when a grateful hunter with an empty rental and a string of hunts in the surrounding states (within the acceptable “drive back to recharge” distance his father surely had written down in his mental checklist of Winchester Rules) had allowed the boys to stay there for months, long enough for Sam to have gotten into the team and made friends, even if they hadn’t been allowed to finish the year there. Sam remembers the city fondly, or as fondly as he does most things from his childhood that hadn’t outright sucked.
Seeing Dean walk into the apartment feels like getting all the air in his lungs replaced with lead. His brother looks young, fresh, joyful. His steps have a spring to them that had been lost somewhere in the Apocalypses, and he was practically bouncing with excitement. Sam almost falls backwards seeing his brother’s petite body. Back then, he’d seemed larger-than life and so solid, so sure of himself. Now Sam wants to weep at the thin wrists and the long limbs, the undeniably pretty features he’d not quite gotten the hang of dampening with his macho attitude.
Sam almost misses the other person who walks into the apartment, equally buzzing with youthful energy, holding an envelope that’s identical to the one Sam realizes, on second glance, his brother’s holding. The face is also familiar, and springs in Sam the half-buried little brother jealously that had been driven to homicidal levels with Benny but he knows was awakened by this very boy. Andrew Orfield, the son of the hunter whose life John had saved repeated times before he offered to let them stay at his rental free of charge, Melvin Orfield. He lived one floor bellow them and the two young men had been inseparable for those months, driving Sam to despise the boy and pick fights with his brother that almost rivaled those with John’s. Now, he feels the instinctual spite, but it’s tampered by age, curiosity and a spark of gratefulness that Dean had had something that was his and only his in their childhood.
He almost misses their excited babbling, so caught up in nostalgia.
“Man, this is it, I can’t believe it. You wanna do it together?” Andrew asks, shaking the envelope like they could be talking about anything besides that. Sam approaches even if they’re already crammed together in the tight quarters, tries to get clues from the words printed on the paper but neither boy stays still enough for him to read.
“Haven’t we done it all together, man? Hell yes, lets get it over with.” Dean answers, tearing his package open at the same time as Andrew, both letting their eyes scan the words before twin shouts of excitement ring in the air.
“We did it! We’re in!” Andrew exclaims and crushes Dean in a hug that must have cracked a few ribs, but that gets returned with enthusiasm. Sam’s overtaken by a blue-tinted, sharp-edged grief: He can’t remember the last time he hugged his brother, and even less the last time it hadn’t been tainted by death and loss and grief.
But most of all, he’s outrageously curious. He takes the time to read through the words on the paper Dean dropped in his excitement to get to the others in the envelope, and feels his world spin on it’s axes before free falling into some sort of alternative reality.
Dear Mr. Winchester,
On behalf of the Admissions Committee, it is my pleasure to inform you of your admission into the MIT class of 1998.
MIT. Dean. MIT. College. Dean had applied to, been accepted to, one of the most prestigious universities in the world. He’d been excited to go. He’d had plans and ambitions and the means to achieve them. And he was going to give it up.
“Okay, so we are good, right? We just need to finish this year and keep this a secret, then we get the hell out of dodge before our old men can sniff something’s off and then… Then the world’s ours for the taking, my friend.”
Andrew nods and then smiles somewhat sadly.
“I just wish… That someone would be proud of us, you know?”
Dean’s smile falters before flashing back to it’s million-watt brightness.
“I’m fucking proud of us, man, and you better be, too. And Pam’s ten so I don’t think she’ll get the whole university thing but she’ll be proud of you if you’re happy, and Sam? Sam’s gonna be over the fucking moon, the nerd. Full rides to MIT? He’s gonna think we’re like, gods or something.” His smile is so desperately fond Sam almost doesn’t register the words “full ride”. Almost. “And they’re gonna be happy when we get them out of here and away from dear old John and Melvin. We did this, man, they’re not gonna take it away from us.”
“Yeah, alright, alright, got it. Fucking sap. I’ll go home before dad gets back. See you Monday!”
With that, Sam’s left to watch as a young Dean stands before him, dazed smile still firmly in place, rereading the words in his admission letter like he wants to commit them to memory. His expression is so lazer -focused that Sam’s sure if he woke his 35 year old brother right now and asked him for it, he’d be able to recite the letter word for word.
Sam felt nauseous as the realizations of what this all meant flickered through his mind, questions and anger and sadness warring for dominance, tinged by something that felt shamefully like jealousy and frustration. How had Dean gotten in? He knew his brother was smart in his own way, but he’d slugged through high school and dropped out due to poor grades, had often had Sam needing to explain his homework assignments to his older brother when he asked for his help. He was a slob with an aversion to research and reading and he’d despised Sam for going to college. He would rather fill his time with pop junk and wrestling than anything that’d look impressive on a college admission letter, even less so to freaking MIT.
It’s only when he starts considering that Dean got in by forging his documents that he forcefully shakes himself, chagrined. Dean’s pride couldn’t have been for anything less than the result of his own efforts, and with a sick feeling in his stomach, Sam realizes that even that bit of evidence is more solid than what he’d been telling himself in his rant.
Truth is, he’d never seen even one of Dean’s report cards, could only remember him nodding to himself as he scanned them and then checking over Sam’s, praising him for his high marks and comforting him for the still-high-but-not-up-to-his-standards ones with fond exasperation. Dean had cared about Sam’s grades and him having the proper materials for school, from colored pencils in first grade to access to a computer during senior year. He remembered his brother loudly complaining about being tired and done with school in a way that Sam had never related to, but Sam realizes with a pang of guilt that what he’d attributed to a comparative ineptitude at the academics was probably the result of having responsibilities that Sam’d been spared at equivalent ages. The only time Sam’d heard him say his own grades were low were in front of their father, when John had been particularly snappy at Sam and Dean had tried to soften him up by bringing up all the ways he was a good kid, even if he’d had to do so at the expense of his own image.
More realizations flood his brain, like all the times in which Sam’d frustratingly explained something Dean got wrong when acting as a sounding board for Sam to solve this equation or to get ideas for that particularly nasty essay. Sometimes Dean’d seemed genuinely confused, like with classes he’d never taken such as European History or AP Literature, but now, with the objectively of an adult, he realizes his brother was mostly making him realize his own mistakes, having Sam put his line of thought back on track and truly learn, instead of just giving him answers in the way that’d have been easier.
And sure, Dean could leave the lion’s share of research to Sam on occasion, but that didn’t mean a single thing about his capabilities in it. He didn’t obsess over details like Sam did (unless he did, like currently, when Sam was sure his brother’s eyes were close to turning into sand from being glued to dusty old tomes and the screen), didn’t get the kick out of it Sam did and didn’t research obscure mythology on his spare time for fun, he didn’t have a college-honed methodology to his search or a background of a bunch of classes on things from architecture to ecology that had come from his undeclared-until-senior-year undergraduate degree, but when he dove through the lore he could pierce it together with a speed that often had Sam floundering, and put patterns together better than Sam and John combined. And more so than that…Sam left him to do most of the weapons maintenance and hustling for funds despite being perfectly capable of doing so. His brother was more proficient at them and liked the activities better, and they were a team , which Dean hadn’t had for four years in which he’d done many successful hunts solo, often with accompanying research that still popped up even now, neatly organized in a jornal that, Sam realized, hadn’t been updated frequently since he’d been back on the game, when Dean had often buried him in research to save him from drowning in fresh grief and incendiary rage.
And Dean read. Not as much or as often as Sam, but a good portion of his references were from books, and whenever Sam’d been surprised at this, Dean had defended himself promptly, each and every time, and mustn’t it get tiring to have to defend his ability to read to someone that had been helped learn to do so by your own self?
To someone who’d been able to go to college because Dean had picked up the slack, had made sure to keep tabs on Sam’s education and be as supportive as he could under their circumstances, and someone who’d then cut off his family, picking up less and less calls from his older brother until they tapered off completely, refusing to give even an inch in their fights, refusing to see that Dean wanted him in his life as much as he could have him, because Dean’s life meant everything he had run away from…
Christ, the guilt was already eating him alive, as he picked apart his own envious, biased arguments, but then his mind kept bouncing to all the ways he did know Dean was smart, to all the ways he refused to acknowledge, and it took him everything not to kneel over. Not only could Dean recall and reference a truly encyclopedic amount of movies, tv shows and songs on top of the books (and, he scolds himself, it’s really freaking presumptuous to put the latter on a pedestal and relegate anything involving the others as less-than, which he’d been told in his Anthropology 101 class at his prestigious Ivy League university and Dean seemed to just get) but even the things he’d often reduced to being “good with his hands” involved cold hard sciences and technical skills beyond average. Dean had built an EMF meter (one that they still used and worked better than most store-brought crap) out of a walkman and Sam could kick himself for not seeing it for what it was before. He had no idea how to even begin to build one, no idea how his brother even learned, so far back, before they even had freaking YouTube as a means. If he’d seen something like that from one of his Stanford friends, accompanied by the prowess at mechanics, he’d be awed at the engineering genius, but it was his brother, and his brother kept up a facade of grunt that even Sam, knowing better, sometimes fed into, and it all culminated in Dean, dead set in being the one to do the trials, telling Sam that he valued his own life less than his brother’s, and not the least because of their supposedly differing intelligences. Sam’d tried to dissuade him from such ridiculous notions, but the damage was a festering wound years old, and he’d promised himself to work on it once the trials were over, and then…
The sight of their father is a welcome one, for once. Sam’s taken out of his dark spiral of thoughts by the pang of grief and regret that accompanies his father’s face in his mind as the man walks into the room. He hadn’t changed much, from this moment to dropping dead on a hospital floor before Sam could properly express his love for the man. There’d been more grey hairs, then, but otherwise, he seemed untouched by time.
Dean freezes when he sees John, and Sam abruptly remembers that another chock from this experience is that Dean had been intending on hiding this from John and then, apparently, kidnapping Sam so they could be free.
John is clearly back from a hunt (Sam remembers he’d been back early after discovering the suspicion of a second black dog had been just the exaggerated tales of bored teens), exhaustion covering his features. He looks at the envelope Dean’s still cradling and holds out a hand for it. Dean visibly swallows, and hands it over. Sam feels a pang of anger. So John had given Dean the same ultimatum Sam had received and Dean had not been able to follow through. Figures.
John reads the letter over, an indecipherable expression on his face as he goes through the papers. Sam can see him mouthing “MIT” and “Extraordinary scores” and “Full ride”.
“This what you and that Orfield boy been working on so intensely?” John asks, gruffly.
“Yes, sir.” Dean barks back automatically, but seems boldened by the lack of explosion and keeps talking, which usually John’d take as excuses when he’d asked a yes or no question. “Well, obviously I’ve been working on this for longer, but me and Andrew really got it going and” Dean’s mouth closes with an audible click when John raises his hand. Sam braces for an explosion.
“I’m proud of you, son.”
Both Winchester brothers, memory and spectator alike, gape at the man, eyes bulging and mouth agape.
“I am, really. I mean, with the life we lead, the way you grew up, too fast, I know… This is a real wonder, boy.”
Dean seems to glow under the praise, and Sam feels so violently angry and jealous and bitter that he can taste the hate in the back of his throat. So he gets thrown out of the house on his ass and Dean gets told their father is proud of him?
“Thank you, sir, I… Thank you. This is a real good opportunity, you know?”
“Yeah, yeah, course. Sammy’s gonna miss you, tho.”
“Sammy” is currently ready to throw a tantrum that’d make his teenage self seem tame and relaxed, in comparison, but the bucket-of-cold-water effect on Dean’s mood isn’t missed.
“Dad, I… I’m taking Sammy with me.”
John raises an eyebrow, looking somewhat amused.
“Oh, you are? And you decided this without my input? He’s my child, Dean.”
The anger in Dean’s face is so palpable that the smile slides off of John’s face as if scorched by it.
“Your… I have been making decisions about him without your input since he went to school, and not by my choice! I’ve been taking care of the both of us for years, now, sir, and I’m damn good at it.” The better than you hangs in the air, unsaid but heard all the same “There’s no reason I should stop now.”
“Mind your tone with me, boy! And I see all the more reason for it, if that’s how you think it’s gonna go! You baby that boy, Dean, and yeah, maybe I’ve been allowing it, well, I’m taking this off your plate, now. Besides, it’s about time Sam picked up some of your responsibilities, don’t you think?”
The word responsibilities must be code for something from the way John’s stresses it and Dean’s face goes ashen at hearing it, but Sam can’t figure out what it means.
“Dad… Please. Just… Just let us go! It’ll be safe, I’ll keep him safe, and you can… You can have a home base with us! With access to a college library and all the tech in the labs and we can hunt with you on the breaks and I’ll make sure we both keep up with the training!” Dean’s begging, desperate, and Sam’s heart aches because it’s Dean’s whole future and he’s bargaining it off for Sam’s sake. He wants to yell at his brother to go, he’ll be fine, he’s capable of feeding himself and salting the doors and dealing with John and then going off on his own.
“You’ve really thought this through, haven’t you? Well, I’m sorry, kid, I really am, but I can’t allow it. You’re my boys, and you might be of age now, so I can’t stop you, but Sammy’s just a boy, and he’s staying with me. Now, you could try and take him anyways, but I think we both know that’d just result in you getting thrown into jail, and then Sam’d be truly alone, wouldn’t he? No big brother to baby him…”
There’s something deeply cruel in John’s tone, and Sam suddenly realizes that whatever “responsibilities” Dean had that John was threatening Sam with, he wouldn’t want to know.
“Please, please, dad… Please, don’t hurt him.” Dean pleads, voice broken, one tear spilling over and carving a path down his face. John raises his hand to wipe it away in such mocking tenderness that Sam’s overcome with the need to scream for their father to not touch him.
“Oh, Dean, I don’t want to, but the choice is yours. I won’t lose both of my boys to some fancy college life, not when we know what’s out there. Now, you can go and live your dream out there, knowing that me and Sammy are in the real world, saving people and being a proper family, or you can stay and actually do something good, keep people safe, keep Sammy safe.” John smiles, benevolent like there’s truly a choice hidden in his phrasing. “I just think you ought to remember, Dean, just because I taught you boys everything you know about covering your tracks and disappearing, doesn’t mean I taught you everything I know. I promise, you try something, you’ll never see your brother again, and I will make sure he doesn’t have a ticket like this one waiting for him when he’s grown up.”
Dean nods, Sam sighs, and then his already collapsed world implodes in on itself because his father’s lips are covering his brother’s in a kiss.
No, please, God, not this, please, no, this has to be a misunderstanding, please…
But no, the kiss continues, and John’s beard must be wet from Dean’s tears and his hands are grasping his body in a way no parent’s should and oh God, Sam’s gonna be sick, so sick…
“I’ll bomb out.” Dean whispers, hoarse and wet with tears, after they break apart “I’ll deck my GPA then drop out, you saw the letter, the admission is conditional on me keeping up good grades, I won’t… You can keep me, I’m right here, just please, please don’t touch him…”
“I knew you’d make the right choice, son.” And John actually ruffles Dean’s hair like they aren’t tangled in a mockery of a lover’s embrace. “You know it’s the right choice, too, don’t you?”
Dean nods, defeated, worrying his lips between his teeth like they weren’t abused-looking enough from the attack.
John makes for the bedroom and stops at the doorway.
“I love you, son, and I’m really proud of this. You know, Sammy gets home, we don’t have to tell him what for, but we can go out and celebrate…”
“When I tell you both I’m gonna drop out, put up a fight, or he will.” Is all Dean answers, as he picks the envelope up and throws it in the trash, walking away without a backwards glance. When the papers touch the garbage, Sam’s vision grays out, and he’s thrown back into his own time, not even bothering to pretend the nausea is from the motion.