Archive of Our Own ^beta

They sound a little like Texas.

1.

John and his boys traveled everywhere, of course, but they spent a lot of time in Texas. As a result of both its size and the number of demons raised, Texas has a larger demon population than much of the US. (Other states are known for their witches, vampires, sorcerers, and extremely nasty curses, but Texas has owned the demon market since near the end of the Kennedy administration.)

Anyway, the reason Dean doesn't sound like Kansas is that he got around to talking again -- after Mary died -- when he was in kindergarten in West Texas. Dean didn't start school until he was six, and he didn't start really talking in whole sentences again until Miss Kelleher got whole paragraphs out of him. He'd mimic her own long, lazy drawl, and thought it was funny. Eventually it slid into his speech and never quite left.

Miss Kelleher was surprised to find out that Dean already knew how to read, write, and do simple multiplication. She was about to push him up to first grade when John took on a hunt near Salem. (Oregon. Hunters leave Salem, Massachusetts the hell alone.)

They came back through Texas a couple of years later, this time outside of Austin. Sam did hard time, as Dean put it, in a Head Start program, until the teacher had to ask John to take him home -- he was so bored that he had become disruptive. John instead made Sam go back, and behave himself this time, because there wasn't anywhere else for him to go during the day while Dean was in school.

Sam got out of that Head Start program with a slight lilt that he never quite lost. And he was never out of line in school, ever again.

Reading is fundamental.

2.

Sure, Sam's the freaky genius, but Dean's grades were fine -- carefully calculated Bs, except in math and science, which he actually understood, and in English, which he couldn't fucking stand. Dean isn't dyslexic, but he was a very lazy reader -- the kind of kid who stops halfway through an unfamiliar word and just guesses.

Oddly enough, his Latin is fine, and he has a better pronunciation than Sam.

3.

Lazy about it or not, Dean reads plenty -- tabloids, always, and some horror-movie websites, and sometimes actual reputable newspapers. He usually can lay hands on battered hard-boiled detective and secret agent novels, many of which he's nearly memorized.

Dean's encyclopedic memory, unlike Sam's, is mainly filled with gun specifications, muscle car trivia, and twenty-two years of late-night Movies of the Week. Oh, and hunting stuff, he knows all that. He'd fucking well better.

When Sam was at Stanford, Dean got stuck in a motel room for three weeks with a broken leg, no TV, and nothing to read but a Gideon Bible. He read the gory bits in Kings and Judges over and over, but thought the Song of Solomon was overrated and kinda girly.

4.

Sam reads everything he can get his hands on, and remembers most of it. Sam hasn't sleep at night without a book since he was three.

Actually, Sam can't even take a dump without at least reading the back of a shampoo bottle.

He can read in six languages besides English, but he can't pronounce any of them except Spanish for shit, because he learned them entirely out of books. The six languages include Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, German, and some Russian. He only recognizes a little Japanese, and doesn't know Chinese or Hebrew. He feels vaguely guilty about that.

Oh, and maybe Aramaic. And Hindi. Fuck.

Sam loves Latin best: its elegance and precision, its obvious utility. Sam likes things that are both beautiful and useful; it's why he prefers knives to guns.

Home economics.

5.

John mainly held honest jobs until Dean was twelve or thirteen -- old enough to be of reliable use on a longer hunt. When John couldn't find work as a mechanic, he'd work on the docks, or in construction -- tasks with his hands that gave his mind time to think. Eventually, con jobs were faster, and more lucrative, especially with Dean and Sam to help pull them off.

Part of why they moved so often when the boys were young was that John kept being promoted, almost effortlessly, into positions with more responsibility than he wanted to devote to his day job.

He did not either work as a bouncer for a whorehouse in Tampa, no matter what Dean tells you. And Sam only had to call him in sick once, after a chupacabra almost got him in Arizona. Yes, he was dead drunk at the time, but come on. It was a chupacabra, for Christ's sake.

6.

Sam grew so fast when he was fifteen, and was so hungry, that Dean took extra hours at his crapass Seven-Eleven job in fucking Biloxi so that he could bring home extra milk and vitamins and Chunky Soup.

John did the same thing for Dean, and probably would have for Sam -- except for the fact that there was something a lot like the beast of Gévaudan haunting the woods outside of fucking Biloxi all that year.

Dean never talks about fucking Biloxi.

Neither does Sam.

The thing in Worcester.

7.

Dean doesn't talk about Worcester, Massachusetts, either, which is where he did most of his junior year of high school. He doesn't talk about it because that's when he started dating Stacy Ramirez and then fell hard for her older brother, Eduardo. He broke up with Stacy just before he gave Ed a blow job in the empty lot near the trailer court.

Sam was skulking around by himself in the same empty lot and saw the whole show. He was fourteen then. He's never talked about Worcester either.

8.

When Stacy kicked Dean in the nuts, three days later, it marked the only time he's ever let somebody win a fight.

Having options.

9.

Dean took the SAT in Bozeman, Montana, which is where he graduated from high school. He stayed up with John on a routine salt-and-burn the night before, and slunk off in the Impala before dawn with two pencils from Sam's bookbag and no preparation. He got a 1340 anyway, even with the fucking reading comprehension.

Sam took twelve practice tests, skipped a poltergeist hunt to get a good night's sleep the night before, and got a 1590. He's still pissed about the math section; that quadratic equation was stupid and never should have been there.

Dean and Sam had the same math score. Dean kept the brochure MIT mailed him for years, until Sam went to Stanford. Then he burned it -- which might have been melodramatic, yeah. Probably.

10.

His freshman year at Stanford, Sam dated a guy named Brian. Brian was short and dark and wore glasses and was nothing at all like Dean, except for where he always could make Sam laugh, and was always spoiling for a fight. They met through Sam's roommate, a Big Queer on Campus from day one. They had a lot of sex but never fucked, even though they both thought about it.

Sam liked hanging out with Brian but didn't like the rest of the LGBT crowd, who were always making him feel like he should be more public about who he was having sex with, and called him "straight-acting." After a lifetime of the faggot treatment from every school he'd ever been in, Sam thought this was totally hilarious.

Eventually, Brian dumped Sam, calling him a closet case. Sam felt bad about it, but he didn't like drawing attention to himself like that. That wasn't what school was for.

11.

Sam met Jessica in an art history class the next semester. He'd taken the class to pick up girls, and it worked. He hadn't expected to get serious about her -- only to reassert his damaged heterosexuality by having sex with a really hot chick.

It was what Dean had done, after Worcester.

Sex that counts.

12.

It turned out that not only was Jessica fun, smart and just so goddamned wholesome, but she'd also made out with her roommate freshman year, and told Sam so on their second date. "Just so you know, I might be bisexual," she said over nachos.

"Um, me too," he said, startled into honesty.

"Wow," said Jessica. "That's really kind of hot." She scooped up the last jalapeno. "You know, I have a single room this year. Not that I want to jump you right this minute or anything."

Sam fell for that girl like the anvil in a Roadrunner cartoon.

13.

That said, it was Cassie who owned the sparkly purple dildo and the copy of Bend Over Boyfriend. Dean found religion, or something like it, with his ass in the air.

Generally speaking, Dean's attitude toward sex is fairly straightforward. (Sam's the kinky one. Kinkier, anyway.) But that thing with the dildo -- come on. Any guy should be man enough to admit that's hot.

14.

Sam: Three. Shelly Vanderclute in tenth grade; Jessica; and Madison. And, um, Brian... sort of counts. So, four, kind of.

Dean: Really? Just twelve. Okay, and Eddie. Thirteen. Or so. Not counting blowjobs. Or handjobs. Or other stuff that doesn't actually count. If you were counting, which Dean doesn't.

And he wore a condom every single goddamn time, that much he knows for sure. And gave Sammy a box of them on his fourteenth birthday, wrapped in pretty pink tissue paper. Just in case he needed them.

Sam never makes out with anyone he doesn't intend to fuck.

None of Dean's ex-lovers are dead.

Transferable skills.

15.

Sam did, in fact, line the windowsills of his dorm room with salt, and carved small sigils in the doorframe. He did it when he and Jessica moved in together, too. Even on his closet door, and the box of stuff he never unpacked.

Jessica thought maybe it was something he'd learned from growing up poor, a superstition about not having enough food or something. She never asked about it; she was sure it would be something embarrassing she should have known if she'd been raised outside of a coffee can.

Anyway, Jess hated talking about money with Sam.

She also never asked him about his nightmares, or the way he would get up sometimes in the middle of the night and run until dawn. He always came back; it was just something he did sometimes.

Sam didn't explain a lot of things, but Jess kind of liked the mystery.

16.

Sam was a Classics major at first. His advisors in the Pre-Law Society said it didn't matter what his major was, so long as his grades were good. He loved taking classes where some of the students were even more psyched about Catullus than he was. It was conclusive proof that he was not, in fact, the biggest dork in the world.

Sam never took a computer course; he learned everything he knew about computers from his work-study job in the computer lab. His boss was a greybeard hacker named Larry who claimed he'd been the real-life basis for Wargames.

So Larry was a little delusional, but Sam never saw a firewall he couldn't get around. Sam watched, and learned.

History repeating

17.

John, for the record, was fucking proud of both his sons, and spent years at a time understanding one better than the other. Sam was practically easy when he was younger; Dean was steadier after middle school. They were both completely uncontrollable space aliens when they turned eighteen. John always thought it kind of funny that Dean forgot that about himself. Or seemed to, when it was Sam's turn.

John had been the same way -- otherwise he wouldn't have ended up in 'Nam. His old man had wanted him to go to college, make something of himself.

18.

Dean had an affair with another car once, a cherry 1965 Ford Shelby Cobra he was working on at a garage in Purlear, North Carolina (also home to a particularly nasty group of poltergeists). The Impala was having transmission trouble, and Dean stayed late to work on it. After sunset, he lifted the keys to the Cobra and drove it around fifteen miles of back road. Beautiful, beautiful car. He washed and waxed her after, and nobody ever asked about the odometer reading.

He feels more guilty about that joyride than about a lot of seriously illegal shit he's done. Sam teased him once, saying that a Chevy in White would come after him for his transgression. Dean put him in a headlock and told him not to talk about the Cobra anywhere near his baby.

19.

Until the thing with the bank in Milwaukee, Sam kept up an email correspondence with Sarah Blake. His last email to her read, in its entirety, It wasn't what it looks like on the news. I hope you know that.

Her reply never reached him; he'd already deleted his account.

20.

Sam and Dean have never slept with each other.

Not really.

Not in any way that counts.

You know.