“I say screw it, you know?”
“When I get there, I am going to kick your ass so hard,” Dean growled in the phone. He had one hand on the steering wheel, one holding the phone against his ear as he left Sam his final voicemail. “Not only did you drag the kid to God only knows where but I AM DRIVING BABY UNPAINTED, SAM!”
Dean snapped his phone closed and threw it in the passenger seat of Baby. Dean was pissed as hell, all the more so with every freaking mile he drove.
Did Sam even give a damn about the damage being done to Baby while Dean drove her with just primer on her body?! Did Sam think about the risk an untrained fourteen year old would be in at a bar for hunters?!
Where the hell was Dean’s brainiac baby brother when common sense was needed?!
They had a couple hour headstart on Dean, only because Dean didn’t expect Sam to send him to voicemail every time he called. Dean thought maybe they were doing something that had a perfectly rational explanation, like fucking shopping or something.
The longer they were gone - and after Dean left his third voicemail - Dean had to admit that Sam took Harry with him to some hunter chick’s bar. Bobby acted like it was no big deal, just Sam being Sam, but Dean specifically told Sam that they weren’t dragging Harry in their crap.
And what did Sam do first chance he had? Dragged the kid in some crap.
Bitch.
Dean was less than fifty miles from the Roadhouse when his phone rang. Without checking the caller ID, Dean answered with a threat.
“What part of leave the kid out of shit did you not understand?” Dean demanded.
The person who replied wasn’t Sam, but Bobby.
“First off, princess, I ain’t Sam,” Bobby snorted. “You still not heard from them?”
Dean took a breath and rolled the tension from his shoulders.
“No, but I’ll be there soon,” he said. “What’s up?”
Dean could practically hear Bobby putting his feet up, the quiet sigh he always made when he was relaxing in his living room with a bottle in hand and the game on the TV.
“Well, thought I’d tell ya that kid ain’t exactly who he says he is,” Bobby said casually.
Dean huffed and barely kept from snapping the phone shut and tossing it again. As it was, he clenched the steering wheel that much harder and pushed Baby’s new engine as hard as it would go.
“That kid is our brother, Bobby,” Dean said tersely. “He passed all the tests and he looks like - like Sam,” he finished quickly.
Harry looked like Dad, more than even Dean or Sam did. He looked enough like Sam too though, all skinny with boy-band hair and dimples when he smiled. Dean supposed they had the same green eyes, but the kid was a mini-John and Sam.
“I ain’t sayin’ he’s not your brother. Hell, the test I’m sendin’ to my buddy is probably a waste of time.”
“Test?” Dean asked. “Damn it, Bobby. Did you ask him to take a freaking DNA test?”
“No, idjit.” Dean could hear the eye roll in Bobby’s voice. “I took his fork and sent it in to compare it to some of your daddy’s DNA.”
“How the hell did you…? No, you know what? Nevermind.” Dean had been about to ask Bobby how he got any of Dad’s DNA, but knowing Bobby it probably meant the paranoid bastard had little bottles of all their blood in his basement somewhere and Dean did not want to know if so.
“What’s the issue then?” Dean asked instead.
“The issue is the kid says he goes to some Hoggart School and the place doesn’t exist,” Bobby said bluntly. “I even made a few calls overseas, there ain’t anything like that anywhere.”
Paranoid bastard.
“So? The kid sounds like Sherlock Holmes, you probably misunderstood him,” Dean said.
“Or Harry’s lyin’ about where he goes to school at.”
Again, “So?”
“So that ain’t fishy to you?” Bobby huffed. “This kid shows up, a damn runaway no less, and not only did he walk away from a plane crash without so much as a scratch on his face, and we don’t know jack about him?”
“Nope.” Dean put as much finality in the one word as he could. He shifted in his seat so he could hold the phone more securely between his ear and shoulder while he turned off on a freaking gravel road.
Gravel road. On primer.
Sam was going to buff out every scrape on Baby with his toothbrush.
“Bobby, listen to me cause I’m only saying this once,” Dean said, his voice hard and serious. “That kid flew around the freaking world to find his dad and Dad’s dead. The kid survived some sort of freak place crash—”
“It wasn’t no freak accident—”
“Some sort of freak plane crash,” Dean repeated, louder. As far as Dean was concerned, that’s what it was. Harry and the chick with pink hair didn’t die and there hadn’t been a follow up crash which made it someone else’s problem.
“We are the only family he has and that’s that,” Dean said. “He stays. I don’t care if he escaped from a freaking loony bin, Bobby. That’s our brother.”
“Get your panties untwisted, princess,” Bobby scoffed. “I ain’t sayin’ we’re dumpin’ the kid anywhere, I’m sayin’ it won’t hurt nothin’ to get some straight answers from him.”
That was exactly what Dean planned to do. He’d get some straight answers from Harry, kick Sam’s ass, then drag them both to California. Sam was going back to college, Harry was getting a normal life.
Because Dean couldn’t lose anyone else.
Dean’s phone rang again when he pulled Baby in a dirt lot right beside the van Sam took from Bobby’s. Dean just let it ring as he climbed out of the car and looked at the wooden bar/motel that Bobby swore was legit.
The Roadhouse looked like a dump, more dive bar than anything. The place didn’t even have all its windows, four of them were boarded up.
Yeah, real safe place to drag a kid to.
Dean walked right in the front door without even a drop of subtlety. The first thing he noticed was Harry, sitting at the bar. Harry jumped when Dean had slammed the door open and Dean recognized the look in his eyes, it was guilt.
The next thing Dean noticed was the smoking hot blonde who pulled a pistol from an apron and had it aimed at Dean’s head before he could so much as blink.
“Who the hell are you?” she demanded.
“Dean?” Sam still had his phone in hand when he walked through a swinging door behind the bar and Dean focused on him. If Dean recognized guilt in Harry’s eyes it was because he had seen it in Sammy’s eyes too many times to count.
Sam looked guilty as hell then.
“You, outside, now,” Dean snapped at Sam, his right hand clenching in a fist. Sam tried his puppy eye look and Dean turned away, storming right back out the door.
The second the door opened behind Dean and Sam walked out, Dean pushed him against the wall.
“What the hell?” Dean demanded. “What part of keep the kid out of shit didn’t you understand, Sam? Huh?”
“Harry wanted to come.” Sam knocked Dean’s hands off his chest and crossed his arms, his stubborn bitch-face sliding in place.
God, he looked like Dad when he did that. It never failed to make Dean want to smack the look right off his face.
“Harry is a kid,” Dean reminded Sam. “When kids want stupid shit, you say no.”
Dean rarely did to Sam when Sam was a kid, but Dean had been a kid too. Dean was a man then, Harry didn’t have to deal with the shit Sam did. Dad was gone —
“Watch out for Sammy, Dean. You have to save him. And if you can’t save him, you have to kill him.”
— and that meant Dean was calling the shots.
“It’s stupid to want to find the demon?” Sam asked, stepping away from the wall and toward Dean. “Is that what you’re saying?”
It wasn’t, actually, but since they were on the subject.
“Yeah, it is.” Dean stood his ground even when Sam stood just in front of him. It pissed Dean off to have to tilt his head any to look at Sam’s tall ass, but that was probably why Sam got so close.
“That demon killed our dad,” Sam said harshly, like Dean forgot.
Dean knew it was the demon, he was sure of it.
Dean had been running from a reaper, trying to stay alive, and then suddenly he was fine. Dean was fine and Dad was dead and Dad told Dean to kill Sam and everything was a damned mess.
And the part that wasn’t messy, the brother they didn’t know they had? The kid with no other family? Sam was trying to mess that up too.
“Don’t you care?” Sam asked Dean. “Don’t you want revenge?”
“No! I don’t!” Dean yelled, all out of patience. “Revenge was Dad’s thing and where did that get him? Huh?” Dean pushed Sam in the chest. “He’s dead, Sam! They’re all dead and if you don’t let this shit go, you’ll be the next one gone!”
“I don’t care!” Sam screamed right back, his voice cracking. Sam was the one to shove Dean then. “If I can take that damn demon with me then I don’t care!”
Dean could see it. Dean could see Sam driving himself to an early death trying to kill that demon, just like Dad did. Sam even looked like Dad as he screamed about how his death would somehow be okay as long as one demon went with him.
“Don’t ever say that.” Dean snatched the collar of Sam’s shirt and held it in his left fist, the right balled up and ready to fly. “You don’t get to say that, understand me? YOU DON’T GET TO DIE!”
“Get off me!” Sam wrenched himself from Dean’s grasp and shoved Dean away only to glare at him with his eyes watered up. “You’re not in charge of me, Dean. I’m going to find the demon and I’m going to kill it.”
Dean couldn’t keep having the same fucking argument. It was the theme song of the last twenty-two years of Dean’s life.
“You know what? Fine,” Dean spat. “I can’t stop you.”
Dean shoved past Sam to throw open the door of the Roadhouse and he ignored the three curious strangers gawking at him to find the brother who he did get to make decisions for. Harry was already on his feet, staring at Dean while he twisted his fingers around the bottom of his shirt.
“You, car,” Dean told Harry. “Now.”
Unlike Sam, who wanted to fight about everything, Harry started moving immediately. Dean didn’t even spare a look for the hot blonde or - did that dude have a mullet? - the woman who told Harry to ‘come back around sometime’. Dean only waited for Harry to walk out of the bar before turning on his heel to follow.
Harry hesitated by where Sam stood, still tense and ready for a fight that Dean was done with. Sam gave the kid a tight smile and nodded his head toward the Impala.
“It’s fine,” Sam said quietly. “I’ll catch up later.”
Dean scoffed as he walked past Sam, shouldering him, and Sam’s bitch ass just had to have the last word.
“Dad would want us to find the demon, Dean.”
Dean stopped. Harry stopped two steps ahead of him. Dean took a deep breath.
And then Dean turned around and punched Sam as hard as he could, right in the nose. When it cracked, when Sam clutched his nose and staggered backward, Dean shook his hand out and stared hard at Sam, wanting to get one thing through his thick skull.
“I don’t give a damn what Dad would have wanted,” Dean said. “Dad’s gone, Sam. It’s done. Over with. Time to move on.”
That was the last word.
“Am I supposed to pretend I couldn’t hear what you two were screaming?” Harry asked after Dean peeled out of the parking lot, headed back to Bobby’s.
Dean looked up in the rearview mirror where he could just make out one brother standing alone before he looked over at the other. Harry was staring straight out the window, his fingers still twisting his shirt up. Dean hated the way he sounded nervous, unsure if Dean would yell or not for asking a question — Dean hated the way he fell in John’s shoes — but Dean couldn’t talk until he calmed down.
“Yeah,” Dean said curtly, already reaching for the volume dial on the radio. “For right now your job is to pretend just that.”
Dean cranked the radio as high as it would go; loud enough to drown out the sounds of rocks damaging the body of the car, loud enough to not think about the explanation he was going to have to give his kid brother. Dean had the music just loud enough that he couldn’t hear Dad’s last words to him, still ringing in his ears almost two months later.
It was getting dark by the time Dean felt like a rational human being again. Harry hadn’t said a word the last two hours, he just sat in silence while Dean took his anger out on the highway.
Dean turned down the radio once the song playing ended and he glanced over at the kid.
“You hungry?” Dean asked. Dean was starving and unless Sam thought to feed the kid - fat chance since Sam barely remembered to feed himself - Harry had to be too.
“I sort of forgot my bag at Bobby’s,” Harry said, mumbling it really.
“And you can’t eat without it?” Dean asked as he took the next exit.
Harry mumbled some more shit and Dean was pretty sure he heard the word ‘money’ mixed in somewhere.
“You’re fourteen,” Dean said, glancing sideways at Harry. “I’m pretty sure I can buy you a meal.”
When Harry didn’t argue anymore, Dean sighed.
God, why was everything so damned exhausting?
“Look, I don’t do touchy feely crap like Sam does, alright? I’m a dick, I know it and you know it. But you don’t have to go mute. You’re allowed to talk or whatever.”
Harry nodded.
Silently.
Which was just awesome.
Dean took them to some diner just off the interstate and snagged two menus before seating them as far away from anyone else as he could. The place wasn’t too busy and it only took the waiter a few minutes to get them a couple of cokes while they looked at the menu.
“Burgers are good,” Dean told Harry. Dean was pretty sure he had been there before, but eventually all the 24 hour diners blurred together.
Like Led Zeppelin though, burgers were always good.
Harry nodded and ended up ordering a double bacon cheeseburger like Dean. Dean nearly grinned when the kid asked for the fried egg to not be on his sandwich.
“You don’t know what you’re missing,” Dean told him. “The egg ties the whole thing together.”
Harry was toying with the wrapper off his straw, looking at anything but Dean.
“I believe you.”
Dean scrubbed his face with both hands and then sat back with a heavy sigh. Once he looked around and saw that nobody seemed to be close enough to eavesdrop on them, he waved a hand at Harry to catch his attention.
“C’mon then,” Dean said. “You’ve got questions, let’s hear ‘em.”
The freaking hunting crap was out of the bag and Dean couldn’t even pin the blame fully on Sam. A lot of it, yeah. Sam never should have taken Harry to the Roadhouse, but Dean stood outside screaming about demons just like Sam did.
Dean could answer questions, explain the whole monsters are real bit. Then he’d explain that it didn’t matter if they were real or not though because the Winchesters - all three of them - weren’t going looking for them anymore.
And then Harry asked a stupid question instead of the one Dean expected and it threw his whole speech off-track.
“Why’d you hit Sam?” Harry asked. Dean couldn’t be sure, he didn’t know the kid as well as he did Sam, but he was pretty sure there was a lot of disapproval in his tone.
“Because Sam’s a stubborn idiot who doesn’t know when to shut his trap,” Dean said bluntly. When Harry didn’t seem swayed by his explanation, Dean sighed again. “Dude, because brothers fight, that’s it. Sam said something stupid, I hit him. If I say something stupid, he’ll hit me.”
“Ah.” Harry definitely didn’t look impressed with Dean. In fact, the kid seemed to be trying to scoot as far away in his seat as he could for maximum distance between them.
“Don’t ‘ah’ me,” Dean said, rolling his eyes. “You’re new, but trust me, at some point Sam is going to say something that’s going to make you want to hit him.”
“I doubt that,” Harry said, cold as ice.
Neither of them looked away from the other or said anything while the waiter awkwardly slid their plates on the table. Dean didn’t want Harry to hate him, but Dean wasn’t sure how to climb out of the hole he dug either. If there were sides to be taken, clearly the kid took Sam’s.
Finally, Dean snatched his phone from his jacket pocket and held Harry’s eyes while he redialed the last number to call him. Sam answered on the second ring and Dean only barely kept himself from making a comment about how he suddenly remembered how to answer his phone.
“Hello?”
“I’m sorry I hit you,” Dean said slowly, watching Harry even while speaking to Sam. “We good?”
“Uh…” Sam was obviously confused, which was fair. The two of them butted heads all the time and sometimes that included a few fists. They never called to apologize afterward, they just moved on.
“Demonic possession?” Sam guessed.
“Harry,” Dean said instead.
“Ah. Tell him we’re cool, and I’ll - I mean… if it’s okay… I’ll be back in the morning?”
“Sounds good,” Dean said curtly before hanging up. He raised a brow at Harry as he pocketed the phone. “Sam said we’re cool and he’ll be back in the morning. That work for you?”
As shitty as he had been, Harry looked all surprised suddenly.
“Er… alright then.” Harry didn’t scoot any closer to Dean, but the tight muscles in his sounders relaxed just enough for Dean to notice.
“Great. Eat.” Dean set the example by pouring a puddle of ketchup for his burger and then taking as big of a bite as he could fit in his mouth. Dean didn’t even finish chewing his bite before Captain Cold across the table from him fully defrosted and took a bite of his own burger.
“Is it good?” Dean asked when he couldn’t take the damn silence anymore.
Harry swallowed and then shrugged, giving Dean a lot less friendly of a grin than he usually gave Sam.
“Yeah, it’s good,” Harry said.
“Shoulda got the egg,” Dean said, grinning fully. It didn’t matter if Dean was the hardass and Sam was the one the kid liked, it really didn’t. If both of Dean’s brothers were alive and safe then they could just be best buddies and get matching bracelets or whatever.
Dean didn’t want to be the dick, but anything was better than being the one to watch as another member of his family died.
Dean and Harry both ate pretty quickly and Dean wasn’t in much of a hurry to settle the tab. Why Dean hit Sam aside, either the kid had questions about demons or Dean had questions about why he didn’t. Either way, better to get all of it in the open so it didn’t mess anything up later.
“When Sam was six months old, a demon killed our mom.” Dean leaned back in his chair and adopted a casual pose, one that would never show how vividly Dean remembered that night or how he sometimes missed his mom so badly he wanted to scream.
Harry froze, completely froze, and seemed to be giving Dean his complete attention and so Dean kept talking. Dean told Harry the whole story, start to finish.
“Our dad spent his life trying to find the demon that did it. Dad was a hunter. All those things that sound like fairytale bullshit? They’re real and our dad knew how to kill them all.
“The demon though? The one with yellow eyes that killed our mom? It’s a tricky bastard. Dad spent twenty-two years looking for it and never got close. Then back in November, Dad went missing on a hunt. I needed help finding him, so I went to get Sam.
“Sam split off on his own when he was eighteen. Sam hated hunting, he hated life on the road. When he graduated high school, he got a full ride scholarship to Stanford, out in California. I missed my brother, hell, I was scared out of my mind that Dad was dead, and I went and talked Sam into going with me to the last place I knew Dad had been.”
Dean paused and Harry didn’t interrupt. Dean just stared at the wall for a second, that same crushing guilt hitting him square in the chest again. Dean didn’t want to find out Dad had been killed on his own, so he dragged Sam back in the mess that Sam never wanted to be a part of in the first place.
And what happened?
“I took Sam back when the case was a bust.” Dean’s voice lowered and Harry leaned toward him to catch it all. “I didn’t get a single drink finished at a bar down the road from his place before I heard some volunteer’s scanner go off. House fire, at Sam’s place.”
Dean could remember exactly the cold fear that seized him when he heard the address.
Fully engulfed structure fire with entrapment.
Dean didn’t even get the car, he ran.
“I had to drag Sam out,” Dean said, seeing it all again as he said it. “I could hardly see, there were flames everywhere, but I could hear him. I could hear him screaming for his girlfriend, Jessica.”
“JESSICA! JESSICA!”
For as long as Dean lived, he’d never get Sammy’s screams out of his mind.
“Jessica was pinned to the ceiling, trapped like our mom had been… so I took Sam with me back on the road to find our dad. We all knew it was the demon, it had to be. But why Jessica? Was it just screwing with Sam? We didn’t know, so we needed Dad.
“When we finally caught up with him, he was hot on the demon’s trail. Dad had a gun, the only weapon in existence to use against demons like the one we were hunting, the Colt. Just when we thought we had the sucker, just when I thought we were all going to kill the thing, bam.”
Dean slapped the table and Harry jumped a foot in his chair. It shook Dean from the memories he shared and he shrugged a shoulder up, rushing the end of the story.
“Next thing Sam and I know, Dad’s dead, the Colt is gone, old yellow-eyes is in the wind.”
Harry’s jaw was practically on the table, but he wasn’t going into full blown panic like some people did when they were told that everything was real. For Dean dumping a lifetime of crap on him, the kid actually looked pretty steady.
“Sam wants to find the demon, kill it,” Dean said, giving Harry all the facts. “I say screw it, you know? We barely walked away last time, why push it? We’ve done our bit. Hell, I’ve ganked more werewolves, vampires, and ghosts than I can count. I say it’s time to let someone else risk their life to kill these sons of bitches.”
If it was just Dean’s life, Dean would die on a hunt. That was just a fact. If Dean lost Sam instead of Dad, Dean would take Johnny Walker on a long hike through the most haunted forest he could and call it a night. But Dean wouldn’t risk Sam’s life for anything, not Harry’s either. They were the last parts of Dean’s family.
“That is… a lot,” Harry said slowly, his eyes wide. “Er… so when you found me in Reno, you were…?”
“Hunting a demon or spirit,” Dean said, thankful for the slight shift in conversation. “That plane you were on didn’t crash on its own. Even if it did, you and that chick with the pink hair wouldn’t have been able to just walk away without something freaky keeping you alive.”
Even if Dean didn’t know Harry as well as he knew Sam, he knew when the kid turned green and jumped from his seat to book it to the bathroom that he was going to barf.
Yeah, maybe the fried egg would have been overkill.
Dean settled the check and then went to check on Harry. The second the door opened, Dean questioned if he should have brought up the plane crash or not.
Harry was standing at the sink with the faucet running. Both of his hands were clenched on the porcelain and his face was pale and dripping water he must have splashed on it. Harry was so distracted by whatever he saw in his own eyes that Dean had to force a cough a few times to catch his attention.
“You know what you need?” Dean asked him when Harry spun around and pressed his back to the sink. “A drink.”
Dean told him a bunch of crap about being a Winchester, no reason to not let him process it all the Winchester way.
Sure, no normal bartender was going to let Harry within ten feet of the door, but two hours back in South Dakota was a bar. Inside that bar was Dean’s brother, and Dean was feeling that same need to have Sam with him as he usually did after something messed up happened. Bringing up all that old shit was just a reminder to Dean that he couldn’t leave Sam behind anymore then than he could when Sam had been a six month old baby, stuck in a crib while his mom burned to death above his head.