Author: Minervacat
Fandom: Supernatural
Pairing: Winchester gen
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Through 2x01, "In My Time Of Dying".
Summary: And then again, what is so terrible about death? 2700 words.

i.
Dean Winchester was scared of cockroaches and things that went crunch when he crushed them with his boots, of stepping on slugs in his bare feet, of fucking up and killing someone innocent. Scared of the things that hid in the dark, because that's what his father taught him - fear it, but don't look away, and respect your own fear - but not so scared that he couldn't face them.

When Sam was 11 and Dean was almost 14, Sam had filled Dean's shoes with dead scorpions. They were living out in Tempe, in a two bedroom trailer at the edge of a Native American reservation where a hunting buddy of Dad's was living. Dean had skipped school on a Wednesday, because they weren't teaching him anything that was more interesting that TV or firing one of Dad's shotguns, and he'd eaten the last can of Beef-a-roni for lunch, and when Sam had come home from school starving, he'd rifled the cabinets and failed to find the can of Beef-a-roni he'd apparently been saving. Instead of shouting at Dean, he'd gotten quiet, slammed out the back door, and missed dinner.

Dad had said, Where's your brother.

Dean had said, Sulking in the desert.

Dad had said, Don't fight with your brother. You've got plenty of other things to fight with.

Dean had said, I don't fight with him, he fights with me.

Dad had snorted with laughter. Yeah, all right, but after you eat, you go find him - there's a Wendigo running around out there.

Before dinner was over, Sam had come slamming back in the door of the trailer, glaring at Dean and sulking over his homework at the kitchen table all night. Dean had shoved his feet into his boots after dinner, going to take out the trash, and something under his left foot had crunched in a sickening way. He'd howled, emptying scorpions corpses onto the floor of the kitchen, and Sam had laughed until he'd cried.

When Dean was 17, he'd almost fallen in love with a girl. She was in his history class, when he was bothering to go, and she was skinny and tough and hilarious. She wore combat boots and battered old jeans and t-shirts from a Who tour, and Dean had almost fallen in love the day that he watched her kick the quarterback of the football team in the nuts.

He hadn't fallen in love with her because before he got around to it, he'd taken a load of rock salt in his shoulder, getting between Sammy and a pair of pissed-off spirits in an old funeral home, and by the time he got back to school, the girl he'd almost fallen in love with was dating some other guy.

Wasn't the first time Sam had cost Dean something he wanted. Wouldn't be the last, either, and watching the girl he'd almost fallen in love with kiss the guy she was dating, Dean tried to believe that it was worth it.

Dean had spent the two and a half years that Sam was in Palo Alto thinking about what his life looked like, what the next fifty years looked like without Sammy.

It would be quieter. Less full of cornflakes crumbled in his sheets, no more snide eyerolls and smart-aleck responses to genuine questions. No more losing out on the chance to ask out the hot girl because his dumbass little brother didn't know to get out of the way of a pissed-off, pottery flinging poltergeist and Dean had to take it in the shoulder for him.

Kind of peaceful, and Dean tried, he really tried, to believe that peace was what he wanted in his life. The first month that Sam was gone, Dean slept in every morning (because he didn't have to get up and make sure that Sam hadn't fallen asleep on his laptop) and limped on a sprained ankle for two weeks (because Sam wasn't around to shout at Dean about icing it) and watched all the Pay-Per-View porn he wanted (which wasn't much, because porn wasn't quite as entertaining when Sammy wasn't groaning and cringing on the couch next to him).

Life without Sammy wasn't quiet - it was boring.

They drove out to Montana six weeks after Sam left, and Dean slumped in the passenger seat of Dad's truck, listening to the radio and wishing someone would complain about the Led Zeppelin marathon. Maybe Sam was happy out in California, but Dean was bored shitless without a little brother to pick on, and he didn't really know what to do with himself when Sammy wasn't there to ask him stupid, pointless, endless, questions. He was lost without Sam, and he spent two years resenting the peace and quiet, hoping that Sam was as he was.

He knew where he stood and he'd always known what his role in the family was: Dad was the hunter, and Sammy was the future, the seer, the one who was at the heart of all of it.

Dean was expendable.

And he'd always known it.

Dean had always known where he stood, and who he was: a soldier fighting a war. He'd have laid down his life whenever it was necessary without a second thought. Sometimes death was a better option than half a life, a haunted life - he'd seen enough, hunting like they did, to know that death was a mercy, and it wasn't anything to be scared of.

If he wanted to be scared, there were loots of better things to be scared of, after all.

Dean didn't want to die - there were too many monsters left to kill - he didn't have a fucking death wish, but if he had to, if death was the only option and it would keep Dad and Sammy safe, well. Dean wasn't afraid of it.

Not until he woke up in the hospital and saw his own body, broken. Not until the Reaper.

Reapers weren't evil. They harvested souls and they were the last force that pushed a body over into Death, but at the heart of them, they weren't evil. Still, Dean was more scared of her - of it, of Death and Dying both with capital D's - than he'd been of anything else in a very long time.

He saw Sam's face, when the Reaper was hovering over Dean's body, and he knew more clearly than he'd ever known before that no matter what Sammy did, no matter what he ever said, Sam was still Dean's little brother and he still needed Dean.

It had nothing to do with the things that had always scared Dean - he wasn't ready to let go of his own life because Sammy wasn't ready to lose him; because Sam's grief and fear and frustration were written so clearly on his face, and because Sam still needed him.

ii.
Dean had thrown himself in front of bullets since he was old enough to know there were bullets to throw himself in front of. When Sam was really little, Dad would come home beat to shit by whatever he'd been hunting, and Dean would patch him up, too young to be wiping blood off his own father's hands and face. When Sam got older, when he could stay by himself but before he was allowed out to hunt with them, it was always Dean who came home limping, leaning on Dad's shoulder and bleeding all over their rented kitchens, wherever they were staying at the time.

Your brother doesn't know the meaning of quit, Dad told Sam one night when Dean was sleeping on the couch, out for the count under a haze of Vicodin - he'd gotten slashed up by an angry, vengeful dead wife before Dad could hit her with a load of holy water.

At the time Sam had heard in it, implicit, you know the meaning of quit all too well, but it wasn't until later, years later, that he had heard their father's disapproval of Dean, his worry for Dean's impulses.

He'd hated his father then, sitting in dingy hotel rooms while Dean slept, pale and hurting and half-dead, again, and Sam couldn't do anything about it. He'd tightened his fingers around the styrofoam coffee cup he was inevitably holding while Dean recovered from his injuries, like a melodramatic scene in a bad movie. He'd hated his father for putting Dean in these positions, and Sam had never thought that it was Dean's fault, too - but it was, and it had been, and it always would be Dean's fault that he got hurt.

When Sam was 17, a couple of months before he'd left for California, he'd thrown the cup of coffee at his father, splattered it all over the wall behind the broken television in Pastor Jim's rectory, and Dad hadn't blinked. He'd looked at Sam, said, You're not the only one who cares about your brother.

Sam Winchester was scared of heights, of the way his brother drove. Scared that all he was going to get from life was the hunt - he'd run half a country away from his family because that wasn't what he wanted. It had been responsibility, pure and simple, until the demon took Jess and everything changed - but law school seemed pointless now, something small and childish that he'd tricked himself into believing he wanted, and hunting seemed less like responsibility and more like something it was worth devoting a life to, worth devoting his life to.

He'd had lots of friends at Stanford; he'd dated a lot of girls, before he met Jess, and he'd never walked across campus without saying hello to at least half a dozen people. Without Dean, Sam couldn't figure out who this Sam Winchester was - everyone seemed to like this guy, this Sam who went to Stanford and was pre-law and dated a pretty girl named Jess, but this guy was unfamiliar to Sam. He was a perfect stranger wearing Sam's face.

No matter how hard he tried, Sam was never going to be normal - the absence of Dean, the absence of his father, didn't make Sam any more normal. Half the time Sam didn't even know what he meant by normal - don't you ever want to be normal, he'd said to Dean when he was 15 years old and angry about everything, hating Dad and Dean and their fucked-up lives, and Dean had said, normal's fucking boring, Sammy, we're a lot more fun.

At 15, Sam hadn't wanted fun, he'd wanted normal. At 21, Jess gone and his life in shreds around him, Sam had wanted what passed for normal for them. Standing outside his apartment, watching it burn, Sam had wanted Dean, cracking jokes and driving so fast that Sam spilled his coffee all over his pants, and he'd wanted the security of having Dean at his elbow, whispering awful things and making Sam laugh in places where Sam knew he shouldn't be laughing.

Dean was unpredictable, irreverent, wild - Dean wasn't normal.

Halfway to Colorado from Palo Alto, following the coordinates in Dad's journal, Sam woke up in the passenger seat with gummi bears stuck all over his neck. Dean had grinned when Sam had glared at him, and stuck his tongue (stained red and green and orange from licking the bears before he'd stuck them to Sam) out at Sam. Fuck you, Sam had said, pulling an orange gummi bear off his neck with a slurp and bouncing it off Dean's forehead.

Dean had just laughed, and it had sounded better than anything Sam had heard while he was trying to find normal in Palo Alto.

He knew something was wrong the moment they transferred Dean from surgery back into his room and he didn't wake up immediately, complaining about the hospital food and the hospital pajamas and whining until Sam told him what had happened to the car. Dean had never stood still, not before he started hunting with John and not after - Dean was energy in motion, and seeing him still and sleeping in the hospital bed scared the shit out of Sam.

Sam didn't know what was wrong, but there was a feeling that nagged at the back of his head like Dean sitting in the back seat of the car when Sam was 13, poking Sam in the neck until Dad had shouted, All right, okay, enough already, I will turn this car right around, I swear on all that's holy I will.

The Ouija board was a last ditch effort, and it worked - he knew it was just a stupid kid's toy, but sometimes, just sometimes, it did what it said it did. When Dean - Dean who Sam couldn't see, Dean who was in trouble - shoved the pointer over to YES, Sam let out a breath he hadn't known he was holding, because no one else in the world except Dean could drawl sarcastically (and non-corporeally) through a Ouija board pointer.

Sam was scared of his brother dying, of his father dying, and of being the one left holding the shotgun, the holy water, the keys to the Impala and his father's journal. Sam was scared of looking in the mirror and not recognizing the guy he saw there, because without Dean, Sam didn't know who he was. Without Dean, Sam would have to be Dean for his father, brave and reckless and fierce.

He was 23 years old, and he'd leaned on his brother since before he could walk, and he wasn't ready to stand up on his own.

iii.
There was a lot in the world to be scared of. John knew that long before the demon ripped his life apart, shredded his family as he knew it into tiny pieces. War should be feared; the darkness and fear in other people should be feared. John knew that anyone who was afraid of you was someone that you should fear yourself.

Fear motivated the worst of human nature. John knew that, and he'd learned it over and over again.

Dean had never asked why John hunted. Dean had nodded and learned to fire a shotgun and never asked why. He hadn't always done what John had asked him to, and Dean had stepped into the line of fire more than John had ever wanted him to. John had never wanted to put his boys in the line of fire, but he hadn't known what else to do.

Sam had asked questions, endless questions - Sam had always wanted to know why. When the boys were young, Dean had answered Sam's questions with more patience than John could - Sam had trailed Dean, in their apartments and the hotel rooms and Jim's rectory, and later in the field, always wanting to know why.

Dean had always told Sam why. Dean had always stepped in front of the danger, and he'd never asked John why, not once.

John Winchester was scared of everything, and of nothing. He was only scared of one thing, and that colored everything: he was scared of losing his boys like he'd lost Mary. His family had shattered, and he'd pulled it back together the best way he knew how, and John knew that Sam didn't think that it had been a very good way at all, but it was the best he knew and he'd always loved his boys, and he'd always thought they'd known that.

He never meant to make a deal with the devil, with a demon, with the demon. He made a deal with the only thing in the world that scared him, besides losing his boys, and he did it for Dean, and for Sam.

He told Dean because Dean wouldn't ask why, because Dean would stand up and do the right thing and just keep going, like John had, and John loved him for it. Sam would ask why, and Sam would try to change John's mind, because that was what Sam did and John loved him for it.

The only way to combat fear was to face it straight on.

author's notes: my heterosexual life partner and danners both went way above and beyond the call of beta duty on this one; they took a story that wasn't much to write home about and talked me, in intense detail, through figuring out how to make it work. i *heart* them both a whole lot. the title and summary are pulled from tom stoppard's rosencrantz and guildenstern are dead. the title, specifically, is from the beginning of guildenstern's speech about un-, sub- or supernatural forces, which always makes me think of the winchesters.