Author: Minervacat
Fandom: Supernatural
Pairing: Winchester gen
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Through "Something Wicked", generally.
Summary: And Dean's old enough to remember their mother doing the same thing for him when he was sick, but Sammy doesn't remember her at all.

The people Dean loves most don't like to be touched. Not that Dean ever doubted that his father loved him and Sam; Dean didn't. John Winchester would never have kept them safe, taught them everything he knew, for as long as he did, if he didn't love his sons. It was a point-and-shoot, lock-and-load kind of love. It was what it was and it worked for them, but unless there was a wound to clean or a gunshot to tend to, it wasn't the kind of love with easy touch.

Except that's not exactly right.

Dean remembers his father hugging them; when he and Sam sat in the front seat of the Impala and watched their father drive away, again, he could still feel the imprint of his father's solid warmth around his shoulders. Dean didn't lack for touch; it was there, but sometimes he thinks that it didn't mean everything it could have.

Except that's not quite it, either.

When Dean was 12 and Sam was 8, Sam got the flu while they were home by themselves. Dad was on a quick trip to Norman, and they were alone for two days, only two days, only one night, in the two-bedroom apartment in Oklahoma City. They'd been there less than two months - it was El Paso before that, where he could call their downstairs neighbor when they got into trouble, and Gulfport, Mississippi, before El Paso - and Dean still didn't know anybody in the building well enough to ask them for help when Sammy came down with a runny nose, and then a fever, and then puked so hard Dean thought he was seriously going to throw his guts up.

But Sam didn't die, and their dad came back, and the thing that Dean remembers from that weekend - which, up until he was almost 20, was the scariest thing he'd ever seen, thinking his brother was going to die on the bathroom floor from the goddamned flu - is pushing Sam's hair out of his face while he heaved into the toilet, skin hot under Dean's hands. He remembers the way Sammy leaned into his touch, because Dean figured out later on that his hands must have felt like ice against Sam's skin.

And Dean's old enough to remember their mother doing the same thing for him when he was sick, but Sammy doesn't remember her at all.

Okay, so, that's right, back up, start over: the people Dean Winchester loves most don't think they deserved to be touched.

Dean's got two important relationships in his life: the one with his dad, and the one with his brother. Sure, once Sam got to high school, they stuck around St. Louis for two years and Tucumcari, New Mexico for the other two, long enough for Dean to meet some people who weren't his family, but they all had ordinary lives - by then Dean knew that this wasn't an ordinary life.

Sam wanted out; Sam wanted ordinary; Dean gave up two-thirds of his father's on-the-road hunting trips when Sammy was in high school so he could stay home and take care of his brother, because his goddamned brother wanted a life that wasn't his to have. So Dean never put down roots, and Dean never went out of his way to make friends, particularly, because that was ordinary, and the Winchesters were never goddamned ordinary.

Sam wouldn't have been a Winchester if he hadn't been stubborn as all hell, though, and Sammy is stubborn, has been stubborn, and Dean lost some of the best years of his life to watching Sam study for the SATs, pencil between his teeth, hair in his eyes.

And sure, maybe Dean pushed at Sam a little too hard, back then, here and now - maybe Dean prodded him with words and half-forgotten promises to their father, because even then, Sam shrugged Dean's hands off him like it was nothing. "Fuck off," Sam would say. "I'm studying, you asshole, leave me alone."

Even when he wasn't - by the time Sam was old enough to know what he wanted, he knew he didn't want Dean to touch him.

Dean has never been easy with touch; it's not how they were raised. So when he touches someone, so when Dean Winchester reaches out for someone, it's because it's the only thing left that he knows how to do. It's always worked for women; by the time Dean gets around to actually putting a hand on some girl's waist, she's practically panting for it.

Restraint, as it is in all things supernatural, is useful sometimes.

But the girls in bars, and in truck stops and in college towns never lean away from Dean like his brother does. The day he shows up on Sam's doorstep out in Cali-fucking-fornia, Sam twists away from Dean's reach a dozen times.

Sam is stubborn, just like a Winchester, but he's spent his whole life running away from his problems, if you ask Dean, and that's nothing like a Winchester at all.

Sam sleeps on his right side, one hand under the pillow, gun within easy reach. Dean sleeps on his left side, and when they're running low and cash and can't afford two beds in even the shittiest motels, they sleep back to back. Like when they were kids and still shared a bed, back to back because that way, somebody always saw what shit-eating monster was about to break down the door.

Now, Dean wakes up in the morning staring at the door to their rented room; the first week he had Sam back, he startled into waking every day for a week; he'd forgotten the familiar warm weight of his brother in his bed, Sam's back pressed against his, Sam's breathing deep and even while Dean's heart pounded in his chest.

When Sam was born, Dean was three and a half, almost four, and his father told him, "The thing about having a brother, Dean, is that you'll always have somebody to watch your back for the rest of your life."

His father said it like it was a good thing; like Dean would take care of Sam and Sam would take of Dean, because they were brothers and that's what brothers did. But not like an obligation - because they were family, but family has never been an obligation to Dean.

Sam is on the road with him, Sam came with Dean when Dean went to Palo Alto and said, "I need you." None of the Winchester men are in the habit of saying that they need anything; they want, they do, they act because they have to. But there's no need anywhere in the lines of what they do and are.

Dean needed Sam, so Dean said so; it was not something that came easily, and it was not something that he wanted to do.

Dean only did want he had to; not obligation, but need.

Sam is on the road with Dean because Sam thinks, still thinks, that family is an obligation; family is something that he owes to John and Dean and the memory of their mother. Dean knows that. Sam has still got Dean's back, like Dean had Sam's all his life, but it's because Sam thinks he has to.

Dean watches Sam's back because Sammy is Dean's little brother; when John told Dean that he'd always have someone to watch his back, Dean heard the opposite. Dean heard, "Take care of your brother, Dean." Which is understandable, since John said that, too, later on.

John never said much to Sam, not once Sam got old enough to hear anything John said; by the time Sam was old enough to understand anything, he thought he understood it all, and he didn't want to hear any of it.

Family means two different things to Dean and Sam; hell, Dean knows that hunting means two different things to them. In the language that Dean speaks, obligation is not a dirty word. In the language that Sam's learned, that Sam has carefully memorized from other people's lives, obligation is something to be avoided at all costs.

So maybe it's like this: Dean gave up trying to understand his little brother a long time ago; even before Sam left, Dean had given up trying. But there's a gravity to their lives that keeps them orbiting around each other, and sometimes, when it's late and they've been driving for too many hours, Sammy leans heavily against Dean's shoulder in the front seat of the Impala, and neither of them are dead yet, and maybe that's enough.

author's notes: this one is for cee, who knows how to tell the right stories.