No one ever wants to say - Chapter 5 - marshmallowfluff (2024)

Chapter Text

When Dad came back for them at the end of summer, Dean was pretty much all healed up and bracing himself to get torn a new one. After all, Dad had the whole summer to sit and stew on Dean’s f*ckup; a whole summer of hunting alone, not able to rely on Dean’s help with so much as research, let alone a hunt. But Dad didn’t even bring it up when he greeted them, he just gave both him and Sam a warm hug, thanked Bobby for putting up with them for so long, and then helped them load up the car.

Dean had managed to grow a whole half inch over that summer at Bobby’s despite all the energy that went into healing from the black dog attack, and he was nearly five foot seven. When Dad noticed how far his threadbare jeans stopped above his ankles, he took Dean shopping. Let him buy three new (used) pairs from a charity store, and threw a faded Rolling Stones T-shirt onto the pile when he saw Dean eyeing it, even though Dean hadn’t even asked.

He wore that T-shirt on the first day at his new school at the end of August, with nothing else under or over it because it was so hot. When he walked through the halls, he was taller than almost every girl and a lot of the other boys, too, and he caught more than a few interested glances from pretty girls in his classes. He used the boys’ locker room for PE, though he did change in one of the toilet stalls.

“I think Winchester has a third nipple he doesn’t want us to see,” jeered one of the other guys in the second week, eliciting some obliging laughter from the boys around him.

“Nah, man, I just got some inappropriate tattoos,” Dean retorted with a wink. “Why d’you wanna see my nipples so bad, anyway?”

The boy scowled as the others turned their laughter on him, and Dean just swaggered his way into the stall.

“He’s lying, we’re too young to get tattoos,” he heard the boy mutter darkly.

“I dunno, man, I think he was in a gang or something where he used to live. Probably had to get inked as some sort of initiation or something.”

“A gang? That’s bullsh*t,” someone else cut in.

“No seriously, I heard it from Bridget. She lives across the street from the apartment block his family moved into.”

“So? What would she know?”

“Her mom tried to welcome them to the neighborhood. His dad is this big scary guy, and he was real secretive, wouldn’t even say where they were moving from or why. And Bridget sees them doing these weird, hardcore training drills in the parking lot before school. Like, military-type training. That’s gang sh*t. Maybe his dad is a mob boss on the run.”

Dean snorted to himself as he eavesdropped and pulled his gym shirt over his head. He preferred this gossip to the kind at his last school.

They ended up going to four or five different schools that year (Dean didn’t keep track like Sammy did). Dean was used to being the weird kid; quiet and overlooked, picked last for team projects, the poor kid in the holey clothes that people could tell were from thrift stores. But he shot up another inch over the rest of the year until he was usually one of the tallest kids in every class, and when he grew out of his old tennis shoes his dad replaced them with a sturdy pair of work boots, and he was going on more weekend hunts with Dad (as long as they were fairly local) so he often went to school with scrapes and bruises and all his clothes smelled like graveyard smoke. So, instead of thinking he was weird-kid weird, his classmates started thinking he was rough-you-up weird.

It didn’t change things too much, really. He still got picked last for team projects, but he usually got picked first for dodgeball now. He used to sit at the end of the nerdy kids’ table during lunch because he liked listening to them talk about movies and TV and stuff and he could sometimes join the conversation, but he couldn’t do that anymore because now he made geeks nervous and they either ate in wary silence or, at one school, moved to another table after he sat down the first time. So instead, Dean usually took his lunch outside to eat under a tree if the weather allowed.

The upside, though, was that usually there were at least a few girls who thought his whole deal was mysterious and cool and liked his face enough to want to flirt. He got a lot of practice flirting that year.

“You gonna ask Madeline on a date?” Sam asked him once while they walked home from their current schools. Madeline was in Dean’s homeroom class and also had a little brother that went to Sam’s school, so she and Dean usually ended up walking over and waiting for them together. She had red hair and blue eyes and freckles and the biggest rack in their grade (other than Jennifer Higgles, whose boobs were massive but whose clothes were too frumpy and ill-fitting for it to be hot).

“Who wants to know?”

“I know Alan. That’s her little brother, he’s in the grade below me. He says he thinks she has a crush on you.”

“Well then maybe she should ask me on a date.”

“You’re the boy, you’re supposed to ask her out.”

Truth was, he thought Madeline was pretty, but she was a popular girl and except for when they fell into step halfway to the elementary school in the afternoons, she pretended he didn’t exist. Dean was fine with their after-school flirting, but he had some self-respect.

Dean really did think about what it’d be like if he had a girlfriend, sometimes: he’d treat her right, kiss her a little bit in-between classes by her locker just to make her feel special. He’d introduce her to Led Zeppelin and Metallica and borrow the Impala - you know, once he was old enough - to take her to watch the sunset and make out. He’d even make her a mixtape of his favorite songs. the problem was that he kinda wanted his girlfriend to like him. Like, him, and most of the girls who flirted with him just liked the bad boy that they thought he was.

“I don’t wanna limit myself, Sammy. You know the second you ask one girl out, all the others just stop talking to you.”

“But don’t you wanna kiss her?”

Dean laughed at the face Sam made; clearly, his little brother knew that boys Dean’s age kissed girls all the time, but found the idea pretty gross.

“You don’t gotta date a girl to kiss her, Sammy.”

Wide-eyed, Sam stared up at him. “But I thought you could only kiss your girlfriend.”

“Nah, you can kiss any girl, long as she wants it.”

“How many girls have you kissed?”

He hadn’t kissed any. He waved his hand airily. “Too many to count, Sammy.”

Of course, Dean wasn’t expecting Sam to relay the news to their father that evening. Then again, he wasn’t expecting their father to be home.

“Dad, Dean says he’s kissed loads of girls, he doesn’t even know how many,” Sam announced across the kitchen table with his fork halfway between his plate and his mouth.

“Sam!” Dean hissed, stomping on his brother’s foot under the table.

“Ow!”

“Is that so?” Dad replied with a raised brow.

Dean hunched down in his chair and glared at his plate, moving around some mushy peas with the end of his fork. He didn’t say anything.

“I said I thought you’re only supposed to kiss your girlfriend. But he says you can kiss any girl if she wants you to.”

Dean could feel Dad’s eyes on him and shoveled a forkful of peas into his mouth.

“I guess that’s true. But that’s only if you don’t have a girlfriend, Sammy. If you have a girlfriend, and you kiss another girl, that’s cheating.”

“Oh.” Sam sat in thoughtful silence as he moved his own food around on his plate. “But you don’t have to kiss a whole bunch of girls that aren’t your girlfriend, right? If you don’t want to?”

“I never even said anything like that,” Dean muttered under his breath.

“No, you don’t have to kiss any girl you don’t want to,” Dad assured Sam.

“I’m only ever gonna kiss my girlfriend, then,” announced Sam. “So it’s special.”

Dean felt himself heat up, irritated and defensive, even though it was all a lie and he hadn’t even had his first kiss yet. Who cared if he kissed a lot of girls? It wouldn’t make kissing his girlfriend any less special when he got one.

“You’re such a little bitch, Sammy.”

“Hey! Jerk!”

Dad groaned and rubbed his temple. “Finish your dinner, boys.”

Later that night, Dad sat on the foot of Dean’s bed while he was watching The Twilight Zone on the fuzzy TV and Sam was in the shower. Dean’s arms were crossed over his chest and he hadn’t been able to relax his scowl since dinnertime.

“It’s alright to be a little girl-crazy, Dean. It’s normal for a boy your age,” Dad said gently, hands clasped between his knees.

“Whatever. Sammy didn’t have to be such a friggin’ tattletale.”

“Hey, stow the ‘tude, dude, and forget about Sammy. I’m just trying to have a talk, you and me.”

Dean reluctantly dragged his eyes away from the black-and-white picture on the TV screen.

“Fine. What.” Dad gave him a look, and Dean forced his arms to uncross and tried to relax his frown. “Sorry, Dad. Whatdya wanna talk about?”

They looked at each other in silence for a few moments; Dean watched his dad’s eyes flicker as they moved around, tracing the curves of his face. His dumb freckles and his girly lips. He wondered what Dad saw in them.

“You’re growing up,” Dad finally continued, and it sounded eerily similar to what he’d once said to Dean in the hallway at Uncle Bobby’s. His tone was different now, though. Cautious instead of weary. A little awkward instead of regretful. “Like I said, liking girls is normal for boys your age. I can’t stop that, even if I wanted to. And I know if you wanna kiss girls, you’re gonna find a way to do it, even if you have to do it behind my back. I don’t want to make you feel like you have to keep secrets from me, Dean.”

“Oh,” Dean said, pushing against the mattress to shove himself further up the headboard. This was one ofthosetalks. Dad didn’t have talks like this with him too often; serious talks about regular life stuff that had nothing to do with hunting. Like a normal father-son talk. “Yeah, Dad, I know. I don’t feel like I have to keep secrets from you, I promise. The kissing girls stuff, it’s just…”

Dad raised his hand. “It’s alright, Dean, I get it. I don’t need all the details, that’s not what I’m asking for. I guess I just… wanted to make sure you’re safe.”

“Safe?”

“Yeah, Dean, safe. If you’re kissing girls now, you might want to… try other things, soon. And I want to make sure you stay safe.”

They stared at each other, communicating silently. Dean knew that Dad wasn’t talking about STDs and stuff. He knew what Dad wanted to make sure that he was keeping safe from.

“Don’t worry, Dad,” he said with a reassuring smile. “I’m real careful.” Like what he’d said about kissing loads of girls wasn’t a load of horse sh*t. “I know what I need to do to stay safe.”

Dean was grateful that they weren’t saying the words aloud. That his dad didn’t feel like he had to verbally remind him that he couldn’t just drop trou with any girl from school (even if he wanted to); that he was treating Dean like an adult and not making him feel weird or bad even though they both knew what the message was underneath it all.

“That’s good, Dean. I know you do. I just wanted to make sure.”

Dean offered his dad a hesitant smirk. “They taught us how to use condoms in my seventh-grade health class. I swear I won’t get a girl pregnant.”

Dad raised an eyebrow but then he just smiled, and he didn't call Dean on his fake bravado because they both knew that he didn't have to. He reached out and put his big hand on Dean’s shoulder with a chuckle. “Glad if my son is a ladykiller, at least he’s a responsible one.” They both laughed a little. It was like a normal father-son talk, one that any man would have with his teenage boy. “Y’know, I’m not exactly surprised you’d have girls knocking down your door. You’re a good-looking boy, Deano. You're taking after your old man.”

They both knew which parent Dean really looked more like, too, but that didn’t need to be said aloud either. That was something that Dad only ever said aloud when he was drunk.

“You look so much like your mother,” he would slur while Dean ducked under his father’s arm and wrapped his own arm around his father’s ribs to help him stumble across the room onto his bed or the couch. Dad would get this look on his face when he said it, like longing and pride and grief all mixed together. Sometimes he'd cry a little bit, too, just a few tears from each eye that he'd be too sloshed to be ashamed of. He usually only cried like that if he'd been yelling in a drunken rage earlier, though.

Dean didn't mind looking like his mom; it made him feel less bad about his girly face. He wouldn't mind if his dad told him that sometime when he was sober. Dean almost thought he'd prefer it; for his dad to say it while they stood facing each other, for him to clap his hand on Dean’s shoulder and say it with a smile. Instead, Dean only ever heard it when he was helping his dad out of his boots and the sentence smelled of whiskey and salt. It made the words feel dirty.

Not as dirty as some other things made him feel, though.

Sickness was very rarely something that Dean had to deal with. He'd gotten the flu once or twice in elementary school and usually got a cold that gave him the sniffles for a few days every winter, but he generally didn't catch bugs. So when he woke up one morning a few months after his sixteenth birthday feeling a little under the weather, he didn't think too much of it.

It started with just a sort of weird, shaky feeling in his arms and legs. By the time he dropped Sam off at his middle school, though, the muscles in his legs had started to ache; the kind of weary muscle ache that he barely remembered from the bad flu he caught in fifth grade.

Over the course of the rest of the morning, the muscle aches got worse and Dean started to get a stomach ache, too. It wasn't like any stomach ache he'd had before, either. Felt like his guts were twisting into knots, the pain ebbing and flowing. Each time it disappeared, Dean hoped it was for the last time. Then the pain would return. God, he hoped it was just something he ate and not, like, appendicitis or something.

He didn't feel all that hungry when lunch time came, but he got into the lunch line anyway. He was planning to just get the tomato soup and crackers in the hopes that it'd settle his stomach. As the line progressed, Dean noticed that his shoulders were hunched and he had unconsciously wrapped his arms around his middle, wincing every time his stomach throbbed. He could hear a couple girls giggling in the line behind him. That wasn't all that unusual, but after a while when the giggles and whispers didn't stop, he felt the short hairs on the back of his neck prickle with the sense that the girls were laughing at him.

He tried to ignore the feeling until a familiar, mocking laugh joined in. It was one of the boys in his class, Nick Jameson, who always made a point of commenting on Dean’s ratty second-hand clothes because he’d heard about his ex-girlfriend kissing Dean under the bleachers. She hadn't, of course; they'd just ran into each other there one time and talked for a while, but Nick didn't believe that.

Rolling his eyes, Dean turned to scowl at the kids in line behind him. Some of the girls went silent at his expression, though a couple could only try to muffle their laughter behind their hands and Nick was grinning ear to ear.

“Wanna let me in on the joke?” Dean asked irately. He wasn't in the mood for this, what with his full-body aches and the chills and the bizarre way his stomach had been hurting all morning. The girls tittered and Nick shrugged.

“The girls here were just wondering if you wanted to borrow a tampon,” he said jeeringly, “‘Cause it looks like you got your period!”

Nick and the girls broke into fits of laughter again, and Dean felt all the blood leave his face to pool in his gut. His lips suddenly felt very dry and his tongue darted out to wet them. His hands twitched and moved unconsciously; he almost reached around to touch his fingertips to the seat of his jeans to see if he could feel anything, but thought better of touching himself there in the middle of the crowded cafeteria.

“What?” he managed to force through gritted teeth, and his voice came a lot harsher than he'd really intended. Some of the girls stopped laughing again, nervous, but Nick didn't seem perturbed.

“I mean either you sat in ketchup or you bled through your panties, Winchester. Don't worry, Jenna’s got a spare skirt in her locker if you need to change.”

Dean scowled and clenched his hands into fists as he shoved out of the lunch line through the small group, knocking shoulders with Nick as he walked past him. “f*ck you, Jameson,” he growled, and Nick held up his hands as he stumbled out of the way.

As he stalked through the cafeteria, Dean began shucking his flannel down over his shoulders. While he slung it around his waist to cover the back of his jeans, he could hear Nick saying to the girls, “Damn, he should go to the school nurse for that PMS.”

Dean made a beeline to the farthest boys’ bathroom with a knot in his throat. He knew before he’d even locked himself in a stall and pulled his pants down, though. He knew before he saw the blood. How dirty he was.

Why’d this have to happen to me? he thought bitterly to himself as he yanked off one of his boots and pulled off his holey sock to tuck into his underwear to soak up the blood (he probably could have just used one of the socks that he was already packing, but the thought of bleeding like this and also not being able to feel that comforting bulge between his legs was too much to bear). Why couldn’t it just…

He didn’t really have a coherent end to that thought. This is what happened to people like him. People with bodies like he had.

He ducked out of the school through the side door and went behind the dumpsters to pull on his hair and try not to scream or cry in peace. Every time his guts twisted in pain - not your ‘guts ’, you know what it’s called - he felt like puking.

“f*ck,” Dean said to himself under his breath. “f*ck.”

A black dog can’t get you out of this, the little voice whispered into his ear. What are you gonna try this time? You think it’ll make your dad proud?

Full of rage and self-disgust, Dean didn’t even realize that he’d thrown the punch until he felt the bright burst of pain as his knuckles collided with the brick wall.

He sat in the Impala for half an hour, key in the ignition, staring at his bleeding knuckles as he thought. He needed supplies, but he couldn’t make himself start the car to drive to the store. The thought of making that purchase was unbearable. The idea of getting caught trying to steal it was even worse. In that moment, Dean thought that he’d rather die. He didn’t know what to f*cking do.

It was a hot day, and he’d lowered the windows to let the air in. Through the open window, Dean heard the sound of giggling; it carried on the breeze and landed softly in his ears. Dean turned his head to see a young mother walking along the sidewalk, pushing along a toddler in a stroller with a small boy walking beside her. As Dean watched, the young boy tugged at his mother’s pants and asked for water. The toddler in the stroller heard his brother’s question and stuck his chubby hand out towards him, offering his own sippy cup of juice.

Dean swallowed dryly. Yeah, Dean was the big brother… he took care of Sam. He cooked and cleaned and budgeted and hunted and he… he just did everything that he was supposed to do. But he could remember small fingers in his hair, a quiet voice asking him if he was alright. Concerned hazel eyes looking up at him. A hand offering up the prize from the emptied cereal box.

Dean turned the key in the ignition. Sometimes, when he needed it, Sammy took care of him.

Dean finally had his first kiss when he was still sixteen and Dad left him to stew at a troubled boys’ home. Robin was sweet and soft and made him go all giddy when he thought about her in a way that he’d never felt before.

Life at Sonny’s was weird. Dean didn’t have to count out the cash and revise the budget twice a week like he normally did. He didn’t have to write the grocery list and do the shopping. He didn’t have to walk Sammy to school or pick him up after and he wasn’t helping his dad with a hunt, which meant he had hours free after school every day; so many that he could join the wrestling team. He didn’t have to help his dad clean up and get ready for bed at night after he got home from the bar, either, which meant he was going to sleep early and getting a full eight hours a night. And he got fed three times a day, and he didn’t even have to pay for it or plan the meals; he just had to do his fair share of the chores, which meant helping with meal prep once a week. Dean didn’t remember a time in his life - outside of staying at Uncle Bobby’s house for the summer after the black dog - where he’d ever been so consistently not hungry for so long.

He missed his dad and little brother like absent limbs, but for some reason even despite that, school seemed easier than it ever had been before. Something about the classes, maybe; or maybe Sonny put a good word in for him with the teachers. It wasn’t so hard to stay awake or pay attention and he got good grades for the first time in his whole life. It even felt easier to talk to the other kids in his classes, and he felt like he actually had buddies on the wrestling team. And none of them ever commented on why Dean never changed or showered with them.

Dean wished that he could have taken Robin to the homecoming dance; wished he could have put his hands on her hips and swayed with her to whatever dumb pop music the student council blared over the speakers in the decorated gymnasium, even if it was Mariah Carey. He wished that he’d gotten to kiss her more; to feel that nervous joy flutter in his stomach and that throbbing heat flare in his groin as she moved her soft lips against his.

Maybe they could have gone outside at some point and made out under the cover of the night. He could imagine her pushing him onto his back in the grass, getting on top of him, holding him down with her hands on his chest to kiss him with the moon lighting up the back of her brown hair and making the flyaways glow silver. Maybe she would have taken his hands in hers and put his palms on her breasts. He would have been so appreciative; touched her so gently, made her feel so pretty.

There would be other girls, though. He only had one dad and one brother, and they needed him.

“You learn your lesson, Dean?” Dad asked him when he climbed into the car outside of Sonny's.

Dean wasn’t sure what lesson he was supposed to have learned. It certainly wasn’t about stealing, because Dad stole all the time. When the budget went short, it was Dean’s job to make it work. If he had to spend food money on rat traps and steel wool because the landlord refused to, then he had to try to make it up somehow with odd jobs or poker games. And if a few bad hands meant that he lost the rest, then… Well.

It was Dean’s job to keep Sam safe from rat bites and rat sh*t and the Bubonic plague, and his job to keep Sam fed. Dad wouldn’t have minded him stealing to do that if he hadn’t gotten caught. And it wasn’t like letting him get sent to a boys’ home had taught Dean how to not get caught shoplifting or taught him how to not lose food money.

Dean was pretty sure that this was one of those times where Dad had just gotten pissed off and reacted without really thinking too much about what his actions were meant to be teaching, and that if Dean asked him to clarify what lesson he was supposed to have learned then his dad would just get mad and lecture him but never be able to give him a straight answer.

It didn’t matter, though. Dean had learned a lesson. It didn’t have anything to do with getting caught shoplifting or losing the food money, but he’d learned one alright.

“Dean?” his dad prompted, and Dean looked at him, then made eye contact with Sam in the rearview mirror.

“Yes, sir. I learned my lesson.”

A few months after Sonny’s Place, Dad sat across from Dean at the dinner table one night with a grin while Dean was half-heartedly struggling through his biology homework. School had gotten hard again. He knew that they’d been going easy on him while he was at Sonny’s.

Dean glanced up at his dad absent-mindedly, but then put down his stubby, chewed-on pencil at the sight of his father’s eager expression.

“What?”

“You’ve got your winter break coming up in a few days, right?”

Dean tapped the eraser-less end of his pencil against the table and searched his dad’s face for an explanation for his mood. “Yeah, Friday’s the last day of school and then we’re off until January third.”

His dad nodded along and put his forearm on the tabletop, leaning forward with a smile. “You up for a hunt?”

Dean was always up for a hunt, but Dad’s mood made him think that he thought Dean would be particularly interested in this one. He was curious.

“What kind of hunt?”

“Something’s injured a few ranchers down near San Antonio. Been killing their livestock, too. Haven’t IDed it yet; could be vampires, maybe a wendigo.”

Dean felt himself perk up at the mention of San Antonio and ranchers; taking a trip down south where it was warm and sunny in December sounded fun even without the added bonus of f*ckin’ cowboys. But then he furrowed his brows in confusion.

“But Dad, that’s like a sixteen-hour drive. It’d be at least a week before we could get back. It’s almost Christmas.” He bit his lip; he didn’t want to leave Sammy all alone in their shabby little Kentucky apartment for the holiday, even if celebrating it together usually amounted to eating takeout Chinese and watching the game (and Dad letting them put a little rum in their eggnog as a treat).

But Dad just smiled. “Don’t worry about that. I got it covered. I’ll be staying here with Sam; you’re going without me.”

Feeling even more confused, Dean co*cked his head and felt himself frown, mouth hanging open slightly but not knowing what he wanted to say. Dad was still grinning like he expected Dean to say thank-you, which meant that this wasn’t supposed to be some sort of punishment.

“I don’t get it,” Dean finally admitted, and Dad laughed.

“Alright, alright. Here’s the deal: I was talkin’ to Abe this morning and he told me that Caleb was gearing up to go on this hunt solo. And I got to thinkin’, sounded right up your alley, and even though it doesn’t look like a hunt that needs more than one hunter, it never hurts to be careful. So I volunteered you; asked if Caleb would appreciate an extra hand, and he said he’d always welcome one coming from Dean Winchester.” Dad finished with a smile and spread his hands in a benevolent gesture. “So, whatdya think?”

Slowly, Dean let a smile spread across his face as he felt nervous excitement expand in his stomach. “Really? Just me and Caleb?”

His dad nodded. “He happens to be in Virginia right now, he’s gonna swing up and pick you up on the way tomorrow morning. I’ll get you excused from school for tomorrow and Friday, let them know we’re leaving early on a family vacation.”

Dean put down his pencil with a smile. “So I don’t have to finish my homework?”

“No, you’ve gotta start packing,” his dad responded with a chuckle.

By midday the next day, Dean was sitting in the passenger seat of Caleb’s truck, duffel tossed in the backseat on top of Caleb’s gear. Dean was a little quiet at first, since it had been a while, but Caleb acted so happy to see him and excited to talk to him that it wasn’t too long before Dean was chattering and laughing and singing along to the radio.

They got burgers for lunch and for dinner, and Caleb even paid for Dean’s. That first night, they slept inside the truck; Dean sprawled, cramped, in the back and Caleb sitting up in the passenger seat. The next night, though, having finally reached San Antonio, it was warm enough at night for them to lay out Caleb’s bedrolls in the truck bed and lie down on them, side-by-side, to fall asleep with their eyes turned up to the night sky.

Caleb was still just as much older than Dean as he always had been, but he felt so much more real now. Still larger-than-life, but solid. And warm. Tall and cool, dusty cowboy boots kicked off and thrown back into the truck through the open rear window. Holey wool socks and ratty, washed-out jeans and slightly too-long facial hair that he kept scratching with blunt fingernails. They had to lie so close in the truck bed that Dean could feel Caleb’s body heat like a physical touch along the line of his side. It made Dean feel hot.

"You know,” Caleb said quietly in the dark as they looked up at the starry sky. “My old man is pretty set in his ways. And… Well, I used to be like that a little bit, too.” He took a breath, and Dean held his. “Like I, uh, felt like I was humoring you, kinda, back when you were a kid. But I don't feel like that anymore. I don't even think of that old you as someone different, you know? That little boy at Pastor Jim’s place, followin’ me ‘round like a goddamn duckling… It's like you've always been Dean to me."

Dean felt his cheeks heat up and something swell in his chest. “I didn’t follow you around like a friggin’- like a f*ckin’ duckling.” It wasn’t like he’d been a baby or anything, he wasn’t that much younger than Caleb. And now he was sixteen; still a kid, yeah, but only a month away from seventeen and so close to eighteen that he could almost taste it.

“Aww, c’mon, Blondie, you don’t gotta be embarrassed. It was cute.”

“f*ck off, I ain’t cute.” He rolled over onto his side so that Caleb couldn’t turn his head and see how darkly he was blushing. Caleb just laughed and reached over to ruffle his hair like… like Dean was his kid brother or something. Dean knocked his hand away with enough force to make Caleb yelp.

“Jee-zus, Blondie; you’re gonna break my finger ‘fore we even start the hunt.”

Dean and Caleb worked well together. An hour or so outside of San Antonio, the two of them posed as brothers and got short-term jobs as ranch hands at one of the local ranches. Dean toted hay and shoveled sh*t in the barns and chatted up the fourteen- and seventeen-year-old daughters of the cattle rancher, while Caleb helped some of the full-time ranch hands mend fences and herd the cattle for feeding and asked about the strange happenings while they ate their lunches in the fields.

What it ended up being was a chupacabra - well, two chupacabras - which might have been the coolest thing it could’ve been.

“Y’know, people only started seein’ these things in the eighties?” Caleb asked Dean as the two of them stood over two frankly bizarre corpses. The monsters looked like the mutant crossbreed of some sort of weird dog and a mosquito. Almost like someone had taken two animals and melded them together with some sort of wacky sci-fi contraption.

“So they’re new? Do they make new monsters? Always kinda figured whatever’s out there’s been around since… like, forever.”

Caleb shrugged. “Beats me. To be honest, I thought they were an urban legend.”

“‘Cause we know those are never real.” Dean kicked at one of the chupacabra’s hairy, hook-clawed feet. “Why’d they call ‘em chupacabras, anyway? I woulda called it a… skeeterdog. A dogsquito.Wait! I got it: Brundlesquito!”

Caleb laughed, a full belly laugh, and clapped his hand on Dean’s shoulder. “I guess it does look kinda Cronenberg.”

Caleb left Dean to get started on making the fire pit while he went to find some lighter fluid. He returned forty minutes later with the lighter fluid, a six-pack, and two joints tucked into his breast pocket.

“You smoke, Blondie?” Caleb asked him after the fire was roaring, the sounds of branches cracking and monster flesh spitting and popping filling the air. He held out one of the joints to Dean, who took it between his fingers.

“Uh…”

Caleb smirked. “I’d stop at three hits if it’s your first time. You can save the rest for later.”

Dean put the joint between his lips the way he’d seen Caleb do with cigarettes, and then leaned forward when Caleb beaconed him to. With the heat of the fire beating on the side of his face, Dean watched Caleb’s hand as he lifted his Zippo up to light the end of Dean’s joint. The man’s expression was relaxed, a contented grin curling up the corners of his mouth, the light from the fire making his facial hair reddish and casting shadows on his cheekbones and well-defined jaw. He looked like he could be a classic movie star. He and Dean could be real cowboys, camping together; that smell from the fire pit could be a spitted rabbit instead of torched dogsquito.

The first inhale from the lit joint tasted just like the stink that always clung to the clothes of the stoners at school. A second later, Dean’s lungs protested the heat and the smoke and he had to grab the joint out of his mouth so that it wouldn’t fall to the ground when he bent over, coughing.

Laughing, Caleb rubbed Dean’s back. His big palm burned Dean’s skin through his shirt and left his skin tingling. “Everyone coughs the first time, D. You’ll get used to it.”

An hour later, Dean’s body felt light and floaty and everything around him just seemed… really, really awesome. He and Caleb had cracked a couple beers after they got high, and they’d been talking and laughing and watching the sparks from the fire float up into the sky and melt into the stars. Caleb’s voice was really nice. It vibrated. Dean wanted… He wanted to say something and have his voice sound like that. He wanted to feel it in his own chest. He wanted to swallow Caleb’s voice.

They were sitting next to each other, so close that Dean could feel Caleb's knee brushing his own whenever Caleb shifted to pick up his beer bottle and take another drink. The firelight was making him glow up in the night, the shadows across his handsome face flickering and dancing in the faint desert breeze. Everything else around them was dark and quiet. Caleb turned and caught Dean staring, grinned and shook his head.

“You really are somethin’, D, you know that?” he asked. His big hand reached over to pat Dean's knee fondly. Innocently.

The feel of Caleb's hand on his leg sent a hot spark shooting from the warm touch straight to Dean’s groin, and Dean looked away quickly and shifted his hips. His dumb, floaty brain suddenly wondered what they'd be doing right now if Dean was a girl… He lifted his bottle to his lips and downed a swig, hoping that Caleb couldn’t see him blushing in the firelight. Even if Dean was a girl, they probably wouldn’t be doing anything. Caleb was twenty-seven and Dean was just some punk-ass kid that he was forced to babysit sometimes. And, and why was Dean even thinking about that in the first place? He pushed the thoughts away.

When Dean woke up the next morning, he wasn’t lying next to Caleb in the dirt by the blistering fire pit, or even in the bed of Caleb’s truck. Instead, Dean was lying on a pile of dusty straw with his hands tied behind his back, his feet similarly bound.

“f*ck,” he hissed quietly; his head was throbbing, his stomach turning, and his bladder was uncomfortably full. A knicker sounded from behind him, startling him enough to nearly piss his pants, and Dean rolled over to find himself in one of the horse stalls with an unimpressed stallion looking down at him.

“What?” Dean whispered to the horse indignantly. “Obviously I’m not here on purpose!”

It took him a good ten minutes to struggle out of the rope binding his limbs, but his dad had taught him well. He pissed on the hay in the corner of the stall before doing anything else, because hunting with a full bladder was a surefire way to make a dumb mistake and get yourself killed. He tried to ignore the horse side-eyeing him the whole time.

After he’d finished, Dean quietly jumped the stall door and then found his knife and his gun tossed on top of a wooden table. He gingerly checked the cartridge - there were two bullets left - before prowling through the shadows towards the faint voices that he could hear coming from the main barn.

“I just want to know who else knows,” an agitated voice was saying. “You hunters are like roaches; there’s never just two. You tell me who else knows about me or I’ll drag your little brother out here and slit his throat right in front of you.”

“Don’t.” That was Caleb’s voice; it sounded raspy and strangled, but it was him. “Don’t hurt the kid. I told you, no one else knows; we didn’t even know you were involved. We thought it was just the chupacabras, we were about to leave.”

Dean peered through the ajar barn door; inside, one of the ranch hands - an older guy with a craggy face who hadn’t started long before him and Caleb got there - was brandishing a co*cked revolver at Caleb. Caleb was standing on a stool, barely conscious, strung up with his wrists bound in front of him and a rope tied around his neck. The end of the rope was looped around one of the rafters above him, and a slow trickle of blood had dripped from his hairline to his earlobe. Dean felt his heart thumping hard in his chest, his pulse racing.

“Liar!” the ranch hand spit at the younger man. “Any hunter worth his salt knows chups ain’t born natural, they gotta be made. If you were after my pets, you were after me, and I wanna know who sent you my way! I’ll let the kid live if you tell me the truth.”

“Listen, hoss, I don’t know what the hunters this close to the border know, but where I’m from we ain’t know jack sh*t about chupacabras! We didn’t even know they were real, honest.”

The man sneered and raised his gun. Dean could see Caleb’s eyes widen, his Adam’s apple bob under the tight rope around his neck.

“If you’re not gonna tell me, I’ll see how talkative your brother is,” the guy said, and Dean felt the world fade around him as he saw the older man kick his foot out at the spindly legs of the stool that Caleb was balancing on.

Dean slammed open the barn door at the same time that the man’s booted foot collided with the leg of the stool, knocking it out from under Caleb’s feet. Without hesitation, Dean raised his pistol and shot clear through the rope before it even went taut.

With a shout, Caleb collapsed to the floor in a heap and the other man turned around to look at Dean with shock and fear, the whites showing all around his eyes. He swung his arm to point his revolver at Dean. Just as the ranch hand’s finger began to tighten on the trigger, Dean shot him in the shoulder with his last bullet.

The man fell into the dust, gun tumbling from his limp hand. Dean darted forward, reaching out to help Caleb to his feet and pull the loop of rope off and over his head.

“Caleb! You alright, man?” he asked, panicked. Caleb coughed for a second while Dean rubbed his back, but otherwise seemed alright.

"Damn, D, y'sure are somethin’," Caleb told him, staring at him in awe while Dean cut away the ropes that tied his wrists together. With his freed hands, he raised his fingers to rub at his neck, brushing over the burns left by the rope that had nearly killed him. “f*ck. f*ck. Ain’t never seen anyone make a shot like that, not ever. Not outside of f*ckin’ Clint Eastwood flicks.”

Shaking with adrenaline and itching to get away from the bleeding body that was lying barely a few feet away, Dean grinned. “Well, you do call me Blondie for a reason.”

“I guess I do.”

If they were in a Western flick and Caleb was a girl, this was where Dean would lift him up into his arms and carry him away on horseback. Instead, he helped Caleb get to his feet and dust off. Caleb looked over at the unconscious man on the floor, and then walked slowly over to him and bent to pick up his dropped revolver.

“Guess he was hired to take out competin’ ranchers’ livestock,” Caleb told Dean. “Seems chupacabras really were made in the eighties. Some sorta Mexican witchy invention. Freaky stuff.”

“Well, I took out his firing arm, so if the spell or whatever takes more than one hand, he won't be making any more for a long time,” Dean said.

Caleb stared down at the bleeding body with an indeterminate expression creasing the corners of his eyes and etching into his tanned face.

“No, he won't,” he agreed, and then he pointed the gun at the unconscious man’s face and shot him in the forehead.

The body didn't even twitch, but Dean flinched and stumbled back a step, wide-eyed.

“What the f*ck, Caleb?” he hissed. “He was human!”

“The monsters he was makin’ weren't,” Caleb replied grimly.

“Okay, sure, but no one got hurt except for a few cows!”

“And you and me,” Caleb added, gesturing to the rope burns around Dean’s wrists and his own neck. “In case you forgot what just happened two minutes ago, I'd be hangin’ with my head on crooked if you weren’t a better shot than f*ckin’ Wild Bill. And he was about to turn this gun on you; you think he wouldn'ta took that shot if you hadn’t got ‘im first?”

Dean just stared down at the corpse. The man’s eyes had been closed before Caleb shot him, but they were slitted now, a sliver of off-white sclera showing underneath his lax eyelids. When Caleb’s hand landed on Dean’s shoulder, he jumped.

“C’mon, Blondie,” Caleb said gently. “You musta heard what he was tellin’ me. He wouldn’ta just let us get away with killin’ his ‘pets’ and you shootin’ his arm. This was how it had to be. You get that, right?”

After a beat, Dean nodded. Caleb was right. The man had had the power to make mutant monsters; there was no way to know what else he could’ve done. That knowledge didn't quell the bitterness festering in his gut, though; Dean hadn't talked to the guy more than a handful of times, but he remembered the man talking about a daughter off at college. How he was working at the ranch to pay for her tuition. He’d probably taken the job of sabotaging the cattle to support his daughter, too.

Dean wondered if the man’s daughter would be sad when her dad went missing.

They were able to find a dusty tarp hanging up on the wall of the barn and used it to wrap up the body. Then, Caleb dragged it to load into his truck while Dean mopped and scrubbed the blood off of the concrete floor. He stared intently at his dry-cracked knuckles as he did so and only focused his vision on the soapy water when it was clear, the suds white. He didn't watch the pink water pour into the dirt when he emptied the bucket out onto the dry grass around the side of the barn.

They dug a grave for the dead man three hours northeast of San Antonio, ten feet away from the highway in a dusty field under the black night sky. This time, when they salted and burned the corpse, they didn't smoke a joint or crack any beers.

A couple days later, after Caleb had dropped him back off at their little apartment in Kentucky, Dean recounted the tale of his heroics to Sam and Dad over dinner. "Then the witch or whatever he was kicked the stool out from under Caleb’s feet, an’ he was literally falling through the air, an' I whipped out my gun lightning-quick and just aimed and -" he mimed holding up his gun and staring down the sight, bracing against the kickback with both hands, "- Pow! One shot, dude! I shot through the rope before he could even finish falling. You shoulda seen it, it was like, like the friggin' shot of a lifetime!"

“No way!” Sam said, mouth agape. He looked suitably impressed, and Dean preened and then looked to his father with a hopeful grin.

“Just don't let it go to your head,” Dad said wryly. “Can’t get too confident. You've missed easier shots before.”

Dean felt the spark in his chest snuff out immediately like a bucket of cold water had been poured out over him. He swallowed the knot in his throat, his grin faltering.

“‘Course not, Dad. I won’t let it get to my head.”

It was harsh, but fair. Dad was right, Dean had missed easier shots before. It never hurt to remember that. Dean pushed his food around with his flimsy fork and decided not to mention that when he'd shot the man right after - when he’d pointed his gun at Dean - Dean hadn't shot to kill. The guy had died anyway, so what did it matter? He hadn’t blown the guy’s brains out, but some college girl out there still didn’t have a dad anymore.

He pushed himself a little harder in training after that. If he missed a target during shooting practice, his dad would twist up his mouth and raise an eyebrow at him; a silent You can do better than that, kiddo, that didn’t need to be vocalized. Because missing a shot, that was as good as getting someone killed on a hunt. As good as getting his dad or his brother killed.

If he hit every target dead-on, then… Well, that was just what was expected, so his dad wouldn’t say anything. What was Dad supposed to do, smile at him and spin him around and take him out for McDonald’s? At least he didn’t give Dean that silent look of disappointment.

Sometimes, though, Dad would surprise him on just a normal day when Dean hadn't even done anything particularly noteworthy. He’d swing by when he was supposed to be casing a haunted house and take Dean and Sam out for chicken wings, and he’d laugh and joke around with them just like how the other dads did with their kids. And he’d look at Dean with such gratitude, sometimes, when he came home after a long night of research or a rough hunt and Dean had the apartment or motel room or trailer tidy and dinner in the mini-fridge and all that Dad had to do was take off his boots and Dean took care of the rest.

And a week after he turned seventeen, Dad swung by his high school during lunch break just to wish him a late happy birthday - even though he was still in the middle of a hunt - and take him to the diner down the road. And Dean felt really special when he was dropped back off at school afterwards, because his dad was a hero and had told him all about the Crocotta that he was hunting, and Dean had gotten to eat a good burger and an ice cream sundae for lunch when all the other kids had been stuck in the cafeteria.

And life was almost okay, with Dean old enough to start scoring higher paying odd jobs to keep the money flowing while Dad was gone, and with graduation on the horizon. Life was almost okay, because even though Sam’s voice had started to crack and he was shooting up like a weed and Dean didn’t have a single mustache hair to his name, Dean was tall, too. Life was almost okay, because even though people thought he was a couple years younger than he really was, at least they thought that he looked like a boy. At least he’d only been ganged up on in the bathroom once, and never again since then.

Life was almost okay, except for when he absent-mindedly rubbed at his jaw and felt that horrible pang in his gut at the baby-smooth feel of his cheek; except for when he glanced at himself in the mirror and wondered how long he’d be able to pass as a teenage boy until people started to read him as a dyke again; except for when he had to go to the bathroom and be reminded that all he was packing in his jeans were a silver knife or his .45 and a pair of socks.

And then Sam went on his first hunt with Dad, just the two of them, and called Dean afterwards to let him know that they were okay and that the whole thing had been some sort of backdoor conspiracy to get Dean sex change drugs.

“It’s the coolest place, Dean,” Sam told him breathlessly over the phone. “There’re other transgender kids there, too, and they’re getting these treatments, and the doctor said he’d give you them for free.”

Dean listened to the way his little brother’s voice was cracking in his excitement, the way it was at least two octaves lower than it had been a year ago - probably lower than Dean’s was now - and he couldn’t help but feel angry.

“Dean?” Sam finally said after a long moment of silence, and Dean swallowed.

“What, like dick pills? The fake supplements they give to old geezers to keep them feeling macho in their old age?” he retorted sourly.

“Hormone replacement therapy,” Sam replied after hesitating, taken aback by his brother’s tone. “You know. I told you about it once. You get it like an injection, I think.”

Dean remembered reading about it in that stupid packet that Sam had given him all those years ago. Hormone pills - or injections or whatever - that people like him could take to feel a little bit better about themselves. He’d toyed with the idea a few times, late at night while he tried to fall asleep, and sometimes early in the morning while he studiously ignored Sam’s morning wood and tried not to feel like a creep for being jealous of his little brother’s wet dreams. But they were just idle thoughts, flights of fancy; he’d known that it wasn’t like he’d ever be able to be issued any kind of prescription. They didn’t have health insurance, they never went to the doctor, and on top of that, no one was ever supposed to know.

Besides, what did it matter? What did he need those stupid drugs for? Dean didn't care about f*cking medicine. What, to fix up his brain? To turn him into a 'roided out freak? He knew what those female bodybuilders looked like, and they didn’t look like men. Who cared about what stupid chemical was floating around with his red blood cells; Dean was already a man, he didn’t need to inject himself with fake hormones to make him feel like less of a faker or something.

And Dean didn’t want to have to inject himself with something every day just for a shadowy imitation of what other guys’ balls could produce naturally. What Dean wanted was for his body to feel right. He wanted to rub his chin and feel stubble against his palm, he wanted to feel his voice rumble in his chest like it was supposed to. He wanted to run his fingers over his belly and feel hair there like his f*cking baby brother was starting to grow. He wanted his body to not feel so awkwardly shaped. He wanted to see himself when he looked in the mirror, instead of the baby-faced child that stared back at him every time. He didn't want to be stuck in limbo, bending over backwards to stay in the good graces of doctors, just so that his dad could feel like he was doing some good f*cking deed. What did he care about hormone medication to ‘make him a man’ when the only thing he really wanted was to actually look like one?

Instead of saying all of that to Sam, Dean just said, “We don’t have the money for that.”

“No, Dean, it’s free,” Sam assured him in response. “No strings attached. We saved his patients, he’s just doing us a favor.”

Dean scoffed. “Yeah, ‘no strings attached’? Since when have we ever gotten something like that that didn’t bite us in the ass down the line? No way is Dad gonna go for that.”

“God, Dean, it was Dad’s idea. He’s the one who asked.”

“Well, then tell him thanks but no thanks.”

“But Dean…” Sam started, but then Dean could hear Dad’s voice rumbling, saying something in the background. “Dad wants to talk to you,” Sam finished, and then it was his dad’s voice in Dean’s ear and Dean just wanted to sink into the floor. He just wanted them both to drop it.

“Dean? You there?”

“Yessir,” Dean answered, all traces of anger and bitterness gone from his voice. Now, he just sounded small.

“You know what Sam’s talkin’ about?”

He picked at the scab on his knee that he could scratch at through the hole in his jeans. “Some doctor you helped said he’d give me some kind of treatment. Some kind of, uh, hormone treatment.”

“This stuff, it’ll make you change, son. I’ve looked into it. I think it’d do you good.”

Dean could feel his eyes well up as he heard the tone in his father’s voice. He tried to swallow around the painful knot in his throat and swiped the back of his hand across his face to wipe away the tears that had spilled down his cheeks. Am I not good enough for you like I am right now? he asked silently. I’m trying so hard.

He really hadn’t thought that his dad cared about this kinda thing. Dad knew that Dean was a boy - a man. Dad showed that he knew it in every clap on Dean’s shoulder and every time that he called Dean his son. No matter what Dean wished about his body and no matter how good or bad he was at training or hunting, Dean knew that he had nothing to prove to his father on that front. At least, he’d thought that he didn’t.

“I don’t wanna owe anybody nothin’,” he managed to say raggedly. He was pretty sure that he hadn’t betrayed his tears in his voice.

“And you won’t, because this is the doctor owing me something, owing us something.” When Dean didn’t reply, he could hear his father sigh heavily. “Dean, you don’t gotta go through with this treatment if you don’t want to. But you will come with us back to the clinic, and you will sit down and listen to this doctor tell you all about what it can do, and you will make a decision only after you have thought about it damn hard. You hear me, boy?”

And, like he always did, Dean answered obediently. “Yes, sir.”

The time spent waiting on Sam and Dad to finally come home was filled with pacing and cleaning the guns and picking at his various scabs until they bled. Wondering how he was gonna tell his dad that he didn’t want this, that injecting himself with drugs wouldn’t make him feel like more of a man but instead would just be a horrible reminder of what he couldn’t have. Figuring out how to tell his dad that if he really wasn’t good enough, he could do better. He could be better.

“For god’s sake, Dean, you’ve been my son for thirteen years now!” his dad told him later while they were standing in the motel parking lot, and the words were a balm that washed over him, warm and tender. Dean swallowed and felt his eyes sting at the look in his dad’s eyes as he shook his head in bewilderment. “That’s not gonna change, whether or not you decide to take this treatment. But dammit, Dean, I see the way you look at yourself in the mirror.”

Was that true? Did his dad really see what Dean saw in his reflection?

Sometimes, when they didn’t think he was an ugly dyke or a tranny or a punk freak, people called Dean pretty. A pretty boy. Dean hated it, hated the way that the kids at school said it with a sneer or the truckers that came up behind him in the truck stop bathrooms whispered it leeringly, the words ghosting over the back of his neck. Mostly, though, Dean hated it because it was a lie.

Picking apart the pieces of his face, Dean could see why people thought he was pretty. He had a nice nose, nice eyes. He had those girly lips. But when he put all the pieces together and saw the full picture of Dean, that's when the image fell apart for him; Dean could never like his reflection because… Well, because it looked too much like himself. If those people really knew him, they wouldn’t think he was pretty either.

But Dean didn’t need to be pretty. And Dean still wasn’t convinced that a bunch of hormone drugs were gonna change the way he looked at himself in the mirror; not unless they changed his reflection, too. But his dad looked at him with such desperation that Dean couldn’t say no.

He wanted it to work. He wanted his dad to be right.

The clinic that his dad and Sam brought him to was… normal. It looked pretty much like any doctor’s office that he’d seen on TV. Stacks of old magazines on tables, a waiting room full of uncomfortable chairs, a receptionist behind a big wooden desk.

Right away, Sam called out to some chick in one of the seats, and Dean cringed because he didn’t want Sam drawing attention to them; didn’t want some cute girl looking at him in this special clinic and being able to tell what he was. Between him and Sam, it was pretty obvious to anyone who knew what to look for. Dean avoided making eye contact with the blonde girl, instead focusing on slouching down in one of the seats and opening a random magazine while Dad walked up to the receptionist.

“She’s transgender too,” Sam whispered, and Dean tried to shoot a weak smile at the girl and then turned back to his magazine, but then… Then he peered over the top of it back at the girl, who wasn’t looking in their direction anymore but instead at a little paperback book that she was holding in her lap.

She was probably a bit younger than Dean, but older than Sam. She had straight blonde hair, shoulder-length, tucked behind her ear and a light smatter of freckles across the bridge of her nose. Her skin looked soft, and her thighs looked soft, too, one leg crossed over the other. She looked like she had cleavage. Did they let boys that young get boob jobs?

He winced internally, feeling guilty for calling her a boy, but he didn’t mean it like that… Just that, that’s what other people would think about her. That she was a boy. And would they give her a boob job that young if that’s what they thought she was?

When the girl got up later and walked into the office, she smiled at Sam and waved at him. Her hands were girly. Her boobs didn't look fake. Dean looked down at his own fingers, then back up and watched the girl's ass sway as she followed the nurse that had called her. That looked like a girl’s ass. Dean blushed.

“She don’t look like a dude,” Dean whispered, mostly to himself, but of course his brother heard him.

“Well, she’s not a dude,” Sam told him in that tone that he put on when he thought he was telling Dean something that he didn’t know, and Dean felt a flare of irritation. Sam liked to make him feel stupid sometimes. Dean didn't mind that his little brother was smart; he could be proud of him if it was just that. But it pissed him off when Sam thought that him being smart meant that Dean was dumb, and when he tried to educate Dean on something as if Dean didn’t know any better even when Dean probably knew better than he did. Sure, Dean hadn’t known what transgender was back when Sam had given him those papers, but that didn’t mean that he was a f*cking ignorant idiot.

“I just mean, she doesn’t look like… you know,” Dean replied, trying to get Sam to understand what he’d meant, and his little brother looked back at him with something like condescension. Or maybe pity.

“That’s what the hormones do,” Sam said slowly, and that… that didn’t make sense. The hormones were supposed to make you feel different, yeah, but she looked like a girl. “Dean, you…”

“Dean Winchester?" a nurse finally called, excusing him from the conversation, and Dean was pulled up a minute later by his dad’s hand on his shoulder and they left Sam alone in the waiting room.

Dean sat nervously in the room while they waited for the doctor, and then while the doctor calmly explained the hormones. What the doctor was saying, it honestly made Dean feel a bit dizzy.

It wasn’t like he’d thought. It wasn’t like he’d thought at all. They weren’t steroids, and they weren’t for treating his brain. They were for changing his body; making it look like how it was supposed to look. Making it feel how it was supposed to feel.

“Mr. Winchester, if you’d excuse the two of us?” Dr. Trewett asked his dad with a smile after he’d explained what the hormones would do, and Dad hesitated before nodding, clapping Dean on the back before leaving him alone in the room with the doctor. Trewett came back and sat down in his rolling chair and smiled at Dean, who was staring down at his own hands, wondering what kind of medical examination he’d have to undergo to get the prescription.

“So, Dean, is there anything you’d like to say or ask me before we get started?”

Dean picked at a little tear in his jeans, just above his right knee. “You need me to take my pants off or something?” he asked, trying to sound sarcastic but just sounding nervous. He’d never had anyone look at him down there before. He didn’t even look at himself down there. But if… If he needed to let the doctor do that to get the hormones, then he’d do it. If the hormones would do to him what the guy had said they would.

But Dr. Trewett shook his head. “No, I don’t. That’s not necessary. I just need to get your vitals and do some bloodwork, to get your base level hormones.”

“Oh.” Dean felt himself relax, his abs aching as they unclenched even though Dean hadn’t even realized that he’d been tensing them. “Cool, I can do that.”

The doctor smiled at Dean’s obvious relief. “Before we start on that, though, there are a few other things that I thought you’d rather discuss without your dad in the room.”

Dean chuckled nervously. Great, so maybe the good doctor wasn’t gonna bad-touch him, but it looked like he’d still have to suffer. “Yeah? What… Whatdya wanna talk about?”

Trewett tried to look sympathetic, but it didn’t do much to ease Dean’s nerves. “Well, I want to go over a few other ways that the HRT will affect you, first. We already discussed the changes in things like your voice, body hair, and fat distribution. Can I ask you what terms you prefer that I use to refer to your anatomy?”

Mortified, Dean felt the urge to squirm like a child on the medical exam table. His anatomy?

“You mean… Like, my junk? Why… Why d’you wanna…”

“Some of my patients prefer that I use clinically accurate anatomical terms to refer to their genitals and sexual organs, while others are very uncomfortable with hearing those words and prefer I use others. For example, some transgender girls prefer that I refer to their penis as a cl*tor*s, and vice versa.”

Dean could feel himself blushing red from the shells of his ears to his chest. His mouth gaped dumbly for a few moments as he tried to find an answer to the doctor’s question. At least the man didn’t look as embarrassed by the conversation as Dean was; he just looked understanding. He waited patiently for Dean to speak.

“Uh, I… I don’t really know,” Dean finally managed. “Can you just… Call them my, you know, my sexual organs? I guess? And. Um.” He averted his gaze and fiddled with a loose thread in the tear in his jeans, which he’d unraveled into a small hole. “Like you said before. You know. Call it, uh, a penis.”

Dean was relieved that Dr. Trewett simply nodded, not pressing further or making some sort of big deal out of it.

“Of course. Well, HRT will affect not just what we already discussed, but your sexual organs as well. It’s likely that you will experience cessation of your menstrual cycle; for some men, this happens right away, while for others it takes a few months while their hormone levels adjust.”

Dean perked up. “I won’t have to deal with that sh*t anymore?”

The doctor nodded. “Most of my patients report total cessation after about six months. If you’re still seeing it after that, it can usually be fixed with an adjustment to your prescription.”

“Awesome,” Dean grinned.

“I do need to inform you that HRT should not be considered a form of birth control. Even without a cycle, there is still a possibility for pregnancy. Other forms of prophylactic should always be used, and if anything ever happens that could result in unwanted pregnancy, it’s important to seek out contraceptive care.”

That had the grin slipping right off of Dean’s face. “I’m not… That’s not gonna…”

Dr. Trewett held up his hands. “I’m not making any assumptions about your life, just doing my due diligence of making sure you are fully informed.”

Wringing his hands, Dean nodded. “Alright.”

“The HRT is also likely to impact your libido. Most of my male patients like yourself report a marked increase in their sex drive. It’s also possible that you will experience atrophy in your internal genitalia over time. If this begins to cause problems, I encourage you to see a doctor, as it’s easily treatable.” He paused, waiting to see if Dean had anything to say in response, and then continued. “Lastly, one of the first changes that you’re likely to see is growth of your penis.”

Dean did a double take, eyes practically popping out of his head. “My dick’s gonna get bigger?” He wasn’t really able to disguise the glee in his voice, and Dr. Trewett wasn’t really able to hide his responding smile. The doctor nodded. “How big? Like… is it gonna…?” His chest felt full to bursting. This stuff, was it really as magical as it seemed? Could it do everything?

But the doctor shook his head. “One inch is typically about the average growth that my male patients see, though I’ve heard of patients who have grown more than two inches. But that’s highly unlikely.”

“Oh. Alright,” Dean said sheepishly, but he still couldn’t wipe the hesitant little smile off of his face as he ducked his head. It was just… well. Even if he wasn't gonna grow an eight-inch dick. It sounded kind of cool.

Trewett smiled and slapped his hands down onto his thighs before heaving himself to his feet.

“Now, that’s pretty much the last thing that I wanted to cover. If you’re ready, I can perform your physical. When we’re done, I’ll get your blood sample. Sound good?”

Dean wasn’t really used to doctors poking and prodding him; it wasn’t like Dad ever took him or Sam to get an annual physical. Most of Dean’s experience with medical professionals were in emergency rooms. Trewett was okay, though; he was respectful and his hands didn’t linger. He took Dean’s pulse, blood pressure, checked his lymph nodes and felt around his stomach. Apparently, Dean was thin enough that the doctor could actually feel up his organs through his abdomen, which was a little freaky.

“Everything looks good,” Trewett said, and then brought out the needle and a little vial that he filled with blood from Dean’s left arm.

“All done?” Dean asked, pressing his thumb over the cotton ball that the doctor had given him for the needle prick.

“All done,” Trewett nodded. “I’m going to go give this to Sherry; she’s been told to rush it. If you and your family wait a bit, we can have the results ready in time for you to take home. Wait here for just a minute.”

The doctor left and then returned just a minute or two later holding a paper bag in his hand. Dean watched curiously as he withdrew a small glass bottle and then a syringe.

“Do you need more blood?” he asked.

“No, no, this is your prescription. I thought I’d have you take your first dose now, so I can show you how it’s done.”

Shocked, Dean just stared at the doctor as he pulled out some sort of antiseptic wipe from a drawer and started prepping the needle.

“Wait, we’re doing this now?”

The doctor glanced up at him. “Unless you’d rather wait?”

He shook his head, his heart thumping in his chest.

“No, I, uh, I was just surprised is all.”

Trewett smiled at him and nodded. “Good. Let’s get you started, then, huh?”

The doctor showed Dean how to use the antiseptic wipe to clean off the top of the vial and then wipe down the injection site. Dean had to lower his pants a little, but the doctor didn’t make him feel weird about it. He just pointed out the spot on the outside of Dean’s thigh and then handed the vial and the syringe over to him.

“You want me to do it?”

“You’ll be doing it every time after. Might as well do it the first time, too.”

The man guided Dean to pull 0.2mL from the bottle before injecting it into his thigh. Dean barely felt a thing when he sank the needle into the muscle of his leg and depressed the plunger, watching that clear fluid shoot into his body. When he took the needle out, it didn’t even bleed, but Trewett gave him a band-aid to put over it anyway. When he pulled his jeans back up and buttoned them, his hands were shaking.

“Usually I start my patients off at a lower dose and we titrate up over several months, accompanied by further bloodwork, until your baseline levels are within the typical male range. But I understand that your family travels a lot, and doesn’t always have access to a doctor.”

Dean shrugged, and nodded. “We don’t really have much in the way of expendable cash.”

Dr. Trewett nodded. “Well, I’m going to give you a list of associates I have. I tried to find as many as I could that I felt could be trusted with a matter like this; I only have a handful, but they’re scattered across the country. You’ll be only a fifteen-hour drive, maximum, from any one of them at a given time. I’d like you to try to stop by one of their offices for labs at least once every four months or so, at least for the first year while you figure out your dose.”

“Sure thing, doc,” Dean said, though privately he thought that he probably wouldn’t be getting labs done unless the hormones were totally f*cking him up.

“I want you to start with a weekly dose of 0.2mL, but you can increase by 0.1mL every two weeks. Stop at 0.5mL; that’s the highest I generally prescribe.” He co*cked an eyebrow at Dean and gave him a stern look. “I understand that you’re probably excited for changes to start happening, but I can assure you that a higher dose won’t make them happen faster. It may cause you other health problems, though. Do you understand?”

“Sure thing, doc,” Dean nodded.

“This is a 10mL bottle. I’m going to issue you three of them. This should last you over a year, but with your lifestyle, I’m sure you’ll be wanting a safety stock. Any of the associates on my list will be able to get you more when you need it, just have them call me. Alright?”

“Alright.”

Dean left the clinic with the promised blood results, three bottles of testosterone, and a bag of syringes and needles. He felt like he was walking on air; he couldn’t stop grinning. It felt so easy to breathe, like it was nothing to take in great big lungfuls of fresh air, and he hadn’t even realized that it’d been so difficult before.

“Where d’you wanna go for dinner, Deano?” his dad asked him when the three Winchesters got back to the Impala. “Let’s do something special.”

His dad was smiling at him, looking so warm, eyes crinkling at the corners. Dean was so full up with gratitude just then that he felt like crying.

“Can we just find a diner somewhere?” he asked. “Someplace that has homemade pie?”

Dad clapped a hand on his shoulder and looked at him silently for a long moment before he pulled Dean in close and hugged him tightly. Dean could feel his dad’s hand on the back of his head, fingers tangled up in his hair. His other hand was on his mid-back, rubbing over his shirt. Dean clung to him, buried his nose in the collar of his dad’s jacket and inhaled deeply.

God, this was really happening. He was really gonna become a man. His dad had really done this for him.

After a long time, Dad finally pulled away and patted Dean’s cheek with his open palm. He gave Dean another smile, thumb stroking gently over his freckled cheekbone.

“Sure thing. We passed one like that on the way into town; the sign said they had the best pie in the tri-state area. We’ll get a whole one to take back to the motel.”

“What about a bunch of different slices instead? So we can try ‘em all?”

Dad chuckled and ruffled his hair. “Anything you want, son. Anything you want.”

And the hormones worked. God, they really worked.

Trewett hadn’t been lying about his dick; Dean thought that he noticed a difference practically overnight, and it kept getting bigger. He was glad that Trewett had told him about that in private, though; he kept it a secret from Sam and Dad. They didn’t need to know.

And the libido thing was no lie, either; not that Dean had been exactly celibate before, but it became downright painful to have to share a motel room with his dad and brother after that. He was sneaking into the bathroom or out to the Impala nearly every night just to take the edge off.

And the voice drop. And the body hair. It just, it just kept happening. With his voice, he could really feel it, it felt different in his throat and in his chest. And when he noticed the bulge of his Adam’s apple for the first time, well. Dean would often find himself just running the back of his knuckle over his throat, almost absent-mindedly, just to feel the novelty of it. After six months, his voice had even caught up to Sam’s.

Dad noticed the changes, too. Dean could see it, could see it in the way that Dad treated him. The look on his face that he’d get when he watched Dean while he thought that Dean wasn’t looking. He'd look satisfied - maybe proud - of the angle of his eldest son’s jaw or the dusting of blond stubble on his upper lip or the timbre of his lowered voice. He took Dean on more hunts than he’d used to, and he let Dean take point more than he ever had before, and he clapped Dean on the back or the shoulder with more strength than Dean was used to. And Dean was glad that his dad was so pleased.

“Got a bead on something goin’ down tomorrow,” Dad told Dean one night, maybe six months after that first T shot, as he settled into the couch. He kicked up his booted feet and rested them on the coffee table. “Some hunter died, and a big group is getting together in Meeker, Oklahoma to pour a few out for him. It’s just outside Oklahoma City, maybe four hours’ drive from us.”

“Okay.” Dean was stirring a pot of meat sauce while spaghetti cooled in the strainer in the sink. He knew better than to ask questions until Dad was done with his exposition.

“You’re a man now, and you’re starting to look the part. You’ll be hunting on your own soon. This is a good opportunity for you to start networking. I want you to make your own connections, Dean. So we’re going to head out there tomorrow. Think of this as field work.”

Dad took a pull from his bottle, indicating that it was Dean’s turn to talk. Dean tucked his left hand into his jeans pocket and chewed on his cheek for a moment while he continued to stir the sauce with his wooden spoon. “What about Sam?” he asked.

“He’s got school, and he’ll keep himself busy with homework. He can make himself a sandwich. It’ll be just you and me, Ace.”

Dean didn't bother trying to remind his dad that he had school, too. Sometimes, it felt like he missed more than he attended, with all of Dad's various letters of excuse written and handed in so Dean could accompany him on hunts.

“Alright. Do I know the guy who died?”

“No; I don’t either. Abe Johnson did.”

Dean felt his abs tense. His jaw flexed as he ground his molars together. “He’s gonna be there?”

“Yeah, Caleb too. Thought you’d be happy to see him again.”

His head nodded weightlessly as he stared into the depths of the boiling pot. “Sure.”

The last time he’d seen Caleb was the chupacabra job outside of San Antonio. He’d been sixteen, fresh out of Sonny’s place. The memory of the warm night after the hunt they’d spent getting high together still made him feel flushed and nervous.

The last time he’d seen Abe Johnson, though, he’d been only fourteen. The reminder shot phantom sensations itching across a body part that he no longer had. He didn’t want to see Abe again.

“Do I need to pack anything specific?”

“Just enough for a night. We’ll get back the next morning.” Dad chuckled, then added, “And your game face and a good attitude.”

Right. Dean would probably be able to find that somewhere in the nooks and crannies of his twisting stomach.

Dad made Dean break the news to Sam when he got home from school, which was just great, because there was nothing Dean loved more than gritting his teeth through a bitch fit about Sam not being able to go along with them somewhere that Dean didn’t even want to go in the first place. But whatever.

When they finally left, Dad let Dean drive them while he navigated, only needing to pull out the map when they pulled off the highway. Dean cherished every moment his dad let him behind the wheel of his baby, and it helped him keep calm while they drew closer to their destination.

When they finally pulled up to the farmhouse, they parked the Impala half-off the dirt road behind a row of other cars. The house in Meeker was a mile and a half away from its nearest neighbor, surrounded by farmland, with a small nestle of trees on one side. There were six hunters standing and talking on the wooden front porch with beers in hand, none of whom Dean could recognize. As he followed Dad up to the front door, the hunters all seemed to quiet down, pausing their conversation to appraise the newcomers.

“Hi, all. The name’s John Winchester, and this here’s my boy, Dean. We’re friends of Abe Johnson. Heard about Darrel from him and wanted to come pay our respects.”

The group of hunters accepted them easily enough, shaking hands with Dad and then with Dean, in turn. With every rough, big hand that closed around his, Dean put every ounce of strength he had into squeezing it. His dad had taught him that early, how to shake another man’s hand; you had to put your back into it. Show him that you wouldn’t back down from a fight, that you might not win it but you’d sure give it your all. He was taller than half of the men on the porch, not including his dad, but every one of them was broader and bulkier than he was. And, despite Dean’s lowered voice, it had only been a little over half a year since he’d started the testosterone. He felt as immature as a pre-teen compared to the men around him, but he didn’t want to show it.

The other hunters made their introductions. All but a couple had heard of John Winchester before, which didn’t surprise Dean. His dad was one of the best, and he’d made a name for himself. None of them had heard of Dean before, but that didn’t surprise Dean, either.

After some initial small talk that Dean tried his best to participate in to make Dad happy, his dad excused them into the house to meet the people inside and try to find Abe and Caleb. They introduced themselves to a few other hunters before one of them pointed Dad in the direction of the kitchen. There, they found Abe and Caleb chatting with one of the few woman hunters Dean had seen at the gathering: an older woman with weather-worn skin and a wicked-looking silver knife strapped to her thigh.

Dean hesitated in the doorway while Dad walked in with a broad grin to greet Abe with a hearty handshake. He patted Abe’s sizable forearm with his other hand before releasing him and turning to clap Caleb on the shoulder.

“Look at you, boy! I’ve heard some impressive things about you from your dad, but he didn’t mention you’d gotten taller than him.”

Caleb grinned crookedly, a familiar expression that reminded Dean of standing next to him in the dark, smiling at each other over the burning chupacabra corpse. “Yeah, he never seems to mention that. Good to see you, Winchester.”

Dad talked to the two men for a few more minutes, looking well at ease. Dean reluctantly stepped further into the kitchen, keeping the kitchen table - which was piled with foil-wrapped plates of ribs, chicken wings, potatoes and corn - between him and the others. The woman hunter had stepped away to pour herself a drink at a rickety wooden table that seemed to be acting as a bar cart. Caleb, who was leaning against the kitchen counter with his arms crossed and a sweating beer resting by his elbow, looked up at Dean’s movement and caught his glance, eyes lighting up. His gaze raked up and down Dean’s body swiftly; Dean didn’t think he looked all that different yet, but he’d noticed people were starting to think that he looked his age, so he supposed he must.

“You waitin’ for an invitation, D?” Caleb asked, his crooked smile brightening. Dean shrugged and his arms unconsciously crossed over his chest when his dad and Abe turned to look at him, too.

“Who’s that?” Abe asked, voice just as gruff and emotionless as Dean remembered it being whenever the old man directed it towards him. His dad laughed.

“Guess he was only up to your shoulder last time you saw him, huh? That’s Dean. C’mon, kiddo. Mind your manners and say hello.”

Dad met Dean’s eyes with a casual, affable lightness, but Dean knew that could change in an instant if Dean acted out. He was here to prove himself capable enough to meet other hunters on his own like a f*cking adult, let alone play nice with ones he’d known since he was a kid.

The wrinkles around Dad’s eyes softened in approval when Dean stepped around the table to give Caleb a handshake that quickly turned into a brief hug as they slapped each other’s backs. Dad moved away to introduce himself to the other hunter, who was sipping her drink at the bar cart. As Dean pulled away from Caleb and turned towards Abe, he saw his dad follow the woman out of the kitchen and back down the hall towards the living room.

Like a little girl, Dean had spent the morning agonizing over what to wear to the get-together, knowing that Abe was going to be there. A part of him had wanted to layer up; put on a T-shirt over an undershirt and pile a flannel and a jacket on over that. But layers hadn’t protected him last time, so instead he’d chosen a tight, pale-colored T-shirt to wear by itself on top of his threadbare jeans. Partly because he wanted to prove that he wasn’t scared, and partly because the thin shirt showed off very clearly that there was nothing underneath it to grope.

He squared his stance and stuck out his jaw, holding out his hand to Abe for a handshake, making sure his arm didn’t waver. He was startled to see that he was the same height as Abe, now.

Abe looked up and down his body slowly, expressionless, a much different appraising than the one Caleb had given him. Abe's eyes paused at Dean’s chest and at his throat where Dean knew his Adam’s apple was visible, before taking Dean’s offered hand. The man’s hand was rough and dirty, black under his fingernails, just like Dean remembered. He gripped Dean’s hand tightly, and Dean squeezed back until his fingers hurt.

“Good to see you again,” Dean lied, making his voice as deep and as gruff as he could without sounding ridiculous. His voice was tight and it had been hard to push the words out of his mouth, but it didn’t crack, and the way it vibrated in his chest was comforting.

“Hmm.” Abe didn’t release his grip on Dean’s hand. Dean could see Caleb in his periphery, shifting a little at the tension. Discomfort was filling Dean, too. Anticipation.

After too much time had passed, Dean tried to loosen his grip to withdraw his hand. Abe tightened his for a moment, grinding the delicate bones of Dean’s hand together until he feared they would splinter.

“Don’t matter how ugly you make yourself,” Abe said, emotionless blue eyes staring into Dean’s. “You’ll always be a woman where it counts.”

Dean tugged his arm back until Abe’s grasp loosened enough for him to yank his hand away. Heart racing and his breaths quick and shallow, he glanced around the kitchen; no one else had entered, and his dad and the other hunter were long gone. It was just him and Abe and Caleb.

Abe was still staring at him, taking a swallow from his beer. Caleb was staring at the floor, at the wall; at anything that wasn’t his dad or Dean. Dean could feel the blood draining from his face and knew that his stupid freckles would be standing out darkly, but Caleb’s cheeks and ears were flushing red with embarrassment. Caleb didn’t say anything to his dad. He never said anything to his dad.

Dean took a stumbling step back. His teeth were cemented together, his lips sealed shut. He could feel his heartbeat in his throat. Caleb pushed away from the counter and moved until he’d placed his body between Dean and Abe, beer in hand and fake smile splitting his face. He threw his arm around Dean’s bowed shoulders and forcibly turned him away and towards the doorway.

“C’mon, D, y’meet everyone yet? Probably not, huh? Lemme introduce you ‘round to some folks. Here, relax, have a drink.” He grabbed a beer from one of the cases on the counter a few feet down the kitchen from where Abe was still standing, unaffected and silent. Dean let Caleb guide him out of the kitchen, feeling his hand grip Dean's shoulder and squeeze, belying his effort to have the contact appear casual.

Dean struggled to forget about the words he’d just heard in the kitchen, though they were buzzing through his brain on repeat. Caleb had heard the words, too, but he was pretending he hadn’t. He always pretended he hadn’t. That was good, right? Kind, even. Polite. Pretend he hadn’t heard, so Dean could pretend he hadn’t, either.

Caleb took him around the house, introducing Dean to the hunters gathered and talking in the various rooms. Dean could see his dad watching him approvingly from across the room whenever they found themselves in the same one. The socializing gave Dean a welcome distraction; he grinned and nodded and talked about hunts and monsters and forgot new names as soon as he’d heard them. Abe came in from the kitchen after a few minutes, and Dean forced himself to laugh and grin, to show that he was unbothered. The beer Caleb had given him was gone in five minutes, and he grabbed another one from the coffee table. That one was downed quickly, too. Caleb asked him if he wanted something to eat, but Dean shook his head. For some reason, his stomach was writhing and twisting in his belly like a dying snake. He got another beer. Caleb pulled him back into the kitchen to try to get him to drink some water after the third beer was drained, but Dean served himself a tall glass of whiskey - too tall, more than three drinks' worth - from the dumpy bar cart instead. He downed half of it in one gulp, grimacing as it burned down his throat.

“You wanna pace yourself, there, Blondie?” Caleb asked him, tone trying at casual. Trying to act all fraternal, calling him 'Blondie'. Trying to conjure up the good memories of introducing Dean to Clint Eastwood, like that would make Dean listen to him better. Dean laughed and topped up his glass while he shook his head.

“Nah, man, pacing is for sissies.” He started to walk back towards the living room where he could hear his dad’s booming laugh, but found the kitchen tilting disorientingly around him. After pausing for a moment, the room was suddenly still and upright again, and Dean noticed Caleb next to him, supporting him with an arm around his ribs. With a huff of objection, Dean pushed him away and walked towards the door. He banged his hip on the corner of the kitchen table along the way but didn’t stumble.

“I know you're not a sissy, pal,” Caleb said carefully, lowly, and it only made Dean feel humiliated.

“Whatever,” Dean said darkly and waved his hand dismissively in an arc that put him a little off-balance, but he recovered quickly and took a long sip from his glass.

He stomped back down the hallway, Caleb still following him. Dean didn’t look back at him and carefully peered around the room instead, seeing that both Abe and his own father were absent. He joined a group of hunters that included the woman one from the kitchen before; he’d already been introduced to all of them, but he couldn’t remember their names. It didn’t matter, because it wasn't like there was going to be a test.

They talked, everyone rowdy and tipsy if not drunk. Dean laughed with them, and knocked glasses with them as one of them toasted to the dead guy, Darrel, while Caleb stood just behind his shoulder like an irksome watchdog.

Dean could be good at this stuff. He could make connections. Some of the other older guys seemed to acknowledge him approvingly as he continued to participate in the conversation; he easily demonstrated that he knew his sh*t and had more than a few notches in his belt. He didn’t need Dad or Caleb watching over his shoulder, supervising him like he was a child. Dean was a grown man. A man. He was almost nineteen.

Movement, out of the corner of his eye. Dean saw Abe Johnson enter the room, coming back into the house from the front porch. Without speaking, Dean turned away from the conversation and made to go somewhere else, but he was halted by an arm thrown across his chest as his shoulder knocked into Caleb’s. Oh, right. Caleb had been standing just behind him, practically on top of him.

“Whoa, Blondie, where you off to?” he asked, getting at eye level in front of his face, trying to force Dean to meet his eyes.

“Hittin’ the head,” replied Dean, spitting out the first excuse he could think of, and then realizing in the next moment that he really did have to pee. How many drinks had he had already? “Gotta piss like a racehorse.” He looked into the depths of his glass, vision graced with just a small amount of amber liquid swirling at the bottom. He downed it quickly and smacked the empty glass down onto the coffee table before knocking Caleb’s arm away and pushing forward out of the circle.

Dean swam through the living room. He avoided bumping into anyone and stayed carefully upright, only having to brace himself against furniture a couple times. He could feel Caleb watching his departing back.

Dean wanted to get away from all the strangers and the noise, so instead of looking for a bathroom in the hallway, he turned and carefully climbed the wooden stairs to the second floor of the old farmhouse, hand gripping the railing with determination.

The sounds of the hunters’ raucous chatter faded behind him, though there was still a faint ringing in his ears as he walked down the upper level hallway. He pushed open a couple doors, finding an empty bedroom and a hall closet. It almost sounded like someone was coming up the stairs behind him, the floorboards creaking under heavy boots. But the next door Dean tried revealed a bathroom, so it didn’t matter.

The door opened inward, and Dean followed it lurchingly into the small room. He gazed around with unfocused eyes at the chipped sink, dirty mirror, and yellow wallpaper. He found the toilet behind the open door, and released the doorknob, stumbling a little on a patch of the floor where the linoleum was peeling as he pressed his hand against the other side of the door to close it behind him.

But the door wouldn’t close, because something was blocking it. In confusion, Dean pushed harder, but instead of accommodating, the door started to push back open into the bathroom.

Before Dean could turn around to see what was happening, something big and solid was crowding into the tiny bathroom behind him, pushing him forward until he tripped and had to throw his arms out to catch himself against the wall.

“Wha’?” Dean asked, uncertain. He managed to recognize the big thing that had shoved into the room behind him as a person, and heard a soft bang as they finally closed the bathroom door behind both of them. Feeling confused and woozy, Dean tried to turn, but a big belly pressed up against the small of his back and strong arms wrapped around him, confining his own arms at his side. The man behind him bent forward until his stomach and chest were squished flush against his back, forcing Dean to bend over, too. Dean’s face was shoved against the wall, though he managed to turn it at the last moment to avoid banging his nose, leaving his cheek flattened and rubbing against the matte wallpaper.

With his cheek and collarbones knocking against the wall in front of him, and the strong arms around him, Dean dizzily wondered who this person thought he was. He had to have mistook Dean for someone else; Dean didn’t know why anyone would want to follow him into the bathroom and hug him like this. Even at his most affectionate, his dad didn’t give him bear-hugs from behind.

“H'llo?” Dean slurred, voice muffled with one side of his mouth shoved against the wall. Maybe at his unfamiliar voice, the guy would realize Dean wasn’t whoever he thought Dean was and let him go.

But at the sound of his voice, the man’s hands moved. One went down and grabbed at Dean’s hip, hitching it back until his ass was pressing up against the front of the man’s legs, just like his back was against the man’s bent-over torso. A coarse beard was rubbing against the skin on the side of his jaw, and foul-smelling breath was puffing against him, moistening the back of his neck. The other hand went to Dean’s stomach where his T-shirt had gotten rucked up, rough fingers slipping under the hem until the whole palm was pressing roughly against his bare skin.

Dean recognized the touch of that rough, dirty hand.

Dean started to struggle, then, as Abe’s thick fingernails scratched against the skin of his stomach. One dipped into his navel and pressed down hard there, sending a stab of pain through him and making his stomach turn over nauseatingly. Dean swallowed back vomit. He tried to shove himself away from the wall, but his arms were caged against his sides and he couldn’t raise his hands enough to put any strength behind them. He tried to buck his hips enough to knock Abe away from him, but quickly found that he could barely move them, either, and the movement he was able to make caused Abe to let out a low groan that didn’t sound like one of pain.

Eyes suddenly frozen wide open in horror and heart again racing in his chest, Dean felt Abe's hands move to the front of his jeans. The thick fingers made short work of unbuttoning and unzipping them, even as he tried to push them away. But Dean’s limbs were wobbly and weak from alcohol and fear. He felt as defenseless as a kitten.

Dean had done this to himself. He’d drunk too much. He’d put himself in this position. If Dad knew he’d dropped his guard like this, let this happen…

Dean almost threw up again when Abe’s monstrous hand crept under the waistband of his underwear. He could feel Abe’s fingers close around the socks he was packing, and then Abe huffed a noise of disgust and pushed them to the side so he could put his fingers… So he could touch him… Touch him there. ‘Where it counts.’

A hitching noise of despair erupted unbidden from his mouth and Dean squeezed his eyes shut. He could feel something hard pressing against him from behind, over the back of his jeans. And the fingers in his underwear. They were hurting him. He clamped his legs together in defense. In the darkness behind his eyelids, he was overtaken by flashes of images: Abe’s hand crawling spider-like down through the collar of his shirt, a dead raccoon in the woods with flies eating out its sunken eyeballs, a poster on handwashing hanging on the wall of a locker room. He felt like his entire being was just his head, floating in space like a balloon on a string.

Suddenly, noise flooded the room. The sounds of raucous laughter and jeering from the floor below. It took a moment for Dean to realize why the noise was so loud: the bathroom door had been thrown back open, momentarily forcing Abe forward to press even closer at his back, and there was a third person in the little room, now, to witness Dean’s shame.

Abe was pulled away from Dean. The scratchy beard, sour breath, and fleshy press of Abe’s belly and chest were gone from Dean’s back first, followed by the hardness that had been poking insistently at the space between Dean’s clenched legs. Abe's hands were the last to leave, calluses and fingernails dragging against Dean’s flesh as they were yanked out of the front of his underwear. It hurt. Trembling with adrenaline and relief, Dean collapsed to his knees, his cheek dragging roughly as it slid down the wall. He could hear a scuffle taking place behind him, angry voices.

“Don’t you f*ckin’ put your hands on ‘im like that!” someone said, voice low and thick with emotion. Dean wondered, for a moment, if it was his dad. “You can’t- I won’t let you do that!”

“I was just teachin’ it a lesson -”

A wordless noise of anger. A smack. “Shut your goddamn mouth!”

Dean struggled to turn over, falling onto his ass as he moved his legs around until he was facing away from the wall. There was another smacking sound of flesh against flesh, a wheeze, and then a heavy thud. Dean tried to focus his blurry vision: there was Caleb, standing in the doorway to the bathroom with panic and guilt writ across his tanned face. He’d dragged his father out of the room into the hall. Abe was hunched over on the floor. Seemed like Caleb had punched him, maybe kneed him in the gut. Maybe in the groin. The older man’s pants were undone just like Dean’s were. Seeing that made Dean’s stomach lurch.

After a second of hesitation, Caleb re-entered the bathroom and grabbed Dean under his armpits. With a bit of help from Dean’s shaky legs, Caleb heaved Dean up until he was back to standing on unsteady feet. He ran the back of his hand over his mouth and looked away as Dean struggled to readjust the socks in his underwear and zip up his jeans. Closing the button felt like the hardest thing Dean had ever done. Something was flooding his eyes, burning like vinegar, and when he blinked he felt wetness from somewhere dripping onto his trembling hands.

Dean allowed Caleb to put his arm around his shoulders again. He didn’t know what else he was supposed to do. He stumbled over Abe’s sprawled legs when they moved down the hall. He barely noticed where they were walking as Caleb guided him down the stairs, into the kitchen, and out the back door into the dark of the night.

The sound of two pairs of boots moving across the grass was quiet. Crickets were chirping, the noise filling the warm air around them. It had gotten really dark. Lightning bugs were flashing around them, lighting up the fields. Caleb only stopped when he’d led him over into the small group of trees that Dean had noticed when he and Dad had first pulled up to the house.

“f*ck, Dean,” Caleb said. His voice sounded shaky and breathless. He leaned Dean up against the trunk of a tree and finally let him go. The rough bark dug into the back of Dean’s thin shirt as he watched Caleb, barely visible in the shadowy gloam, rummage with desperation into his pockets for his cigarettes and lighter. “f*ck.”

Pressing his palms against the tree, Dean braced himself against it before tipping his upper body forward and throwing up onto the grass at his feet. Caleb flinched and looked up at the initial retching noise, then skidded away at the sound of the splatter to avoid getting the mess on his cowboy boots. He probably wasn’t fast enough. Dean couldn’t find it in himself to feel bad about it.

His stomach was still roiling, and his body clenched over and over again, wracked by relentless spasms, as it attempted to forcibly eject every ounce of alcohol from his guts and every disgusting memory of the touch of dirty hands from his mind. It took minutes; every time Dean thought he was done, another heave rolled through him, until he was hacking up nothing. Strings of bile - and a little blood from his torn-up throat - dripped down his chin. He shifted his feet and cringed in confusion at the sensation of wet socks, until a shameful realization washed over him. The legs of his pants were soaked, too. He’d been vomiting hard enough that he’d pissed himself. Just another source of humiliation to pile onto all the rest.

Bracing his hands on his knees, Dean finally sucked in a full breath uninterrupted by gagging. It took a moment for him to register the feeling of a hand on his back, rubbing in circles. Dean turned his head and saw Caleb bent over beside him with a lit cigarette trapped between his lips.

“I saw him follow you up the stairs after you left,” Caleb said. Dean could see his eyes even in the dark, the glow of the cigarette shining in his pupils. He didn’t say anything in response, raising one hand to wipe the slippery mess off of his face. “I didn’t know why he was followin’ you. I dunno, Dean. I didn’t think anythin’ of it. But you were gone for too long. And I know… I know you don’t like bein’ alone with him, so I came up after you. I swear, D, I never thought he would ever do anythin’ like that. I swear.”

Dean spat down onto the mess in the grass and stayed silent.

“I…” Caleb tried to start again, opened and closed his mouth a few times with no sound coming out. “I’m sorry, D. f*ck. I swear, I’m never lettin’ you alone with him again. Never lettin’ ‘im touch you again. Dean? You gotta say somethin’, Blondie. You good? You okay?”

“Is that what it takes?” Dean asked, quietly, staring down into the pool of his sick. He could tell Caleb wasn’t able to make out the words, but the older man let out an audible exhale of relief. He bent down closer to Dean’s downturned face, cigarette held precariously in the corner of his mouth.

“What? Come on, Blondie, speak up. You good?”

Dean straightened with a lurch and shoved Caleb away from him with all the strength he could muster in his whiskey-loosened arms, overbalancing himself and stumbling back until he caught himself against the tree. The action had surprised Caleb, and Dean had managed to knock him to his ass a few feet away, where he was looking back and up at Dean with his eyes wide and mouth hanging open, his dropped cigarette smoldering in the grass.

“Is that what it takes?” Dean yelled, years of pent-up anger flooding through him and shaking the foundations of his chest until it felt like his voice was wrecked with it. The trees were swimming sickeningly around him as he braced himself against the one at his back. “You’ve heard what he says to me! You’ve heard what he calls me! You’re the only one who knows!” He could feel his voice crack in the back of his throat, moving over the sore areas where his sick had scraped him raw on the way up. Caleb was gulping silently, making no movement yet to lift himself onto his feet. “Known for f*ckin’ years, and you always just stand there like a dumbf*ck and never done anythin’ about it!”

The vinegar was back in his eyes, burning until he could barely see Caleb’s face through the dark around him. It felt like it was raining, but strangely, the drops were only falling onto Dean’s cheeks. He swiped the wet streaks away unthinkingly with his dirty hand, and gagged again at the smell of it. He could feel his legs shaking. Could still feel Abe’s dirty fingers touching him where it counts.

“Is that what it takes for you to f*ckin’ grow a pair?” Dean asked the shadows, no longer yelling. Tired. “Is that what you were waitin’ for?”

It was silent between them for a long time. Lightning bugs continued to drift through the air around them, and the song of the crickets soothed Dean’s ringing ears. Eventually, Caleb pushed himself up until he could cross his legs. He propped his elbows on his thighs and buried his face in his hands.

“You’re right.” His voice was low, resigned. He kept his face buried in his hands. “I’m a coward. I’m sorry.”

After that, neither of them said a thing for half an hour. Maybe a little more. Caleb stayed on the ground with his head in his hands. Dean felt his heartbeat start to slow as he remained standing, leaning back against the tree, willing his legs to stop shaking underneath him. Feeling the urine drying on his pants, the vomit and bile drying where it had dripped down onto the front of his shirt. He smelled rank; no one else would want to touch him, not that night, which could have been reassuring if the thought wasn’t so dark. He was glad he’d been the one to drive himself and his dad here, because it meant that he still had the car keys in his pocket and could go get a change of clothes without having to go back into the house first.

“How far did he get? Before I got there.” Caleb suddenly asked, his voice sounding anguished. Dean wondered if he’d been obsessing over the question in silence for the last half hour, turning it over and over in his head like a f*cking pervert. Caleb wanted to know if his dad had gotten to put his dirty fingers up inside of Dean, where it counts. Wanted to know how guilty he had to feel.

“You don’t get to know that,” Dean said through gritted teeth. Dean didn’t really know, either. Couldn’t really remember where the fingers had touched him once they’d gone inside his underwear. He just remembered that it had hurt. Maybe he’d be able to tell if he tried to… If he… But the thought of trying to confirm it was even worse than not knowing.

“Alright.” Caleb finally raised his head, lowered his hands to the ground. Picked up the cigarette from the grass. He pulled his lighter back out of his back pocket and relit it, then took a long, sad drag. He held the smoke in his lungs like he was trying to make it hurt, then blew it out into the night. “Do you want me to be the one? To tell John?”

Dean almost fell over when he whipped his head around to look at Caleb in horror. “You’re not telling my dad!” he gasped, frantic, almost shouting again. “No one tells my dad! My dad doesn’t f*cking hear about this, got it, Caleb? If you tell my dad I’ll f*ckin’ kill you!”

Caleb held up his hands in surrender. “Alright, alright, I hear you. I just thought… I mean, John’d want… He’d kill my dad, I think, you know?”

The words were so frank. Resigned, sincere. Caleb was… offering. He was offering to let Dean’s dad kill his own father. Not only that, but to be the one to deliver the death sentence. It struck something in Dean; allowed him to calm down somewhat. He loosened his fingers out of the fists they’d clenched into and shook his head slowly.

“I guess.” Dean’s first thought at the idea of his dad finding out had been of the look Dad would give him. Dean wouldn’t be able to stomach it. Yeah, Dad would probably be furious at Abe for touching Dean like that. He maybe even would kill Abe. Even if he didn’t kill Abe, Dean knew he’d beat Abe bloody and never talk to him again. And if that happened, that was one less hunting buddy to give Dad backup on hunts. Dean didn’t want that. He’d never wanted that.

“But you’re not gonna let him touch me again, right?” Dean sighed. “Not gonna let him alone with me ever again, right? That’s what you said. So he doesn’t need to die. And my dad doesn’t need to know. Okay?”

“Okay.” Caleb took another drag from his cigarette. He stared into the middle distance. Dean realized Caleb looked different to him. Normal, somehow, when he’d always been larger than life to Dean before. Something had changed. Maybe Dean had grown up more than he’d thought.

Finally, with a heave, Caleb shoved himself up to his feet and brushed off the back of his pants. “I’m gonna go inside, get you some water. To drink, and to clean yourself up a bit. Wait here.” He turned back to the house, and steeled himself, sucking in a breath that lit up the end of his cigarette, before starting forward.

Dean stayed in the dark in the trees, letting his thoughts drift, watching the lightning bugs flicker around him. He held out his hand when one flew close by, cupping it gently and catching it in his palm. It stood there, tiny legs tickling his skin. It lit up his hand when it flashed.

Dean felt his chest break open while he watched the tiny insect. The lightning bug didn’t know what had just happened to him. It didn’t even know that Dean was disgusting, covered with his own bodily fluids and smelling like a roadhouse bathroom.

The lightning bug had departed by the time Caleb returned carrying a twelve-pack of plastic water bottles. He’d even brought Dean a little bar of white soap. After handing them over, he left, retreating back into the house to give Dean privacy.

Dean left the water on the ground next to a different tree in a clean patch of grass to go fetch his change of clothes and a trash bag from the Impala. He ran into one hunter, who was getting into his own car to leave for the night, but neither of them exchanged a word and it was too dark for the guy to see what a mess Dean was.

Back amongst the trees, Dean took off his clothes and used four of the water bottles and the soap bar to gingerly clean the sick off his face and chest and the piss off his legs. He couldn’t wash off the lingering feeling of Abe’s fingers on his stomach and everywhere else, and he couldn't do anything about his wet boots; he'd have to wash them in the tub when they got home. He wasn’t sure if Caleb had noticed he’d pissed himself. Dean hoped he hadn’t, but he wasn’t optimistic. Caleb had probably picked up on the smell, sharper than usual from all the beer and whiskey and dehydration.

Dean got dressed in the fresh outfit, and stuffed the soiled clothes into the trash bag, before drinking two of the remaining water bottles. It took him an hour to finish, all in all, drinking the water slowly so he wouldn’t trigger his gag reflex.

When he was done, he sat there for another long while, back against the tree trunk and fingers buried in the cool grass, not wanting to go back inside and face the people yet. Practicing his expression for when he saw his dad. The whole reason they’d come here was because Dad wanted Dean to socialize and make connections, and there he was spending over two hours away from everyone, sitting out in the dark. He knew Dad wasn’t gonna be happy when he showed his face back inside.

And Dean was nervous. He didn’t know what to expect from Caleb. Or Abe. He knew neither of them had left, yet; he’d had his eyes on the front door, and their trucks were still parked in front of the house. He’d probably run into them, when he got back inside.

At the thought of seeing Abe again, Dean’s whole body went numb and his stomach turned over. He wrapped his arms tightly around himself, holding on with desperation, grounding himself with the pressure. He wanted… He wanted his dad.

Dean choked on a sob and doubled over, clutching at his hair, gripping it between his fingers and tugging, hard. "Goddamn motherf*cking sonuva bitch," he gasped. Pulling his hair didn’t hurt enough to distract him from the thoughts and sensations that just kept f*cking cycling through his brain.

He didn’t want his dad to find out, but he wanted Dad to keep Abe away from him.

He didn’t want his dad to know what he'd let happen, but he wanted Dad to tell him that it wasn’t his fault, because maybe if he did, then Dean could believe it himself.

He didn’t want to tell his dad what Abe had done, but he wanted Dad to just know, and for it to not change anything, and for him to tell Dean that everything was going to be alright.

Instead, Dean was going to walk back into that house and no one was going to know except him and Caleb and Abe. And Dad wasn’t going to take care of him, he was going to be disappointed in him for slacking off. And Dean was just going to have to take it. And he was just going to have to be there, in the same room as Abe. And he was going to have to listen to the hateful words Abe directed his way. And Dad might make him shake Abe’s hand when it was time to leave, the same hand that had hurt him... And what if Abe tried to… to touch him, somewhere else, with that hand again...?

But Caleb had promised him. He’d promised he’d never let Dean be alone with Abe again, and Abe had never tried to touch him like that when there were other people around. So Dean didn’t have to be nervous. There was nothing to be nervous about. He could do this. He wasn’t a coward.

Dean double-bagged the trash bag containing his filthy clothes to mask the smell and tucked it into the far corner of his baby’s trunk. Then, fists and teeth clenched, he psyched himself up and walked up through the front door of the farmhouse.

A part of him had been bracing for everyone in the house to fall silent as he walked through the door and stare at him. He felt stupid when that didn’t happen. Everyone was too engrossed in their own conversations with the people they were friends with to even notice him; Dean was barely a blip on their radar. They probably hadn’t even noticed he was gone.

Only one person seemed to see Dean hovering awkwardly just inside the door, and that was Caleb, who was standing in conversation with a small group of hunters. When he caught sight of Dean, still pale and shaky but clean and freshly dressed, an expression of pure relief flitted across his face. He shot Dean a hesitant smile and nodded at him. Dean forced himself to smile back and managed a flicker, then crossed his arms over his chest, tucking his hands under the flannel he’d put on over his shirt, and walked over to sit in an armchair in one of the far corners of the room where his back was to the wall and he didn’t think anyone would pay attention to him.

He felt the urge to curl his knees into his chest and wrap his arms around them like a child, but instead, he sprawled, trying to sit like a man. He’d brought one of the water bottles with him, and took a sip every couple of minutes. Between swallows, he watched the hunters in the living room and picked at the paper label. His dad wasn’t in the room, and neither was Abe. Dean kept trying to work up his nerve to get up and bust his way into one of the conversations, but he couldn’t stomach the idea of talking to anyone. So he sat.

Dad came into the living room after a while. Dean, who had been doing nothing but waiting for him, saw him immediately. A part of Dean wanted to sink back into the chair in avoidance, but a more instinctual part made him sit up straight at attention. He watched his dad’s eyes trail across the room, searching. Dean was pretty well hidden, tucked into a corner with maybe fifteen other hunters between them, but he wasn’t surprised when Dad quickly found and locked eyes with him. He looked irritated.

Dean stood up and squared his shoulders as his dad made his way across the room to him.

“You’ve been gone a while,” Dad said flatly as soon as he’d reached Dean’s corner.

“Yeah. I, uh, I was out in the yard. I got sick.”

“I bet you did. Heard you got pretty sloshed.” Great, so Dean had made enough of a fool of himself that the other hunters had noticed even before he’d left for the bathroom. “You know better than that, Dean. I thought I told you to bring your game face. You knew what this was. You knew what you were supposed to do.”

Dean kept his face straight but he couldn’t help lowering his eyes so he didn’t have to see his father’s disappointment. “Yes, sir. I know. I’m sorry.”

With his eyes trained on the floor, all he could see of his dad were denim-clad legs and dirty boots. Dean waited, bracing himself for a further reprimand, but he had to wait for longer than he expected to. Dad usually wasn’t slow with his words, especially not when Dean had f*cked up, but he was silent for several long moments. As Dean waited, the back of his neck started to prickle. He could feel fingers crawling across his skin again, and the urge to turn around and look over his shoulder was rising in his chest even though he knew the only thing behind him was the armchair and the wall.

“Are you alright, Dean?” his dad finally asked him. The question surprised Dean so much that he looked up from the floor and back at his dad’s face.

“What?”

Dad reached forward and pressed the back of his hand over Dean’s clammy forehead as though feeling for a fever. Dean felt his dad’s fingers brush over the shell of his ear as he lowered his hand to clasp at his shoulder. Dad’s fingers were warm and rough, clean and gentle. They didn’t feel like Abe’s. With his hand on Dean’s shoulder and Dean meeting his eyes, Dad searched Dean’s face with an expression of concern that he hadn’t been expecting. He felt something swell in his chest, in the back of his throat.

“I was talkin’ to Abe, just now, in the kitchen.” Dean kept his face carefully blank while he felt his body go numb again. “He said he’s got a hunt and was hoping I might want in. It sounded interesting; haven’t offered yet, but I thought you and I could stick around for at least the weekend to look into it, spend some time with him and Caleb. It’s been a while.”

Dean stayed silent. This felt like a nightmare. Dad’s eyes didn’t leave his face.

“But,” Dad continued, thumb gently rubbing over the point of Dean’s shoulder, “Now that I think on it, I don’t know that we need to. You’ve still got school tomorrow. And Abe and I can talk things through over the phone. What do you think, Dean?”

Dean wasn’t sure he’d heard his dad right. He felt like he had whiplash; one second living through a bad dream, and the next, hope blooming in his chest. He parted his dry lips and hesitantly ran his tongue across them.

“Sammy’s expecting us home by tomorrow,” he said, praying that would be enough.

Dad nodded. “Okay.” His thumb was still there, stroking Dean’s shoulder. “You know, I was hearing some good things about you from the other hunters before you went off to get sick. Seems you made a good impression. And to tell you the truth, all this socializing’s wearing me thin. We don’t have to stay any longer, if you’re ready to go.”

Feeling desperate and weak with hope, Dean tried to keep the emotion from his voice when he responded. “Yeah, we can go. I mean, I’m ready. If you are.”

With a final squeeze, Dad released his shoulder and nodded. “Then let’s get outta here. You got the keys? You’re in no shape to drive.”

Dean nodded and fumbled the car keys out of his pocket to hand over. “You don’t want… you don’t wanna say goodbye first, to all of them? To Abe?”

Dad took the keys from him and paused, meeting Dean’s gaze before shaking his head. “No. It’s fine. I can always call him from the road.”

And he turned and headed towards the front door.

After a moment, Dean stumbled after him. As he went out into the night, he met eyes with Caleb one last time and gave him a nod. He could feel Caleb watch him leave.

In the passenger seat of the Impala, Dean let himself lean over and press his face against the window, his jacket cushioned under his head. The purr of Baby’s engine was comforting, and his dad was a calming presence at his side. Dean allowed himself to close his eyes and at least pretend to get some sleep, though he felt like the muscles of his body were so tightly coiled he’d never relax enough to actually do so.

After maybe forty minutes on the road, Dean felt the car veer off, then pull over and slow to a stop. Keeping his eyes closed and his breathing slow, Dean pretended to be sleeping. He listened to his dad get out and fill up the gas tank. When Dad got back into the car, he didn’t start it for several minutes. Eventually, Dean heard Dad fiddling with the buttons on the radio and the sound of a tape sliding into the tape deck. When the music came on, it was quiet; not loud enough to wake him up if he’d actually been sleeping. It was Dean’s favorite Zeppelin mixtape.

The feeling of something being laid over him almost startled Dean enough to flinch, but he quickly recognized the familiar scent and feeling of the worn, supple leather. Dad was draping his jacket over him just like he’d used to when Dean was little, even though he was a man now. He felt Dad’s big hand rub briefly over his back, and then Dad’s fingers were gently brushing over his forehead and stroking through the longer hair on the top of his head. Dean could feel his dad's fingernails scratching softly at his scalp. It felt nice.

His dad finally let out a sigh, so soft that Dean could barely hear it over the quiet music. He moved his hand from Dean's hair to trail his thumb along his cheek, a touch so caring and unexpected that he almost opened his eyes. Dad held his hand there for a minute, cupping the side of his face, brushing the pad of his thumb delicately along the freckled skin under his eye. Then, finally, his dad's hand withdrew, and Dean heard him straighten back up in the driver's seat and turn the keys in the ignition.

The car rumbled back to life a moment later, and his dad pulled out of the gas station and back onto the highway. In time, Dean was finally lulled to sleep for real; safe and warm under his dad’s leather jacket - engulfed by the familiar smell of sweat and graveyard smoke and whiskey - and, hidden underneath the dark cover of the night, tears of gratitude dripping silently down his face.

Dad got a call from Abe the next day, and he left Dean and Sam alone soon after that for the hunt in the mountains. And two months later, Dean was a high school dropout and Abe Johnson was dead.

After that, with Dean out of school, something changed in their family dynamic. He could spend a lot more time with Dad, helping him out with research during the day and hustling pool or going on hunts with him at night. His dad had seemed disappointed in him at first, but quickly warmed up to the benefit of having Dean around to help out more. But his punishments changed, too.

Now, If Dean pissed Dad off too much by saying the wrong thing or not saying the right thing fast enough or seeming like he was taking Sam’s side in an argument, Dad would send him off to do solo hunts. He’d say it was to help Dean build his confidence, maybe meet other hunters and continue with his “networking”, but Dad only kicked him out to hunt alone when he was angry.

Dean figured part of it was the T. He hadn't been able to see it very well at first, but as the months went on it was clear how much the hormone was manning him up. The first time he caught his reflection and felt like he was really seeing himself in the mirror, the wonder of it was enough to make him grin. He got stronger without even trying, which meant he could cut back on the dreaded exercises he'd used to put himself through, and the trail of hair that grew in under his navel made him want to stretch his arms up all the time so his shirt would ride up and show it off. By the time he was nineteen, people stopped thinking he could be the same age as Sam. A couple gas station attendants even asked him if he wanted to buy cigarettes when he stopped in for snacks. He would never pick up a habit that would stink up his baby, but he sometimes bought a pack of menthols just for the hell of it. He usually kept one in his jacket pocket in case someone ever tried to bum him for a smoke; easy way to get people to talk when he was working a case.

With all of that, it figured Dad would be more comfortable sending him out on his own. Or maybe he just thought that now that Dean looked grown, he needed to grow up; shouldn't be riding on his dad's coattails all the time.

So, Dad fathered in the way he thought was best: he taught Dean how to shave, taught him how to hustle and scam, and he kicked Dean out on his ass to teach him how to be a man.

The hunts, Dean didn't mind. Didn’t even mind going it solo every once in a while if there were monsters needing killing in two places at once. But getting kicked out hurt like a punch to his gut every time it happened, and he hated the thought of Sam home alone with Dad. Especially since, whenever he came back, it seemed like Dad had always told Sam that Dean had left on his own accord. Like he'd just up and decided to take off, ditch and leave Sam to fend for himself for a while.

Dean never corrected him, because he knew better. But he wanted to. He really wanted to.

It was one of these such hunts that sent him chasing werewolves in Miami. Dean didn’t even remember what he’d done to piss Dad off, but Dad had given him a clutch of newspaper clippings about a string of mysterious deaths and told him to hitch a ride “and don’t show your face back here until the hunt is over.”

“Yessir,” Dean had responded. Whatever.

With his fake credit card and a meager wad of cash, Dean worked his way to Miami from their trailer park in Jacksonville. He wished his dad would spring for a second car already, because then maybe Dean could have taken it and he would have been down there in six hours. Hitchhiking wasn’t as fun or convenient as he’d imagined it would be when he was fourteen, but he’d had plenty of experience since then. Between waiting with his thumb out at truck stops and having to hitch with three different rides, it took Dean a day and a half to finish what could have been a five-hour drive.

Dean was bone tired by the time he’d found himself a decent enough hostel with a private room with a door that locked for under eight dollars to use as home base. He’d be able to get a couple hours of sleep and leave his duffel behind while he investigated.

Dean hadn’t slept at all the night before, having spent it sitting in a huddle outside of a truck stop, leaning against his duffel bag with his jacket draped over his lap, hiding the pistol in his hand. Truck stops at night were never fun - especially when Dean was alone - and he’d learned that the hard way over the past few times hunting solo. Barely any rain cover, hordes of mosquitos, no locking door, and too many passing strangers who might either thumb him as an easy mark for a mugging or catch a glimpse of his face in the streetlamp and think he was too pretty for his own good.

After a dreamless two hours of sleep in the hard hostel bed, Dean woke up and put on some street clothes and a lanyard with a fake school ID and hit the pavement as an investigative journalism student to get the low-down on the reported victims.

The admin lady at the police station looked down her nose at him when he asked for copies of the police records of the crimes written about in his newspaper clippings.

“You’re not one of those weirdos obsessed with serial killers, are you?” she asked suspiciously as she made photocopies on her office machine. “Because the department has determined these deaths are all unrelated, no matter what those civil rights kooks are saying. They just like finding reasons to get mad at the MPD.”

Raising his eyebrows, bemused, Dean shook his head. “No, ma’am. It’s just my school assignment.”

He took the police records to the library and combed through them. They didn’t tell him much; the police didn’t bother to include relevant information, like details of the injuries sustained. “Cause of death: Fatal injury ” was written on every one, opaque enough to be suspicious. At least something like “Boating accident” would have told him the victims had died on the water, even if it was a cover-up for “Shark attack”. But “Fatal injury” could just as easily be cryptic for “eaten alive”, “impaled by a skewer”, or “fell off a ladder”. Great. There was no way Dean would be able to get into the morgue to see the autopsies, either; he still looked way too young for Dad’s FBI schtick.

But as Dean continued to pore over the sparse reports, and cross-referenced them with the lunar calendar, he realized that they did tell him two very interesting things: every single one of the five victims (so far) hadn’t just been found after a full moon, they’d been found after a full moon by a cop.

Dean had never seen anything like that before; cops don’t find bodies, they just yellow-tape the crime scenes after civilians find bodies. So, five different bodies found in four months, all after a full moon by a pig who’d then written a suspiciously nondescript police report? All signs pointed to werewolf cop.

"Awesome."

It was with a little more digging and interviewing with some locals that Dean learned that the victims were also all queers, and at least three of them had been last seen the night before their deaths at one of two local gay bars. Dean couldn’t find witnesses for the other two, but their bodies had been found nearby. Less awesome, but did explain the police admin lady’s comment about “civil rights kooks”.

Poking around the old crime scenes didn’t yield Dean anything helpful, and the next full moon was only one night away, so he decided to scope out the two gay bars and hope he’d be able to figure out which one was going to be the source of the next hit. There hadn't been a discernible pattern so far.

Dean tried to look casual as much as he tried to be invisible, sticking to the shadows near the walls and silently begging to not be hit on. He didn’t see anything strange at Purgatory, but a couple hours later, at Salvation, he spotted a creep with a regulation haircut who was instantly recognizable as a cop in civvies. Dean eyed the man until he was sure he’d be able to recognize him, then retreated to his room at the hostel to get a full four hours and prepare.

Dean geared up the next day, loaded his .45 with silver bullets and tucked his silver knife into his jacket, and hovered in the shadows outside of Salvation, waiting. After watching people come and go for a few hours - no sign of the cop from the night before, and worrying he was staking out the wrong location - Dean observed two men exit the bar, obviously drunk, arms slung around each other’s waists. They turned and began their slow and giggly walk down the street, wearing tight pants and mesh tops, and when they turned to walk down a dark side street, Dean felt the hair on the back of his neck prickle. He didn’t ignore the feeling.

Collar turned up, Dean followed the pair swiftly around the corner to see an empty street. Cursing, he hurried forward, peeking into alleys and seeing nothing, until he heard the unmistakable sounds of a scuffle. A voice pleaded in a language Dean couldn’t understand - maybe Spanish - before cutting off with a gasp of pain while another man yelled.

Down the next alley, Dean could see one of the gay guys from the club struggling with a monstrous figure wearing a police uniform, teeth and fingernails too long and sharp to be human, while the guy's boyfriend or hookup or whatever lay unmoving on the ground. The gay guy’s back was towards him, blocking Dean's view of the werewolf; no way Dean would have a clear enough shot to use his gun. Rushing forward, silver knife in hand, Dean shouted "Hey!"

Maybe in surprise, the werewolf turned away from his prey and saw Dean coming at him, his silver blade glinting. The werewolf shoved its prey away from it and leapt towards Dean, knocking him back and up against the brick wall of the alley where Dean just barely avoided getting his head busted open. He almost managed to sink his blade into the werewolf's chest, but the monster was able to knock his hand away at the last second and it sank into its shoulder instead. The werewolf howled and bucked, and the knife twisted out of Dean's grip, lodged between the beast's clavicle and rib.

Suddenly unarmed, Dean's eyes widened and he felt a strike of fear as he grappled with the werewolf cop (less awesome now that it was about to kill him). He just managed to prevent its snapping jaws from closing around his neck when suddenly the monster was dead weight, slumping forward onto Dean and almost sending him toppling to the ground underneath it.

With gritted teeth, Dean shoved the body away from him, where it slumped lifelessly to the grimy asphalt. Glancing down, Dean saw a silver arrowhead, smeared with red, sprouting from the werewolf's chest.

Breathing heavily, Dean wiped werewolf slobber and blood off of his face and the front of his jacket and looked up to see a woman standing maybe fifteen feet away, outstretched arm holding steady a mechanical crossbow. It was already loaded with another arrow that was pointed unwaveringly at Dean's heart.

"Whoa," Dean said, holding his hands up placatingly. "Wanna point that thing somewhere else, sweetheart? Clearly I'm not with him."

The woman narrowed her eyes and pursed her full, red-painted lips. She had a beautiful face: a deep brown complexion, big dark eyes shining over round cheeks, and long black braids tied up behind her head. She was wearing combat boots and a miniskirt under a lime green tube top and short leather jacket, with a purse big enough to fit about ten encyclopedias - and, Dean realized, probably her crossbow and a sheaf of arrows - slung over her shoulder.

"I seen you around the last couple days," she said. Her voice was deep. She looked normal - like any other woman - but after hearing her voice, Dean could tell right away that she was like him. Transgender. He felt a lurch in his chest. "You been poking around, showing up at the crime scenes, lurking ‘round the edges of the clubs, yo’ white ass sticking out like a sore thumb. Thought you was an undercover cop, maybe scoping out marks for your buddy, there. Maybe a werewolf, too."

"Well, clearly you got me pegged all wrong. I was huntin' him." Dean gestured to where his silver knife was still buried in the werewolf's shoulder. Then, moving slowly, well aware of the woman’s finger on the trigger of her crossbow, he stepped forward and bent down to put his foot on the dead cop's chest and use it to leverage his strength and pull the knife out of the body.

By the time he straightened back up, the woman had tentatively lowered her crossbow and was watching him, mouth twisted with disapproval.

"Y'know,” Dean said, “I've been mistaken for a lot of things, but a cop is a first. People usually don't think I look the type. I like to think I give off a sort of Dirty Harry vibe." He flashed his most rakish smile and wiped the bloody blade on the dead cop's shirt, then tucked his knife back into its sheath and safely slipped it into his inside jacket pocket. "Y'know, ruggedly handsome, vigilante hero, operating outside the law…"

The woman looked unimpressed. "You stupid or something? Dirty Harry was a cop. Besides,” she eyed him up and down, and Dean didn’t miss her pausing briefly on his finer assets; “All white boys look the type."

She tucked away her crossbow and turned to kneel down and check the unconscious man, who was still lying in the dirty alleyway. The man's partner had collected himself and was kneeling at his friend's side as well, pressing his shaking hands to the fallen man's shoulder where blood was seeping through ragged gashes.

"Is he bitten?" Dean asked, tone serious again; back to business.

"What the f*ck was that cop on?" the man asked, voice thick with tears. "He wasn't human!"

"Don't worry about it, honey," the woman hunter comforted. She glanced up at Dean from her position on the ground. "He ain’t bit, just scratched. He gonna be just fine."

"We gotta call… Gotta call an ambulance, he needs an ambulance!" the frantic man said. The hunter shook her head.

"You really wanna do that with a dead cop on the ground six feet away? Hell no. Listen, I'm gonna call for some people, and they gonna come here and take care of you and your friend. You just calm down, it'll be alright. I've gotta take care of the body, but I swear, my people will be right here for you in no time."

She stood and pulled a flip phone out of her pocket, dialed a number and stepped away to speak quietly to someone. The man on his knees had pulled his unconscious friend's head into his lap, hands still applying pressure to where the guy was bleeding and rocking back and forth with tears streaming down his face. Dean crouched down next to him and put his hand on the guy's shoulder.

"Hey, man, what's your name?"

The man turned to look at him with unfocused eyes. "Tyrese."

"And your boyfriend there?"

Tyrese choked on a sob. "Angel."

"Alright, Tyrese. I'm Dean. Listen, I know what just happened was scary and confusing. But you're okay, and Angel, he's gonna be fine. I know it looks like a lot of blood, but you gotta lose a lot more than that to be in any real danger, okay? I've had a lot worse, and look at me. Walkin’ and talkin’ and almost saving people from monster cops in back alleyways."

Tyrese cracked a watery smile. "Really?"

"Yeah, man, really."

The hunter had finished her phone call and was standing over them, looking down at Dean contemplatively. Dean met her gaze with a raised brow.

"My friends are coming to help. But we gotta take care of the cop."

"We?"

"Yes 'we', Dirty Harry Wannabe. You wanted to get involved, and now you're gonna make yourself useful."

"Whatever you say, sweetheart."

The woman was strong, well-muscled like hunters had to be. Not as strong as Dean, but they both carried the dead cop easily enough between them, stopping occasionally for short breaks as they quickly moved the body through a short maze of alleys and dark side streets until the other hunter seemed satisfied that they were far enough from the scene of the crime, hidden behind a metal side door just inside an abandoned building.

"What's your name?" Dean asked her while she bent over to start stripping the body of its equipment. For a moment he just stood there, appreciating her curves underneath the miniskirt; then, chivalrously, he reached down to grip the arrow behind its silver tip with the intent to pull it out of the corpse, knowing that silver arrowheads didn't come cheap. It moved a little but then got stuck and slipped out of his grasp, nearly nicking his fingers and leaving his palm covered in cop-blood.

"Yeuch!" he exclaimed in disgust, hastily wiping his hand off on the front of the cop's black vest. The woman watched him make a fool of himself with a straight face.

"Rhonda Hurley," she answered him when he was done, then bent over and easily unscrewed the silver arrowhead from the shaft. She pocketed it, then rolled the body over halfway to pull the rest of the arrow easily out from the other side.

Chagrined, Dean made a face. Rhonda smirked, and started to strip the body of its uniform, which Dean began to help with after taking a moment to nurse his pride. Once finished, Rhonda shoved the police uniform into a nearby trash can that looked like it had been a container for used needles once-upon-a-time, a few still clattering at the bottom. She lit a match and dropped it into the trash can, watching the fabric catch, and then tucked the cop's badge and gun into her purse along with her crossbow. She examined the cop’s radio after that, pried open a small hatch and pulled out the batteries before tucking it all into her purse, probably to use or repurpose later. Dean admired the way her skin glowed in the firelight.

"And you, prettyboy?"

"Dean Winchester.” He flashed her a winning smile.

They stood silently next to each other, watching the fire eat the contents of the trash can.

"What are you gonna do with the body?" Dean finally asked, after the mess in the trash was just a smolder. The werewolf cop's body, nude except for its underwear, was sprawled carelessly in the dust and grime of the old building's floor. Rhonda glanced at it with a hard expression.

"I've got friends in low places. They'll be coming by later to pick it up, take it out of the city somewhere to salt and burn it." She kicked the corpse's bare foot bitterly. "I been hunting this pig for half a year now. He got turned maybe seven months back, started waiting outside queer bars on the full moon so he could eat the hearts out of some fa*gs. He’s the only werewolf on the MPD, least as far as I can tell, but they all been covering for him.” She curled her lip in distaste. “Killing this werewolf only does so much when there's more than one kind of monster on the force."

Dean grimaced in sympathy. "I can imagine."

Rhonda looked at him curiously, and her eyes fell on his upper arm. "You're bleeding."

Dean looked down, and noticed for the first time a tear in his canvas jacket that blood had finally started to soak through. He could feel it running down his arm, and when he lifted his hand, a couple drops fell onto the floor.

"Goddamn. Looks like it."

He clamped his other hand over the tear and felt a flare of pain from the gash in his arm, but it wasn't too bad. Rhonda's eyes seemed to soften.

"Come on. Dean, right? Come over to my place. I'll patch you up good. You kept the wolf busy long enough to keep those boys alive. That’s worth something to me." She smiled, then; sweet, and maybe a little playful. “Plus, you kinda cute.”

Rhonda lived in a tiny three-bedroom apartment with two roommates. She introduced them as Coco and Lizabella, and they didn’t seem perturbed by Rhonda walking through the front door with an unfamiliar white man at her heels, even with both of them dirty and covered in blood. Whether or not Coco and Lizabella were also hunters, they at least seemed to be in the know.

“I got a spare towel your hunk can use,” Coco offered with a flirtatious wink. “You both look like you need a good shower.”

“Thanks,” Dean replied, blushing, rubbing the back of his neck.

“C’mere, Dean,” Rhonda beckoned him down a short, narrow hall. She pulled a fluffy towel, stained but clean, off of one of the closed bedroom doors and handed it to him before directing him into the bathroom. “You can shower first, I don’t mind. You better wash out that cut on your arm. When you’re done, you can wait for me in my bedroom, it’s the one at the end of the hall. I’ll get you patched up after.”

Dean showered somewhat nervously. He’d never been in a bathroom that so clearly belonged to women before. There were piles of various hair products and scented soaps in the bathtub, washrags draped over the shower curtain and satin-lined shower caps dangling on strings from the shower head. What seemed like thousands of makeup containers and bottles of nail polish were cluttered around the sink. It felt strangely intimate, looking around at the women’s toiletries as he shampooed his hair and washed the sweat and blood off his body with honey-vanilla-and-oat scented soap.

While he was lathering, he heard a knock on the door, but before he could answer he heard it open; the door didn’t have a lock, but he hadn’t exactly expected anyone to barge in. Panicked, he cupped both hands over his groin, as though whoever was there was about to tear open the shower curtain.

“Dean? I’m gonna get your dirty clothes and put them in the wash with mine. That alright?” It was Rhonda.

“Sure,” Dean managed, breathless. The door closed again a minute later. It was only then that Dean remembered that he didn’t have any other clothes to change into. Awesome.

After Dean was done, he dried himself off with the towel and then stood in the bathroom for a couple minutes, just breathing. He wrapped the towel around his waist and tied it into place and stared at himself in the mirror. The scars on his chest were visible, but they had faded significantly since the summer he was fourteen. And Rhonda was a hunter, too; she wouldn’t be surprised he had scars.

He noticed that Rhonda had left some gauze pads on the toilet seat when she’d come in to collect his clothes, and he picked them up and pressed them to the still-bleeding gash on his upper arm. Then, he poked his head out of the bathroom door and verified the coast was clear. He could hear Rhonda talking with Coco and Lizabella in the kitchen.

“Shower’s free!” he called briefly before beelining to Rhonda’s bedroom to wait for her.

Rhonda’s bed was a futon set directly on the floor, layered with leaking down duvets. The sheets and pillowcases were silk. Piled on the ground beside it were a few books, a pile of CDs, and a dark green CD player.

There was nowhere else to sit in her room, so Dean sat on the end of her bed. Her walls were plastered with cut-out pages from magazines, a shabby wooden dresser was in the corner overflowing with colorful clothing, and a full-length mirror was propped up leaning against the wall.

When Rhonda finally joined Dean in her room, she looked warm and damp in a fuzzy little green nightgown with Kermit the Frog’s face on it. She’d let her braids down, and they swayed gently as she walked towards Dean, who was still holding the gauze to his arm with one hand while the other lay in his lap closed in a nervous fist, and his legs stretched out in front of him. She pulled a first aid kit out of one of her dresser drawers and took it over to the bed where she sank down next to Dean and nudged the hand on his arm aside, lifting the gauze to peek at Dean’s injury.

“You don’t need stitches,” she told him, breath ghosting over his shoulder and making him shiver. “I’ll disinfect it and put on some butterfly bandages and you’ll be all good.”

“Thanks,” Dean replied, a nervous tremor in his voice. Rhonda hummed a low tune as she poured some isopropyl alcohol onto a swab and when he let out a pained hiss after she dabbed it into his wound, she skimmed her fingers soothingly over his collarbone. There was something electric between them, filling the air with possibility.

Rhonda’s fingers were warm and gentle when she squeezed the edges of the gash together to apply the butterfly bandages, and after she taped gauze over it and cleaned her hands, she turned and leaned her head against his shoulder. Her braids hung behind them, tickling his back. Her hand, smooth and delicate, reached down and landed at his thigh, just beneath where the towel ended and just above his knee.

“What are you doing?” Dean breathed, voice husky with anticipation.

“I seen you looking,” Rhonda answered. “Not like you don’t know you been flirting with me all night. And I don’t know about you, but I get all hot and bothered after a good hunt.” Her breasts underneath the fuzzy nightgown pressed against his arm, and when Dean didn’t make a move, she slowly crept her hand further up his leg over the towel. “You seem curious. I don’t mind. You ever been with someone like me before?”

“Another hunter?”

“You know what I mean.”

He wondered if part of the reason why she’d taken his clothes away - including the knife and the gun in his jacket - had been so she’d feel safer, doing this. Offering to sate his perceived curiosity.

Dean couldn’t lie; he was curious. Ever since Sam had given him those stupid papers when he was thirteen, he’d been curious. Wondered what it would be like to meet someone else who was like him after living so long not knowing there was a real word for what he was. And since he’d seen that trans girl at Trewett’s health clinic that day he got his T for the first time, a part of him had wondered what it would be like to be with a girl like that. A girl like him. Maybe he wouldn’t mind taking his clothes off in front of her, since he wouldn’t be as scared of what she would do if she found out.

Shemale p*rn popped up occasionally during his infrequent internet forays, but Dean had never watched one of those videos. He always scrolled past them quickly, pretending not to see the images in the thumbnails or read the video titles. Enough teenage boys had made crude jokes and jeering accusations about tranny p*rn in his high school locker rooms for just the idea of watching those videos to fill him with shame.

But Rhonda, she was normal in the same way that Dean was normal: a freak, and a hunter, but not some sort of p*rnified caricature. Her cheek against his shoulder was warm, and her hand, continuing its slow journey up his leg, was clean and soft. Her fingernails were long and brightly colored.

When Rhonda’s hand got dangerously close to the V of his legs, Dean finally pushed it away and turned towards her. She lifted her head to meet his eyes, lips parted, cheeks warm.

He felt both insecure and excited, wanting. He didn't want to tell her he was a virgin, at least in this way; he'd never been naked like this with anyone before, and no one else had ever touched him down there, not except… well. He pushed the thought away, not allowing the itching crawl of bad memories to flood his skin.

With his eyes fixed intently on hers, Dean raised his hands and hooked his thumbs under the straps of her nightgown. He waited a moment, and after she gave him a barely perceptible nod, he slipped the straps off her shoulders and pulled the dress down over her chest to bare her soft breasts. He lowered his hands to cup them gently in his palms - they fit in his hands perfectly - rolling his thumbs over her dark nipples and feeling them swell and pebble under his touch.

Rhonda let out a soft little gasp and raised her chest into his touch, eyelids fluttering closed. Dean looked up from her breasts to her face, to her lips. They were now lipstick-free after her shower; dusky, pinkish brown and looking so plush and inviting. He tipped his head down, and she tipped hers up, and he raised his hands from her breasts to cup the sides of her face, stroking his thumbs lightly along her jaw as they kissed open-mouthed. He felt a little stubble scratch against the pads of his fingers - softer than his own - and that was fine, and her skin was soft and lovely. As soft as Dean’s used to be, but Dean’s skin was rougher, now.

After a long moment, she pulled away from him. Both of them were breathless. Her eyes were shining. “So? Have you?”

Dazedly, he shook his head. “No, I haven’t. Have you?” She furrowed her brows and peered up at him, confused. He swallowed, shy. “I guess I don’t really look like it. But I’m like you, too.”

It took only a brief moment for Rhonda’s eyes to widen in realization. She pulled back a bit, and Dean felt his stomach sink, but she didn’t retreat all the way and she kept her hands where they’d ended up; on his chest. She looked down to where her palms were gripping at his pecs, spread her fingers wide, glanced over the patchwork of scars decorating his skin underneath them. “Oh,” she said, and she sounded reverent. “So you really see me, huh?”

He surged forward, wrapping his arms around her and joining their lips with passion. She met him gladly, dipping her tongue into his open mouth. They fell together onto her bed, hands running greedily over each other’s bodies, and made out until they were sweating. Somewhere along the way, both her nightgown and his towel ended up on the floor beside them, until Dean was naked and Rhonda was sitting on top of him wearing only a pair of pink satin panties.

Dean looked up at her, at her heaving chest and her shining eyes and open mouth, running his hands up and down her smooth, brown thighs. She shifted slightly, and at the feeling of the satin rubbing against him he let out an involuntary moan and bucked his hips. Her eyes grew darker.

“Wait,” she gasped. “Wait, I want… Wait. I got something for you.”

She rolled off of him and Dean whined his disapproval, reaching towards her with one hand and the other going between his legs to cover himself, almost subconsciously. He watched as she went once again to her dresser and pulled something out of her underwear drawer; Dean didn’t recognize it at first, a tangle of straps and silicone, but after a moment his eyes widened. Rhonda was holding a harness with a fake co*ck attached to it.

“I use it sometimes, when someone wants me to f*ck them,” she said, sounding almost shy. She took out some sort of disinfectant and sprayed it onto the toy before turning around. “It’s the E; I can’t get it up anymore. Anyway.” She stepped back towards him, fell to her knees and held out the harness. “I want you to wear this, Prettyboy. Want you inside me.”

Breathless, he nodded.

Rhonda stood back up and pulled him to his feet, and she continued to kiss him, starting at his lips and then moving down over his neck, his clavicle, his sternum, his stomach, the coarse hair just above where his legs met. He leaned unconsciously into that one, and felt her lips curl up against him.

She put the harness on him, adjusting the straps until it was tight and moved with him like it was a part of him, and when he looked down at her through heavy-lidded eyes, she looked back up at him and smiled. She had a foil-wrapped condom on the ground at her knees, cherry flavored, and she tore it open and placed it at the tip and then leaned forward and rolled it down over the length with her mouth. Dean bit his lip and let out a noise, one he’d never heard himself make before; he could feel it. As he watched, he could feel her mouth on him.

After she’d sucked on him for a little while, until his head felt flushed with arousal, Dean reached down and pulled ever-so-gently on her braids - not enough to hurt - until she straightened and stood onto her feet. He kissed her again, tenderly, tasting cherry on her lips, and then turned them both and lowered her onto her bed.

He moved down her body - mouthing at each of her nipples and then peppering kisses over her soft belly - before breathing hotly onto the soft bulge underneath her satin panties. Dean stroked over the satin with his fingers, loving the feel of it and letting it excite him. Finally, he put his mouth on her and soaked through the fabric with wet, filthy kisses, moaning at the sensation of the smooth satin under his tongue. He wanted to taste it, to taste her; to get her panties so wet with his spit she was dripping with it. One of his hands grasped her inner thigh, pushing her legs apart; his other went between his own legs, closing around the hard length there, just the feeling making his hips buck into his grip and lights burst behind his closed eyelids.

Rhonda gasped and shifted underneath him, tangling her fingers in his short, damp hair. Eventually, he slid his fingers under the hem of her panties, prepared to pull them down.

“This okay?” he paused to ask, and Rhonda lifted her hips in response.

Dean pulled the panties off and down her legs, slipped them off her feet - her toenails were painted apple green, the same color as her fingernails; he thought green might be her favorite color - and laid them respectfully aside on the bed. He then returned to lavish attention where she was soft and warm.

She didn't smell like he did, there; at least, not like he did now since starting the T. It was different, and tasted more like the few other women he'd gone down on than he'd expected. When he took her into his mouth, she felt so nice on his tongue, and small, not filling him up.

Dean went down on her for a while, until she was practically begging him to stop and get to the main show, and then moved lower to eat her out and soften her up with his fingers and some flavored lube she’d procured from under her pillow. When she was finally ready, he let her flip him over onto his back and sink down onto him, throwing her head back in ecstasy.

There were tears in his eyes when he came, which was shortly after Rhonda did. She was breathing deeply after her org*sm, bowing down to let her face hover over his and looking at him through heavy-lidded eyes. She was still seated on his hard length, moving her hips in tiny gentle circles and grinding back down onto him while his hips twitched needily beneath her. She gazed down at his flushed face and bitten lips and pressed kisses to the tears that leaked from the corners of his eyes when the overwhelming pleasure moved through him, fingernails trailing along the line of his jaw.

Rhonda lay on top of him for a while, and he rested his chin on top of her head and ran his hands up and down her back while she had one of hers up and carding through his hair. When they'd both rested enough to recharge, she propped herself up and grinned down at him, braids hanging around him like a curtain. He felt her right hand reach down and close around the length between his legs.

"You ready to go again, Hot Stuff? You feel ready," she teased.

Dean grinned and tried to lean up and kiss her but she pulled away playfully. "I'm ready."

"Good. Want you to do something else for me, though, Prettyboy." She ran a finger over his lips, and he flicked his tongue out to wet them and her finger, too, just to see the way her eyes darkened with desire. Her finger moved away from his mouth, trailing along his cheeks like she was tracing his freckles, and then she brushed her fingertip across the ends of his eyelashes, making them flutter.

"What do you want?" he asked, voice rough and deep. It felt good, and new, the way it was rumbling in his chest.

She finally sat up, straddling him, and turned to pick up her pink satin panties from where Dean had placed them on the duvets. She held them up and smiled at him knowingly.

"You liked these so much," Rhonda said. "You like the way they feel. You gonna put them on for me. Wanna see you in them."

Mouth suddenly dry, Dean's throat clicked as he swallowed. "You gonna make me?"

Rhonda co*cked her eyebrow and looked down at him with an unimpressed expression that reminded Dean of the way she'd looked at him back in the alleyway.

"I didn't think I’d need to. But I will if you want me to."

If it was any other moment other than that specific one - that particular instant in time and space - Dean would have denied her, refused to do it. But he was still flushed and heated and loose and comfortable, and he could see the fire in her eyes. And he could see that she wanted him to wear them because she wanted to see them on a man. And, he couldn't ignore the spark of interest he felt jolt between his legs at the thought of that pink satin tight against him.

Dean licked his lips, then bared his teeth with a nervous smile. "I want you to make me."

They stood up together, and she pulled him off the bed until they were standing in front of the mirror. Suddenly feeling shy, he focused his eyes on the ground until he felt her tilt his head up to meet her eyes. She smiled at him and bent down, the panties in hand, and held them out for him to step into.

Rhonda pulled them up slowly so he could feel every moment of the satin against his skin, brushing over the hair on his legs and making him shiver and ache in his core, until they came to rest around his hips. He watched her tuck the length of silicone into them until it was nearly covered up, just the tip poking out over the top of the waistband. She pressed her mouth against the satin where it was still wet from Dean's prior attention, tongue out, wet and messy like he'd done for her, and Dean leaned into it.

When she pulled away, she stood and came around behind him. His face still down-turned, Dean was hesitant to look up.

"God, Dean, look at you," Rhonda breathed, and nervously - almost scared - Dean raised his eyes to look in the mirror.

He saw himself through Rhonda's eyes. The man in the reflection was hot. His hair was messy, his cheeks and chest flushed with arousal in a way that disguised the freckles and the scars, his lips swollen red and spit-slicked. The trail of hair leading down from his navel disappeared into pink satin that bulged in a way that looked so right. The panties covered up any hint of the straps of the harness; it looked like that was just his body. Dean felt a hot rush of arousal zing through him so strong that his legs nearly collapsed beneath him.

Rhonda stood behind him, slender hands and long fingers stroking over his abdomen, up over his pecs, pausing to play with his nipples. Her chin hooked over his shoulder. Her brown skin was so beautiful against his pale chest. So soft and warm, Rhonda's breasts and belly pressed up against his back, a few of her braids trapped between them. She reached one of her hands down to between his legs, where she squeezed the length underneath the pink satin with a heat blazing in her blown-black eyes and Dean could feel it again, feel the touch like it was his own hot hard flesh.

"f*ck, Prettyboy, I really ain't never met a man like you before."

He kept the panties on, feeling vulnerable and embarrassed and sexy, and she backed him up until his ankles knocked against the futon. He sank back onto it, sitting upright. Rhonda pulled the front of the panties down just enough for Dean's co*ck to spring free, and then sat on his lap, plunging down onto his length for the second time that night with a grateful sigh.

Later, taking another break, Dean pressed kiss after kiss onto Rhonda’s shoulders and back, brushing aside her braids for access to that delicious expanse of skin. She was sorting through her CDs, idly musing to herself as she picked an album.

When she reached one of the CDs she let out a gasp, and then turned towards Dean. Rhonda held the CD up pressed against her mouth, hiding her face behind it but blocking the album cover with both of her hands.

“Don’t make fun of me!” she said, “I got it in a mystery bag at a flea market for five cents. I only listened to it as a joke.”

“But?” he smirked, trying to reach out and take it from her to see. She leaned away, nearly falling off the futon before Dean caught her about the waist with his arms and pulled her back until she fell onto him instead, trapping the CD between them.

“But, I liked it. The second track is my favorite song,” she confessed into the side of his jaw.

“With that introduction, now I have to see,” he laughed, playfully wrestling with her until he had her pinned beneath him and the CD held triumphantly in his hand.

He looked between Rhonda and the album cover for Lost in Love with an open-mouthed smile of incredulous delight. On her back underneath him, she covered her face with her hands.

“Air Supply?” he exclaimed, and she nodded. “You’re worse than my kid brother!”

Rhonda slid her hands down her face, revealing wide, pleading eyes and a luscious pout. He softened his expression, caressed her lower lip with his thumb.

“Aww, sh*t. I can’t say no to that beautiful face.”

Still straddling her, he leaned over to open the CD player, popping the CD in and pressing ‘Play’. He pressed the button to skip to the second track, and when the first few notes of “All Out of Love” started to fill the room, he laughed and looked down at Rhonda’s pleased expression, shaking his head fondly.

“It’s romantic!” she asserted, and he leaned down to layer kisses over her round cheeks and wide nose. As the song continued to play, the music filling the room, he gently moved his hips back and forth against her underneath him. He was still wearing her panties, embarrassment forgotten, and he could feel her soft bulge pressing up against him through the satin fabric, right in the space there between his legs. It felt nice, and he felt comforted in a way he couldn’t explain: straddling a girl and grinding against her in her bed like a high school boy in his girlfriend’s bedroom, listening to her favorite song.

He moved his face slightly lower so he could press his mouth against hers again, and after a moment she parted her lips and Dean dipped his tongue between them. She sighed into his mouth, and reached down to cup her palm around the hard length between his legs with gentleness, like she just wanted to feel him there - like she didn’t want to hurt him - even though it wasn’t really a part of Dean’s body. When the song drifted to an end, Dean reached out to press the button to replay it. It really is romantic.

They each came two more times that night and fell asleep only in the wee hours of the morning. When Dean woke up, it was bright outside, sun glaring through the slats of Rhonda's bedroom window. Rhonda was sleeping beside him, curled into his side with her arm draped across his waist. He was still wearing the panties and the harness. He felt so comfortable, so at home in his body in a way he hadn't really felt before.

I gotta get myself one of these, he thought, the desire bright and glowing. But a moment later, it dimmed, because he knew that if he ever had the extra cash in hand, he couldn't spend it on something as frivolous as a strap-on. And the thought of Dad or Sam rummaging through his bag and finding it was humiliating.

His thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the door, and Rhonda shifted at his side, blinking her eyes open.

"Get yourself decent, I'm coming in!" Lizabella's voice called from the hallway, and Dean quickly reached over and pulled one of the duvets to cover their bodies before the door creaked open.

Lizabella poked her head through the doorway and smirked at the two of them lying in bed together.

"Whatchu want?" Rhonda asked, irritated, voice bleary with sleep. Dean caressed her forearm soothingly.

"Just wanted to let you two know that we made pancakes. Oh, and I put your laundry in the dryer for you last night. Seemed like you and Boy Band were pretty busy." She wiggled her eyebrows at them, and Rhonda let out a groan and buried her face into Dean's neck, sending warm shivers down his spine.

After taking a half hour to wake up, Rhonda slipped back into her Kermit nightgown (no underwear on underneath, which made Dean bite his lip), and went out to fetch their laundry so Dean could get dressed. While she was out, he peeled off the satin panties and clumsily undid the harness, setting them both aside on the floor. He felt more naked than he usually did, and pulled one of Rhonda's pillows over his lap.

When Rhonda returned, she handed Dean his clothes and leaned down for a kiss - just a press of their lips together, chaste, like the way couples kissed good-morning in the movies - then turned around and let him get dressed while she chose her own outfit from her dresser. Dean pulled on his briefs, jeans and T-shirt, and rolled up one of the two pairs of socks she'd handed him to tuck into his underwear. It made him feel a little better, but not as good as he had last night. They both showered quickly, separately, before entering the kitchen.

Breakfast was nice, friendly. Dean had been worried about Coco and Lizabella grilling him or maybe asking invasive questions about him and Rhonda's night together, but they only teased him a little bit, and it was lighthearted and playful.

"How long are you staying with us, Dean?" Coco asked him, elbow resting on the table and chin propped in her hand. He looked to Rhonda quickly, then back to Coco.

"I think… One more night, maybe. To make sure everything's taken care of." He wanted to at least stick around to ensure the other cops weren't going to be after Rhonda. "I'll need to go check out of my hostel before two o'clock."

Rhonda casually reached out and put her palm on Dean's thigh. "I'll come with you. Show you around a bit. All the cool spots white boys like you won't know how to find."

"Ooh, a date," Lizabella sang teasingly, and Dean looked down at the table, blushing.

Dean and Rhonda spent the day together. She returned his pistol and knife, no worse for wear, from wherever she’d hidden them near the washer and dryer that the women had in their hall closet. He tucked his gun into his jeans, but let her carry his knife so that she could leave her crossbow behind.

They got lunch from a taco truck and ate it at her favorite beach. Rhonda was wearing another little skirt and a ribbed tank top, and carried a smaller purse that she’d tucked Dean’s knife into. When they were done with their tacos, she pulled her tank top off over her head to reveal a string bikini - forest green and shimmery, like the rainbow haze of gasoline over water - that made Dean’s mouth go dry and his fingers twitch, aching to reach out and touch. Dean loved watching the way Rhonda's long braids fell over her shoulders, the way her breasts bounced in her little bikini top as she walked.

As they walked along the sand, the sun beating down on them, Dean hesitantly reached out to brush the side of Rhonda’s hand with his. At his touch, Rhonda threaded their fingers together, and they continued their walk hand-in-hand. Dean had never held hands with a girl before. He felt like a f*cking kid at how much he liked it, at how fast it made his heart beat and how it made him blush.

“Anyone looking at us probably thinks we’re dating,” he said suddenly, hand tightening around hers like he was worried she’d pull it away at his observation. But Rhonda squeezed his hand back and smiled at him.

“We can be,” she said. “You can be my boyfriend for the day.”

She didn’t say it like a joke, but like an offer. Dean’s smile was blazing, and he felt giddy.

Wanting to treat her, like a boyfriend would, Dean pulled out a few dollars from his pocket and bought her a frozen strawberry paleta from a street vendor. He watched the surprised delight light up her face when he handed it to her, and later kissed a sweet, sticky stain from the tip of her nose, eliciting a husky giggle.

Rhonda went with him to get his things from the hostel just before two, and then took him to a little Mexican bakery where he treated her again, buying them both conchas and a large shaved ice drink - a chamoyada - that Rhonda had been gushing about earlier that afternoon. They shared the chamoyada while people-watching on Rhonda's favorite boulevard, and then kissed leisurely, both of their mouths tasting sweet and sour and a little spicy.

"People are staring at us," Rhonda said softly, gazing up at Dean while he cupped her cheek with one hand, the other at her bare waist just under the string of her bikini. She was tall, and only had to tilt her head up slightly, and Dean liked that he didn't have to bend his back down to kiss her.

He glanced around them at the crowd and noticed that while most of the people around walked past without noticing them, some of them did in fact stare at the pair with curiosity. He glared at one man who was watching for a tad too long, and the guy averted his eyes and carried on down the sidewalk.

"Maybe it's because they're jealous." The line even tasted cheesy. Rhonda shook her head and tucked her fingers into the belt loops of his jeans, pulling his hips flush against hers like they were in some kind of teen drama. It made Dean's stomach flutter.

"You know, I'm used to people staring at me," she laughed, shaking her head slightly, "But for once, I don't think it's me they looking at. I think they looking at you, kissing me with you looking like you stepped right out of Days of Our Lives."

Dean scoffed. "Now you're just making fun of me."

Rhonda's eyes softened and she put her hands on his chest, smiling understandingly.

"You really don't know what you look like, do you?"

Dean didn't know what to say to that. He knew what he looked like to other people, in a rational, logical sort of way. Men sneered and called him pretty under their breath in bars and girls blushed and flirted around him. But that wasn’t… It didn't really mean anything. They didn't really know him, know what he was; if they did, they'd look at him different. What they saw wasn't what he saw when he looked in the mirror.

He shook his head, rolled his eyes, pulled Rhonda closer and bent to whisper into her ear.

"You're gorgeous," he told her. She wrapped her arms around him and buried her face into his neck.

That night, Rhonda, Coco and Lizabella dragged him out to Purgatory, partially under the guise of checking that the cops weren't scoping the place out but mostly to have fun. This time, with Rhonda at his side, he didn't stay on the outskirts in the shadows. He danced with her for hours, holding her body tight against him, swaying to the beat of disco music. Occasionally, some guy would brush up behind him too, ask to dance for a minute, and Dean found that he didn't mind. But he always went back to Rhonda quickly, and she would pull his face down into a kiss like she was showing the club that he was hers.

When they finally got home and fell into bed together, they didn't have sex. Instead, they played some of Rhonda's CDs, starting with Lost in Love again. Rhonda had an eclectic collection, a mix of current hip hop, R&B, pop, and older pop rock and disco.

Rhonda let him wear the harness again, underneath his own underwear. She wore nothing except another pair of satin panties, this one teal. They pressed every inch of skin they could together, and Rhonda lay her head on his chest and listened to his heartbeat.

Safe and warm beside him, Rhonda told Dean about running away from home when she was sixteen - she was twenty, now - and getting picked up by someone who she'd thought was a pimp but turned out to be a vampire. About how he'd used her as a blood bank for two days before she'd managed to cut off his head with a fire axe, and how she'd been hunting ever since.

He wrapped her tightly in his arms, wanting to protect her.

"How'd this happen?" she asked him later, tracing the scars on his chest with her fingers. "I seen some other guys' before, and they're usually a little more… professional-looking." Dean chuckled, grabbed her hand. "Did you do it yourself?" Rhonda joked, but she looked a little knowing, a little sad.

Dean shook his head. "Got a black dog to do it for me. Cheaper than a plastic surgeon."

Rhonda smiled, an understanding smile, and pressed her closed lips against his scars. Dean didn't feel like he had to say anything else. And a thought struck him, suddenly; I could fall in love with this girl. If I stayed here, I could fall in love with her.

In the next moment, he thought of Sammy, and felt his heart clench painfully in his chest.

They said goodbye the following morning. Dean accepted brief hugs from Coco and Lizabella, and then a much longer, deeper embrace from Rhonda.

"You could stay for a while, Prettyboy," Rhonda muttered into his ear when she wrapped her arms around him. He rubbed her wide shoulders, her narrow waist, the curve of her hips. "We could hunt together. There's always sh*t going down in Miami."

A part of Dean wanted to. To stay there for a few weeks… A few months, even. For the rest of his life. He wouldn’t have to just be her boyfriend for a day. He could spend each night sleeping next to Rhonda on her bed, kissing her, and f*cking her. Falling in love with her. They'd hunt together, eat together. He'd become friends with her roommates, get a day job to help cover rent. He was nineteen, the right age to move out and find his own way. No one would blame him for doing that.

But Sammy and Dad were back in Jacksonville, waiting. They needed him there, to take care of them. He couldn't abandon his family like that.

"I wish I could, but I gotta get back," Dean said, regret clawing at his throat in a way that hurt.

It had been nice for a day, to have a normal life with a beautiful girlfriend, where he didn't have to take care of anyone or mediate shouting matches or stay awake overnight at truck stops to hitch a ride. But Dean knew where he belonged. He could feel the chain pulling tight around his neck, tugging him back towards Jacksonville, the choke of it both familiar and comforting.

Dean called Dad from a pay phone - having neglected to keep his cell phone charged - to let him know the hunt was over and he was on his way back. It only took him nine hours and two rides, this time, switching cars in Kissimmee. He fought back tears in the backseat, feeling a stabbing pain in his chest even as the chain around his neck loosened the closer he got to Jacksonville. For the first time in a long time, he found himself thinking It's not fair.

He hated himself for it.

And for two weeks after his return home, each moment felt like he was on the precipice of breaking down; forcing himself to grin for Sam's sake, assisting his dad with research, and wishing - not for the first time - that he had someone in this godforsaken world to talk to about sh*t like this. Someone who didn't rely on his stiff upper lip and his calm in a crisis. Someone who wasn't his responsibility. A best friend, maybe. Or any friend at all.

Instead, Dean had no one. Five - ten, fifteen - years from now, no one else would ever know about Rhonda Hurley from Miami, who had taken his virginity, who he had dated for a day, who he could have fallen in love with. No one else would ever know how much he missed her in those first few months after that hunt, how frequently he thought of her in that first year after. No one else would ever know how scared he was that he'd never feel that way about anyone again, that he'd let his one shot at love slip through his fingers.

No one but him would ever know about Rhonda and her pink satin panties.