No Son of Mine

"Before"

Dean didn't know when exactly it happened, just that things went from stable and sometimes happy, to a living hell made specifically for him.

He remembers that the few years before 'After', as he's gone to calling it, was a grieving time for all of them. His mom was gone, had gone somewhere that he couldn't, Sammy wouldn't stop crying, and Dad was always gone and came back late in the night smelling foul. After leaving their Aunt and Uncle's house, their dad had driven them to a motel that smelled like Sammy's dirty diapers and only had one bed plus Sammy's carry crib. Dean had no idea what was happening or how to help make it better.

His father's kind words and kisses as he tucked Dean into bed for the night were replaced with barely-there glances as he grabbed the Impala's keys and a command to watch Sammy before he disappeared into the night, not bothering to come back until predawn. John never realized that Dean didn't sleep when he was gone, would sit sentinel in Sammy's crib until John was safely back inside the locked motel room and sleeping in his bed.

Dean never felt the urge for sleep when his father was gone, only a sense of a feeling that he would learn to know quite well; loneliness.

Dean couldn't function like a normal kid was supposed too, was still too deep in the mourning of his lost mother and not receiving the respite from the grief that a present father should've given. Instead, he was left to repress his grief, to mourn but never heal. He was becoming a robot, keen to please a man that was blind to his child's suffering because he was too focused on his own. Dean's mind was on autopilot, nothing registered with his psyche besides mom's gone and make sure Sammy's okay so dad doesn't get mad; not a single thought that went through his four year old brain was his own...and they wouldn't be for months to come.

~~~~~~~

Almost a full year passed before things started to change for the better. When his dad finally came back to the motel room one night at a decent time, smelling faintly like himself and not yelling or weeping in loss, Dean knew that things were finally settling back down from the chaos that they'd been living in.

His father actually looked him in the eye and spoke his name, asked him what he wanted for dinner instead of throwing a box of greasy leftovers from a bar on the table and waiting for Dean to find it in the morning. Dean wanted to answer, more than anything in the world he wanted to tell his dad that he didn't care what they ate so long as they ate together, but after months of silence and being treated like nothing more than a shadow, he physically couldn't get the words to pass his vocal chords. His father gave him a frustrated look that made Dean flinch into himself, but the look was quickly overpowered by worry at Sammy's disgruntled cry that came from across the room. At the sight of his almost-never-there father picking up his younger brother for the first time in 8 months and not looking straight to Dean to fix the crying child, Dean almost let out a sob. His daddy was back. Everything was going to be okay now.

That night was the first night in over 11 months that the now-five year old boy held any hope for the family's future.