Harmless Things (Jean Hobbs AU)

Part twenty-one

Daniel P.O.V.

I've never really been the one for attention. I suppose I took after Dean that way who generally avoided being in the centre of it all, but our younger sister was the complete opposite. However with her illness, the type of attention she was getting was a lot different to the kind she got at home, and she didn't like it. At all. 

All the different doctors and nurses and then the special type of doctors that saw her daily scared her. She would only ever allow them to see her if Dean was there to give her all his support and a hand to hold on, and me and our mother would be shooed away into the waiting room to give them privacy. Sometimes my mother would go on a wander, leaving me there alone and to receive sympathetic looks from strangers, and then I'd either look down to the well-polished floor to avoid eye contact or just go on a walk myself, taking in all the different walks of life. 

Perhaps it was my quiet personality that made my family not give me as much of their time as they did for Scarlett, but then again, she was young and needy and maybe it was assumed that could fend for myself and to just come to them when I felt like I wanted to. It had been like that for as long as I could remember, but for the majority of the time I resisted going to Dean about my problems unless they were urgent, because he was constantly tired and never seemed to get a break until he eventually climbed into bed each night. 

I was always given space which I usually grateful for, but sometimes I had too much of it and often I'd spend my time alone just sitting on the floor in the bedroom I shared with Dean, staring blankly at the sheets of paper that surrounded me that I had first hoped to fill with the lyrics I came up with, but had been unable to come up with something that was sufficient enough to be jotted down. 

'Lonely' wasn't the right word to use when it came to describing how I felt in those hours I spent alone, but 'forgotten' and 'unimportant' would be more suitable. Even though I felt as guilty as hell for admitting it, jealously was a new emotion I had been feeling lately to add to the mix because Scarlett took all the attention leaving barely any for me, and by the time we got home Dean would just collapse straight into bed, too exhausted to speak to me. 

I knew it was awful for feeling how I did especially with what we were all going through, but I was constantly in the shadows, hardly ever getting a word in edgeways. I knew Dean tried his best and I loved him for that, but even just to speak to him for 5 minutes before I slept was enough for me, but I never got that now and instead had to be satisfied with that one hug in the morning. 

Dean underestimated how well I knew him and he didn't know that I knew that he hadn't been himself for weeks. The smile he always forced in front of us was a little a bit smaller, the light that showed he was truly happy in eyes that he only had for a while was now gone and he always seemed to have an arm around himself as if he'd fall apart if he didn't. 

I blamed Jack for sending my brother into a spiral of sadness and fear, because the days where he used to text Jack for hours on end were now over, and he no longer looked at his phone and smiled like he used to, and even though he tried to hide it, I picked up on how he walked just that bit slower when we walked to school and I could see how terrified Dean suddenly grew when we walked in the entrance and said goodbye to me as quick as he could, scurrying out of sight.

Today when the school bell rung to signal 4th period was over and that it was now lunch break, I tried to work out where Dean would be and decided to try out the maths corridor. I saw him come out of class and was thankful that my height blended me into the crowd easily and I stayed back, observing him cautiously walking down the corridor and clutching onto his backpack straps and keeping his head down that only reminded me so much of myself when I had problems at school.