Title: Those Who Favor Fire

Author: MissAnnThropic

Spoilers: pre-series

LiveJournal: miss_annthropic(dot)livejournal(dot)com

Summary: The first time Dean burned a body he was too young, but that was the story of his life.

Disclaimer: None of it's mine. I'm just a sad little fangirl that spends her days writing fanfic and watching DVDs of her favorite shows :(

Author's Note: You could sort of call this a companion piece/sequel to my fic "Pyro", but only in the sense that is expands on the idea addressed in that fic. Definitely don't need to read that one first to get this.

The first time Dean was too young, but that was the story of his life. After the fire, John had turned to him to be mature beyond his years. Dean didn't complain. He didn't resent it. He felt like he and his dad became partners that night. They had to protect Sam from everything bad, like Mom would want, and it was a job for two.

Dean never missed the rest of his childhood. Not much, anyway. He stopped acting like a little kid at the tender age of four.

But the first salt and burn where Dean wielded the matchbook made Dean tremble. He was nine. He'd seen John do it before, of course, but always while standing back, well clear of the dancing flames. He couldn't watch the flame land on the corpse, couldn't watch the body catch fire and bloom with orange light. He couldn't look at a body burning.

The burning body had let loose a ghost that was hurting people, sure, but when it was alive it was someone's family. Maybe someone's mother. Another mom burning.

But that night, John couldn't do it himself. The ghost did something to John's hands. Dean hadn't seen it happen, didn't know what the ghost did, only that his father came stumbling back to his son standing watch over the open grave with a bag of salt and iron crowbar (Sam hiding in the Impala outside the cemetery) with his hands held close to his chest, swollen and stiff.

John had come to burn the body. Dean was already preparing to inch away. The body didn't bother Dean; he just couldn't be there when it burned.

John fumbled with his battered hands to dig the matchbook out of his pocket. That he did, but his fingers couldn't manage the finer motor functions needed to strike the matches.

He held them out to Dean in the palm of one hand, half-curled fingers frozen like talons. "You'll have to do it, son."

Dean stared wide-eyed at the matchbook. For a second, he couldn't move to take them. He couldn't burn someone's mom.

"Don't have all night, Dean," John snarled, his voice roughened by pain.

Dean swallowed and took the book with a shaky hand. If John saw the waver in his son's hand, he didn't say anything about it.

Dean tore the top off the pack and turned the paper to use the rough strike strip. He focused solely on the matchbook, his heart racing and his lungs burning.

It took three swipes before a few matches sparked. They ignited their neighbors. Soon enough, Dean was standing over the grave with a handful of fire.

The desire to go home nearly choked him. He didn't even know where home was anymore, but in that moment of panic he was still a child enough to want to escape to it.

"Do it," John ordered.

Dean didn't throw the matches down so much as drop them, hand jerking away out from underneath the book. The flame fell, landed on the salted body reeking of gasoline. The dried carcass was suddenly awash in flames. The face, desiccated but still human, looked up at Dean from a collar of fire. The dress she'd been buried in was faded and wasting away… through the mirage of heat, it might have been a nightgown.

Dean tried to retreat only to back up into his father. He wanted to run from the burning woman, but when John put one wounded hand on his shoulder, Dean found himself frozen. He hoped his father couldn't feel his whole body shaking.

He couldn't watch the body burn anymore. He turned toward his father, intent on burying his face in his father's stomach, but he happened to glance up and catch the light of the fire flickering in John's eyes. John Winchester looked quiet-angry and mesmerized by the fire. He fed off the burning corpse like some mythical beast.

Dean was horrorstruck a moment.

"Good job, son," John grumbled, tired and hurting but proud, and Dean clenched his fists at his sides and just stood there as tall as his nine-year-old frame would stand. He was going to hide his face in his father before, but that moment passed and he never did. He told himself protecting Sam had meant burning that woman, whoever she was. If that's what it took, Dean would burn her.

Even if she had been someone's mom.

They went back to the car, where they found Sam asleep in the backseat. John got in behind the wheel and had Dean crawl in his lap to steer while John worked the pedals.

That was the first night Dean drove the Impala, but that memory was never very happy or good for Dean. It was always tied to the first night he burned someone.

Dean stayed afraid of burning bodies for years… so for years, he always wanted to be the one to do it. If he was afraid, he wasn't strong, and if he wasn't strong, he'd let down his father. John needed him strong. Sam needed Dean to be strong, because the older Dean got, the more Sam became his responsibility. Dad had enough to worry about just concentrating on the hunt, so he delegated. Dean was the one who made sure Sam was clean, fed, and clothed. He got Sam ready for school and made him brush his teeth at night. It was Dean who calmed Sam after a nightmare. It was Dean who looked after Sam when he was sick, wishing he knew how to make tomato-rice soup.

Whenever Dean was on a salt and burn with his father, he held out his hand for the matches. His heart was always in his throat and his stomach always rolled as he asked for the assignment of setting fire to someone, but he made himself do it.

John usually let him. He even joked a few times, after the fact, about his son the pyromaniac. It couldn't be further from the truth, but Dean smiled at the compliment John thought he was giving Dean.

Because Dean didn't hear 'my son likes to play with fire', he heard 'my son is a damn good partner and he'll be a damn good hunter one day'.

A hunter could keep his family safe, protect Sammy, and that was all that really mattered.

It was never easy, but it did become easier. John always talked to his sons about facing their fears, and Dean was nothing if not obedient to John's every word. Dean made himself look those frozen faces in the eyes, whether or not there were still eyes in the sockets to look at, and he made himself watch them burn. He felt like he owed them that much honor, for whatever it was worth. Even if they weren't someone's mother, they'd been a father, a son, a daughter, a brother… they had been someone's everything. Someone's Sammy.

He felt older with every burning. By the time he was fifteen, his soul had to be about eighty.

The first time Dean relished setting a body on fire was the first time a ghost hurt Sam. It tossed the youngest Winchester into a headstone. It did nothing more than that – Dean and John were the threats and twelve-year-old Sam just got in the way – but that didn't lessen the rage awoken in Dean.

Sammy was bleeding, and for that the spirit would burn in hell.

He didn't even remember if it was man or woman… nor did he care. Dean stood over the body, lit the matches, and dropped the spark to light the fire. The shriveled corpse went up in a pyre of Winchester wrath.

John was checking on Sam – usually Dean's job, but Dean couldn't pull himself away from the body just yet.

When the body went up in flames, there was no twist of guilt, no clench of fear, no twinge of remorse. Instead there was another fire building and growing… a fire inside Dean. In his heart, in his eyes, in his chest. It burned hot and dangerously bright. It danced with that sweet elixir of vengeance.

In that moment, he got it.

He had always known his father wanted to find the thing that killed Mom and make it pay. He took up John's cause because Mom shouldn't have died, and being a good hunter made his father so proud of his oldest son. Avenging Mary Winchester's death was the Winchester Mission. But Dean had been four when she died, and the memory of that night made him sad more than it made him angry. A little boy lost his mother, and the grief and loneliness (even with his dad and brother there), was all that night could hold for Dean. He hated the thing that killed Mom, he helped Dad hunt, but the two had never really connected before for Dean.

As he stood over the body whose disembodied spirit had hurt his baby brother, he understood.

From that day onward, Dean threw himself into the hunts with gusto. Before it had been their way of life, and one that Dean had grown very good at, but now it was a calling of a sort. His father's pride in him, for the first time, became secondary to Dean's genuine thirst for the hunt.

He looked forward to the burning bodies. Every one fed a hunger in Dean, one that could never be sated but the feeding was intoxicating and drove Dean to continue hunting. In fact, it got to where John had to curb Dean's eagerness to hunt.

Because he wasn't torching mothers or fathers or brothers or Sammys anymore. He was eliminating one more nasty, fugly monster that would hurt Sammy if it had half the chance. Every burning body was another ghost that couldn't touch Sam.

Dean would set the world on fire, one body at a time, to keep Sam safe.

END