Flash
Sam:
"Well, I'll tell you one thing. We're lucky we had Dad."
Dean:
"I never thought, I'd hear you say that."
Sam:
"Well, it coulda gone a whole other way after Mom. A little more tequila and a little less demon hunting and we woulda had Max's childhood. All things considered, we turned out ok. Thanks to him."
Dean:
"All things considered."
Flash:
Dean was standing in the door, shifting his weight from foot to foot.
The yelling had been going on for a long time.
Sam and Dad had been butting heads more and more recently, and now this…
He realized suddenly that he had been digging his nails into his wrist hard enough to draw blood. This couldn't be happening. It just couldn't… Sam… Oh, Sam…
Sam shoved his chair backwards and jumped to his feet shouting at the top of his lungs:
"I'm going, and I don't care what you say, you can't stop me!"
"Oh, shit, here we go," Dean whispered to himself as he scrambled into the room. "Sam!"
John set his bottle on the low table next to the couch with a clink that sounded like a church-bell in Dean's ears. Sam just squared up and lifted his chin defiantly.
"What the hell did you say to me, boy?"
"Dad. I'm not a little kid anymore. This is important!"
"You mind your tongue with me!"
John had stopped shouting, he was growling now.
"No. Dad. Listen to me..."
Dean touched Sam's shoulder gently,
"Sammy, come on."
Sam pulled himself free and shook his head.
John took a step closer to his sons.
"Sam, go to your room."
"No."
"I said, go to your room!"
"Yeah. And I said no!"
Voices was getting louder again, and Dean stepped in between his brother and his father,
"Look we're all tired, we can talk about this later. Sammy, I mean it, come on."
The other two ignored him almost completely, John just shoved him to the side and grabbed Sam's collar, pulling him close, staring into his eyes.
"What did you say?"
"You heard me. You're just pissed off that you won't be able to control me anymore!"
Dean shoved his way in between them again, putting his back to his brother and pushing at his dad's shoulders.
"Stop it, both of you. Stop it! That's enough!"
As John staggered a step back, Dean half turned to Sam:
"That means you too, Sam, just… get out of here, go."
"But Dean..."
John straightened up and moved forward, stalking like a predator, his shoulders bunched up under his stained plaid shirt, his jaw clenched tight. Dean shoved him back again, harder this time, then hissed over his shoulder at Sam.
"Go! Just Go! Sam! I mean it. Get the fuck out of here!"
Sam hesitated… looked uncertainly from his Dad, who was radiating waves of anger along with the stink of cheap booze from an evening mostly seen through the glass of a bottle, to his brother, who was staring back at him, pale and determined…
"Dean… I… "
"Just go, Sam."
Dean sounded so immensely tired suddenly. It wasn't fear of his father's wrath that broke Sam's intention to stay and fight this out, it was the exhaustion in his brothers voice, the bleakness in his eyes.
"I'll talk him down… please Sam… just get out, go."
Sam went.
He looked back as he pulled the door shut, long enough to meet his fathers eyes one final time. There was nothing but rage to be seen there, and the last thing his father roared after him, as he stepped out into the dark was:
"If you go out that door, you don't come back. You hear me? Don't come ba…"
The door shut of the last part of the word.
Dean's shoulders slumped a bit.
Before he had time to fully wrap his head around the fact that Sammy was really gone, had left, he was hit from behind with the full weight of his dad, barreling into him like a run away freight train.
He staggered forward, hit his head on the wall and blacked out for a moment.
A moment was all it took.
When he came to, Dad had a knee on his back and was ripping the nearest extension cord out of the wall.
As the lamp in the corner toppled and broke, darkness descended.
Struggling to get up, get away, he saw his dad tear the cord away from the shattered lamp, double it up and lift it.
His last clear thought was:
"Oh, shit, not a cord, not again."
He hurriedly turned his face away, brought his arms over his head for protection.
The cord whistled through the air, landed with a dull sound that wasn't nearly loud enough compared to the mind-numbing pain it brought along with it.
Dean screamed, or at least he tried to, because his mouth opened wide, but no sound came out, just a wheeze of air.
Agony danced a triumphant foxtrot over his back, ass and thighs, skipping and jumping irregularly, hammering it's heels down on him again and again.
The long lines of cord itself drew ribbons of fire, that inexplicably felt both hot and cold at the same time, but the end, the doubled-up end, was thudding into his flesh, landing like a punch until the word pain became irrelevant, insufficient.
He writhed and gasped, twisted and wheezed. Fought desperately to get enough air, to escape the hurt, but to no avail. He was pinned like a butterfly in a collector's box, caught in a hurricane of torment.
Dean stopped struggling as his mind gave up under the onslaught of icy-hot flames licking his body. He went limp and drifted away into the darkness above the blue.
When he came to, the first thing he did was puke until it felt like his stomach would turn inside out and draw his intestines along with it out through his mouth.
He was on all fours, retching miserably, every spasm renewing the agony of the whipping and thus bringing on yet another body-wrecking gagging spell.
At last he got control of his rebellious stomach. He crawled a little away from the pool of stinking, lumpy liquid, then pulled himself to his feet, using the wall as support on the unending journey upwards.
Moving like a 90-year old with bad hip-dysplasia Dean shuffled into the bathroom.
He carefully got out of his clothes, opting to cut the t-shirt rather than pull it over his head. His back burned, his legs shook in competition with the tremors in his hands, apparently battling over which of them would be the first to tear themselves free of his body altogether.
He realized that under his breath, he was quietly, steadily, cursing Sam.
Sam went away. He left. Left the family. Left Dean.
And he just had to choose an evening where Dad had been in the fucking tequila to do it.
Dammit.
Dean looked at himself in the mirror and discovered that he was crying. Silently, as he always cried. Noisy crying had been knocked out of him a long time ago, just around the time when Dad started knocking back tequila after a bad hunt.
He stared at himself for a moment, then half-turned to see how bad the damage was.
The initial red lines had turned into swollen red-purple welts, crisscrossing his backside from shoulders to knees. The letter C was inscribed in his skin in deep bruised black and blue everywhere where the thundering end of the doubled-up cord had landed.
Dean turned back to the mirror. He should have been able to fight the old man off. He was young, strong, trained, and Dad had crawled into that fucking bottle early in the evening. He should have been able to. But he hadn't, had he?
Useless. Just a stupid, useless high-school dropout.
All he'd ever wanted was to have his family together, hunting things, saving people, but now… Sammy was gone. To college of all things. And Dad… the devil only knew when he'd stagger back in….
Take care of Sammy. That was what his job.
Now what was he supposed to do?
He leaned a little closer to the mirror. Then he drew back a hand and punched the horrible thing into splinters big and small, his face bursting into a mass of fragments along with the glass.
He picked glass out of his knuckles as he limped back into the main room.
Unwilling to put clothes on over the artwork of soreness that had become his body, he grabbed a blanked from the couch before he walked out the door, got into the safe haven of his Baby, lay down across the front-seats, gently pulled the blanket over his shoulder and finally, mercifully gave in to exhaustion.
In the darkness and silence, the door to the empty house swung gently in the night wind.