Title: No One Is Gonna Save This Town.
Rating: PG, maybe PG13 for one line.
Characters: Sam, Dean, John. No pairings. (Mentions of J/M, S/J)
Disclaimer: Well my birthday’s coming up, so I’m crossing my fingers … until then … nope.
The title is taken from a Muse song falling away with you.

This is AU, people. For both seasons. And the demon. Just a little plot bunny that gnawed on my brain. So, be nice?

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Such a tragedy, people used to whisper, the mother died in the nursery. That poor baby—who knows could’ve happened…good job you got him out of there, John.

Good job you got him out of there, John.

Missouri couldn’t give him an accurate picture of what killed his Mary. Evil, was all she said, her eyes weary, her teacup shaking in her hand. Real evil. It wasn’t much—it was nothing, in the way of specifics—but it was something. He wasn’t just going crazy, he hadn’t just lost the love of his life in some freak accident that he couldn’t control nor have prevented. He had something to hunt.

The police never could figure out how the fire started, so they closed the case with some bull about an electrical short.

John never could find the trace of the thing that killed Mary, even though he searched until the day he died.

---

Those boys, strangers used to say, they’re trouble. You can see it in their eyes.

Sam didn’t know what was worse; starting a new school, a new town, a new reputation, or enduring the one he already had. Either way, people would look at their hand-me-down clothes and lack of a mother and treat them the same as they always had been, with disdain and—sometimes—disgust. Like they were sub-humans because they were poor, because they didn’t have it so easy as others. After a long while, it stopped bothering Sam—wherever they were, these people would be in the impala’s rear-view mirror in a few weeks anyway.

But even at home, he was on the outside. Dad and Dean had a special bond, and it was something Sam could never get, no matter how hard he tried. They spoke to each other with body language and glances. They wanted to hunt; they wanted to live this life. They remember Mom. Sam didn’t. Not only that…Sam felt different. He knew it was something neither John nor Dean would understand, but it’d always been there.

His brother was the perfect son for John Winchester. But Sam … Dad always seemed to be in a shitty with Sam no matter what he did. If he didn’t want to go on a hunt. If he went on a hunt and figured something out faster than the old man. If teachers called him to tell him Sam had an ‘unusual, exceptional intelligence’. If Sam had nightmares.

Eventually, Sam stopped telling his Dad and brother about his nightmares, the ones filled with fire and the dead speaking in riddles. It’s not like they made sense anyway.

Sam supposed the fights didn’t help. Dad hated it when they got into fights because it drew attention, but it wasn’t like Sam purposely went out of his way to get into punch-ups and scuffles on the playground or street. He didn’t. Especially when—when he knew the adrenaline would take over. Like that time when—Sam had barely touched that boy, Timothy Davies from Arkansas, the fifteen year old with a pug nose and a personality to match. He’d barely touched him, but he knew he’d never forget his face.

He’d never forget how easy it was to feel his neck break under his hands like a twig.

---

I’m sorry, friends would say, their voices distorted by a crackling phone line. Your father was a good man.

Dean would thank them and hang up. It was too much. These were fellow hunters, good friends, and Dean knows they mean what they say to him, bit it was too much to hear it at that point. Everything was. Sam was too much: his grief, his anxiety, his presence. The impala was too much, saturated in memories. Eating, breathing, living.

At the same time, Sam was his only lifeline. His brother. His only reason to slug out the next day. But he wasn’t Sam’s, Dean knew that. Dad’s death awoke something in Sam that Mom’s hadn’t, or even Jessica’s. A desire to hunt. For days on end Sam wouldn’t sleep, wouldn’t eat, would just bury himself in piles of ancient texts and old tomes. Books on old black magic became light reading for Dean’s little brother. The line was getting more and more blurred.

Sam’s line had never been too distinct anyway. Dean always thought that was why he went to Stanford. He hadn’t been running from Dad and this lifestyle, he’d been running from a part of himself—the hunter—hoping to bury it with normalcy and pretence. Because Sam always had been the best at the hunt. Latin came so fluently to him; blood rites were like his ABCs. Sam was born for this life, and later Dean would realise that was what their father had been missing all his life.

Sam figured it out first, though. Dad chased all over the country for twenty years, hunting for a monster that he wouldn’t find.

He never did think to look in the backseat.

“My nursery, Dean,” Sam told him, his voice thick and his eyes bright, “My room. I was sleepin’—”

Dean felt the gun in his hand cock itself.

Sammy. Sammy, no.

All of a sudden, claiming ignorance wasn’t an option anymore.