Sam is making better choices on this run through Stanford but that means things are playing out differently. In some cases, the changes aren’t at all surprising. Except when they are.
I wonder if at some point Dean started getting hand-me-downs from Sam because he was bigger, he just kept on growing and growing and it didn’t make sense to buy stuff just for Dean when Sam was going to sprout another few inches still.
The t-shirt is gray and threadbare, thin as Dean pulls it over his head. The silkscreen pattern is cracked and peeling, letters that were once razor sharp crumbling around the edges, but the name of the band is still legible. Three years ago Dean had sneaked away to go to that Metallica concert and come back with this t-shirt in his hands to find Sam wide awake and waiting for him. Sam had been so excited, convinced Dean had brought the shirt back for him, and even though it was his only tangible reminder of a rare night, Dean hadn’t been able to disappoint him.
They’d only had adult sizes in medium and large, and the shirt would have been big on Dean, even then. Sam had swam in that shirt for the first year he’d worn it, arms too skinny and neck too thin, hem trailing far past the belt holding up the faded jeans two sizes too big for him. They’d been Dean’s jeans during the previous two years, white spots worn in the shape of Dean’s muscles, thin where Dean’s knees had pressed against the denim, and they’d hung all wrong on Sam’s long, stick-figure legs. Two years after that, Sam had outgrown those jeans all together, the Metallica shirt finally fitting tight across his shoulders, clinging to the growing muscles in his chest, hem hanging above his belt, flat, tanned plane of his stomach revealed in an inch wide strip, edge of his underwear just showing.
This year, Sam has finally outgrown the concert t-shirt; outgrown all of Dean’s things. The irony that the shirt he’d bought for himself and ended up giving to Sam has now been passed down to him isn’t lost on Dean. It fits a little tight in the shoulders, but it hangs right on him, better than the jeans Sam has passed down to him; material stressed and worn in the shape of Sam’s longer legs. The knees on this pair are dangerously thin, tiny pocked holes and straining threads in places, marks of Sam’s passing left behind. Dean will break them in, leave his own tiny holes and stresses behind, but they’ll never fit him quite right; never fit him like they’d fit Sam.
Sam teases him about it, pushing his shoulder into Dean as they sit on the stairs of the sloping porch, watching Nebraska wheat ripple like an ocean under the moon. Dean elbows him, then catches Sam’s neck in the crook of his elbow, tugging his brother’s head against the slats of his ribs, other hand ruffling Sam’s hair. Dean knows it drives Sam crazy; Sam’s gotten weird about his hair this past year, too, wearing it too long and shaggy wild, almost as if in defiance of their father. But if Dean has to deal with wearing his little brother’s hand-me-downs, Sam can handle a little messy hair.
Sam laughs, squirming free and shoving Dean away, smoothing his hair back into place. But he doesn’t leave, thigh plastered against Dean’s inside jeans that are all his own, their shoulders just touching, neither of them moving away as the moon climbs higher in the clear summer sky.
Years from now, Dean will look back on this moment with an ache in his chest for a simpler time. The shirt will be long gone, ghost of silkscreen barely visible against gray material gone see-through in places by the time it had given out. It had never broken in right, had always fit Sam more comfortably than it had ever fit him. But Dean had never minded wearing it.
Even his heart has always been a space well-worn in the shape of his brother.
Karate, SPN Demonic Octopus Guardian 