TITLE: Between Days
E-MAIL: eli @ popullus.net
ARCHIVE: Ask, please.
RATING: PG
POSTED: June 5, 2006
SUMMARY: It would've been a barrel of laughs until graduation, Dean figured -- the state of touchy truce would have stood, all balanced and safe -- if Sam hadn't taken that damn test.
AUTHOR NOTES: For Monkie's request of Sam and Dean in high school together. Sal was the lovely providing the beta.
DISCLAIMER: Read
School was school. Nothing changed except the name over the doors and the teacher who decided he was too much trouble. Girls still played with their hair and smelled like sweet heaven as they brushed by. Guys still snickered in the halls or pushed out on the field, all posture, no power. And stories still traveled faster than the sound of the punches that Dean was always forced to throw before things settled. There was a pattern to this stuff, just like everything else.
Until Lincoln High.
Old building, just over 100. Solid stone. Clean history. Dad had liked that. Dean liked even more that the sports teams weren't called the freaking Navigators. He almost pitied the kids at North Star; some adult thinks they're funny, and you're stuck with a dumbass name forever.
This time the fight had come a little faster, a little harder, and he'd had to really land some serious hurt on the big one who just hadn't quit. But it would've been a barrel of laughs until graduation, Dean figured -- the state of touchy truce would have stood, all balanced and safe -- if Sam hadn't taken that damn test.
"You are shitting me."
"What?" Sam laughed. "Dean--"
"No." Dean stabbed a finger at Sam, the skinny-ass source of a whole new truckload of problems. He watched Sam's smile die, and he gritted his teeth, but he couldn't make himself stop. "There is no way this is happening. You don't get to do this to me, Sammy."
"Like I'm doing this to you." Sam had learned how to sneer years ago, and hell, he was good at it. "It was a test, Dean. I took it. I passed."
Dean leaned forward across the kitchen table that Sam, no idiot, obviously, quickly put between them. "You're in eighth fucking grade, not ninth--"
"Oh, come--"
"--I don't care what any test says!"
"Dean!"
That sharp bark of sound from the doorway was an order, not his name, and Dean straightened and shut up. But he didn't stop glaring across at Sam, because shit.
Dad tossed his keys on the table and stood there, hands in his jacket pockets, looking back and forth between them. "One of you, explain."
Without a word, Sam held out the paper that was going to make the next four months of Dean's life a true living hell, complete with torturers around every corner...waiting for both of them, now.
Dad barely glanced at the official letterhead, but his eyebrows went up way high at the rest.
"A class a day at the high school?"
"Not every day," Sam said immediately, glancing across at Dean. Dean gave him a tight smile, and Sam cleared his throat. "Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. At least until January, anyway."
Dad said, "Hmm," a low sound that could mean just about anything. Good for you was as likely as Well, I'm not driving you. Hell, if it had been anything else -- anything but Sammy at the same school for the first time since Dean had started regularly going to school and discovered that a little brother, even when he wasn't so little anymore, was a bigger liability than a broken arm --- Dean would've said one or both of those things himself.
It didn't mean No, though. It didn't mean that Dad was going to say the one thing that he could've said and actually have it count more than when Dean said it. That had been the one important word; the rest, the yelling, that had been frustration, had been--
What else could Dean say? That he knew Sam could take care of himself, that he'd back Sam against any one of the guys in this school, but that he was honestly scared to death of the hell that human teenagers in a pack could release on Sam instead of on him? Yeah. That'd go over well.
Dean's hands clenched and he took a deep breath. He'd just have to establish a new pattern.
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