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The first time Dean pulls the wide-eyed hitchhiker routine, he’s thirteen years old.
His dad tells him what to do. He’ll learn later how much his dad doesn’t know about what to do — his dad puts him in jeans without holes in them, tells him no one wants to give a ride to a scruffy no-good vagabond, but Dean learns later that’s the opposite of true. He learns later how to dress so he looks like the next stiff wind will knock him over; how to bite his lips until they’re puffy and shine under the halogen lights. He learns how to dash water in his face in the truck stop bathroom so his eyelashes clump together, so it looks like he might have just been crying.
He learns that people don’t want a clean-cut Hardy Boy. No one at these places is looking for a kid to father; they’re looking for a kid to fuck.
That first time, he doesn’t know, though. He combs his hair ahead of time. He says please and thank you, sir; he stands with his shoulders back like a Marine. A lot of guys look at him and their eyes slide off, uneasy, but a few of them still invite him into their cabs.
Either way, Dean’s job is straightforward. Press some silver to their skin; see if they react. Usually he can get that done in a quick handshake, with the bracelet around his wrist. Sometimes he grabs their arm to get their attention, skims it across their neck or the back of their hand. He doesn’t have much luck, though; they’re all human, and he has to awkwardly beg off of the rides he does get offered. A couple guys get mad about it, get in his face, but that’s when John comes to the rescue — barrels in and stares them down until they slink off muttering and leave Dean for the next customer.
There’s a couple guys, though, that don’t get near enough to touch at all. One who just rakes eyes over Dean, grunts something, and jerks his chin back toward the cab of his truck — idling loudly a hundred feet away.
Dean glances back toward the dumpsters where John is hiding. There’s nothing; no sign, no gleam of a gun barrel, no indication of whether Dean should go or stay. But — well. John wouldn’t want him to let a suspect go untested, so — Dean follows him to the truck.
When he climbs up into the cab, the guy’s already sitting behind the wheel. He glances sideways at Dean, then straight ahead through the windshield again, and he grabs Dean’s hand and puts it on the crotch of his pants.
His hand wraps right around the bracelet. He doesn’t react. Dean does — yelling and jerking back. And the guy turns to look at him finally, right in the face. “What kind of a goddamn whore —”
Dean doesn’t wait to hear the rest. He slips out of the truck cab and takes off running — slows to a walk before he emerges into the yard where his dad should be able to see. He makes the signal — all good, no monster. He’s not sure if his dad has moved at all.
But he realizes it’s a pretty good way of getting silver on skin — going back to a guy’s truck. One guy even tries to shove ten bucks in his face when he gets in the cab.
In the end, the monster’s easy pickings. Shakes Dean’s hand out there in the open like an idiot; jerks back and hisses when the silver burns his skin. John wastes him with a long gun. The guy’s dead before Dean even hears the bullet blast.
They move on after that. Dean remembers the ten dollar bill, though. He remembers how his dad let him follow men back to their trucks.
---
Mostly he runs it as a stick-up scam — when he’s doing it for money.
It’s the easiest one there is. Give some guy his best doe eyes; follow him to the truck. Climb up in his cab and stick a pistol in his ribs and tell him to hand his wallet over — nice and easy. Dean gets so he can slide the cash out one-handed, eyes fixed on the guy’s face, daring him to try anything; he’ll let the wallet fall in the footwell. He’ll stick the money in his pocket and slide back out of the cab — he never latches the door, always thumps it closed against his foot instead so it’s easy to push back open — and walk away twenty or forty or two hundred dollars richer, and no one ever calls the cops.
A couple guys try to fight him. He has one or two scary moments, hands around his throat; he even takes a knife to the ribs. Dean’s a scrappy motherfucker, though; even his dad says that. He can take care of himself.
The first time he doesn’t pull his gun out, it’s — well, it’s not a thing he planned.
He just kind of likes the guy, is all. He seems sad, and a little lonely, and younger than most of the truckers, and how hard can it be? Dean’s seventeen by now; he’s plenty familiar with how to jerk himself off. Can’t be that different with another dude.
It’s not that different. The angles take some adjusting; there’s some awkwardness — but when he gets the guy’s fly open and gets his hand working, the way his head tips back — the way he sighs and his eyelashes flutter closed, the way the orange light hits his cheekbones — fuck. Fuck. Dean wants to kiss him. He wants to never stop doing this. He wants to fucking die.
He stares, hungry, at the way the guy’s face changes. The way he flinches, eyelids squeezing tighter shut, and lets out a little moan of pleasure — the way his ribs rise and fall. Dean wants to climb into his lap and touch them. He wants to strip the guy’s shirt off and lay his cheek against his skin — listen to the beating of his heart. He wants to get down on the floor, face to face with the guy’s cock — he’s staring at it, suddenly; it’s beautiful, even in the shadows of the cab. He wants to let it bump his cheekbone. His jaw. Wants to taste the tip of it — wants to find out if the guy’s breath would go crazy, or tense and still. If his hands would grip the edge of the seat or Dean’s hair.
His heart is pounding like a jackhammer. His hand is moving too-fast, too-rough, but the guy seems to like it — he gasps and arches, like he wants a little punishment, like he wants Dean to push him on the edge of pleasure and pain. And then he’s coming, with a great satisfied sigh — making a mess across his own jeans. Across Dean’s hand.
He pays Dean twenty dollars. It’s not everything that’s in his wallet, but it’s more than Dean expected. He doesn’t quite know, until he’s slipping from the cab, that he’s not going to hold the guy up for the rest of it anyway. He doesn’t quite know how to tell the guy, I think I would die for you.
His hand is sticky. He carries it carefully across the parking lot, washes it off in the bathroom sink — watches the pearly streaks of come tendril down the drain.
Another guy comes into the bathroom. He starts for one of the stalls — then he stops. He’s looking at Dean. He asks, with hope in his voice — “BJ?”
Dean meets his eyes in the mirror. He’s not beautiful like the guy in the truck was, but his ruddy face doesn’t look mean. “You got a condom?”
The guy puts a hand on his pocket. Foil crinkles. He nods.
Dean never takes clients in bathrooms. It’s harder to rob people in bathrooms; you want some real privacy if you’re pulling out a gun.
“Yeah, all right,” he says, and inclines his chin toward the stall.
He’s not very good at it. The condom tastes rubbery. The guy seems to like it all right, though, and Dean figures — it’s good to get practice. He wants practice, for the next beautiful boy in a truck cab; for in case he ever wants to do this again.
---
“Running away from home,” is his usual line, when people ask him why he’s doing this. Why he’s here. He says it with a smile, because guys like that; they like to feel like they’re the only thing in your world.
One guy tries to murder him. Full on serial killer bullshit — he’s got fucking razor wire. Dean uses it to yank his wrists together; his own palms are bleeding. They make the grip of his gun slippery. He shoots the guy in the head.
Three guys try to return the favor. Dean only lets the third one. It’s strange, another guy’s hand on your dick; another guy’s eyes hot on your face. Dean comes, and kind of wishes he’d let the others touch him, too.
One guy gets the best of him. It’s on the stick-up drill; Dean doesn’t usually put out for dudes that look like assholes. This one must be ex-military or something, though, and he’s fast, lightning fast, and bigger than Dean, and Dean’s off his game that day; the butt of his own gun hits his temple, and everything goes black. He wakes up a long time later, in a heap on the side of the road in the glaring sun; his head is pounding. His pants are around his knees.
At least it wasn’t the serial killer, he thinks. Some guy gives him a lift into the nearest town in exchange for a handy. He doesn’t seem to mind how the whole side of Dean’s face is black and blue. John sure fucking minds when he finds out Dean lost his gun.
“Running away from home,” is his line, until one guy says, “Shit, boy. Ain’t you old enough to be out on your own?”
Dean doesn’t say it anymore after that. It feels like — Be careful what you wish for. Sometimes, sitting in motel rooms while John and Sam firecracker around him, or later, when Sam’s gone, under the cold weight of one of his dad’s moods — he wants nothing more than to leave and never come back. But he doesn’t. He’s never had much of a home to run away from; still, it’s the worst thing he knows, being out on his own.
---
Cas says, “Your father was a complicated man.”
Dean thinks about that.
He thinks about that for a long time — while they’re hunting down the gorgon. It’s one that haunts truck stops, but not like the monsters Dean’s used to; this one plays Dean’s side. Maybe that’s why it gets the best of him. Or maybe it’s just ‘cause it kisses Cas — Cas, who falls down motionless on the floor. Cas, who knows Dean better than anyone; Cas who said, Your father was a complicated man.
He thinks about it later, after Michael busts out of his head, after the people they cared about are dead because Dean wasn’t strong enough; he thinks about it when he’s relieved anyway. When he’s grateful to Jack for setting them free.
He thinks about it with the gun to Jack’s head. He thinks about John Winchester’s dying wish. He thinks about locked-up boxes, and how he’s kept his dad in one for years — just like Michael. Just like he tried with Jack.
What did he let out, when he let himself crack open? Not his dad’s voice; that’s been in his head all along. It’s something else. Something about all those years out on the asphalt, about the shame in the fiction: I hoped you would get yourself a normal life, a peaceful life, a family. Something like: I have a family. Something like — He must have known. He must have known. He must have known.
He has a family. Pull the trigger, and Dean will kill his son. Will kill his father. Will die as he lived — a complicated man.
He thinks about all the men he pointed guns at, all those years. He can’t even remember now which ones he might have loved.
---
John looks away once.
It’s been ten years, maybe, since that first hunt with the silver bracelet. Sam’s gone. Dean’s been standing shivering in truck stop parking lots for almost half his life. Sometimes on his dad’s behest — hunting something. Mostly on his own.
He’s not stupid. He doesn’t go all in when John’s there to see; doesn’t dress the part like he would if he were playing for cash. There must be something, though, some automatic shift of his posture — the hunch of his shoulders, the way he casts his eyes down, the quick dart of his tongue across his lips.
He catches John’s gaze past the monster’s shoulder. There’s something in his face that looks sickened; there’s a curl to his mouth.
He looks away.
Dean shoots the shifter himself.
---
Dean’s first kiss is a girl named Robin who teaches guitar at Sonny’s House for Boys. He’s sixteen.
Dean’s first time is with a blonde bartender who smells like cigarettes and looks like Kate Winslet. He’s eighteen, but he tells her he’s twenty-one. She raises her eyebrows and laughs at him, but back at her place she shows him what to do — how to make her feel good. She makes him feel good, too. She makes him feel fucking incredible.
It only occurs to him years down the line that some of those times in truck cabs probably counted too. That he’s always liked making people feel good, when he gets to choose the people.
---
“My father was a piece of shit,” he tells Cas a long time later. “I’m not saying — I’m not saying it excuses anything. I just — thought you should know.”
“I know,” Cas says. They’re sitting in Cas’s pickup truck — the turquoise one. The last in a long line. Cas has his hands on the steering wheel, the bottom of it, cupped loosely; his head tilted back on the seat. He’s beautiful. The glow of streetlights lines his cheekbones in silver; his jaw, the straight line of his nose.
Then he turns his head, and his profile’s lost in the darkness. “Can I touch you?” Cas asks, and Dean says, “Yes.” He says, “Yes.”