I can't seem to stop
It was all very obvious to Dean.
--
When he was young, just before Mom and the start of hunting, Dean was still called Darla. He already knew that he didn’t like the sound of that.
He looked at the boys in the park, shoving and screaming in the dirt, and wanted that more than the pretty pink dress that Mom thought Darla loved.
Maybe Darla did love it. Dean had never met her.
But he was only four, then. He knew that he was flat all the way down until his toes, and he knew that Mom was bumpy up high and rolling like hills. Dad was a mystery, because Dad didn’t take baths together like Dean and Mom.
Then, the only difference between girls and boys was the length of their hair. And maybe the clothes.
After Mom, Dean assumed that he would be free of the dresses, and then went and got his hair cut short. He figured that that made him a boy.
It wasn’t that easy, though.
--
Sammy called him Dee, and that was closer.
It was too simple to say, “Call me Dean.”
Sammy shrugged and tilt-sucked a few drops from his sippy cup. “Okay.”
--
Irrationally, Dean kept hoping. Even after he figured out the physical difference between sexes, he assumed - he thought, maybe, - that it was just a mistake. That, as he grew out of the androgyny of youth, it would turn out that he was right all along, give the man a cigar.
And then the ghost of Darla rose up like a jealous, nasty creature. Her body came up with two hard, painful circles, just under the nipples, and Dean was trapped inside her skin, sharing space with them.
He sort of hoped they were tumors. Cancer. An accident.
For a long time, he flat ignored them. They grew bigger, though, and Dean found himself poking one experimentally, looking in the mirror, and it hurt. Tender and delicate.
Like a girl.
Dean stared at Darla’s face and the dust of Darla’s pubic hair and the downy-soft, blondish hair on her legs, and he didn’t trust the person in the mirror.
--
“Dude, Dean, you fatass, you have man-boobs!” one of the kids in class said, and that set the whole class laughing. Like they’d all noticed, but had been waiting for someone else to say it first.
Dean had to stay in his seat until the end of school, and then he had to sit still on the bus. Every time someone glanced at him, he knew they were thinking about Darla’s boobs, her revenge against him for stealing her body.
He taught himself how to bind them down that night, tight and flat, and it hurt and it ached until he got used to it.
--
Dad tried to talk to him about it. It didn’t work.
“Dee, sweetie,” he started cautiously, sitting down on the couch next to Dean. “I know you must be confused about a lot of things, right now, but. You’re just staring to grow into the woman you’re meant to be.”
Dean said, “I’m not a girl. I know Sammy told you. My name’s Dean.”
That was the last time Dad brought it up to him.
--
In seventh grade, they had sex ed. Dean went with the boys to learn about parts he didn’t have, while the girls trooped off to see the secret girl-hood initiation handshake, or something.
That stuff was probably important, though, so Dean looked up a free clinic and went in.
The doctor was a woman. She glanced over his sign-in sheet and smiled, red lipstick dark and pretty. She was pretty.
“Hello, Dean. You wrote on here that you had a few questions about puberty?”
Dean clenched his jaw tight and steeled himself against the humiliation curling in his gut, pulled up his shirt, unwound the Ace bandage holding Darla’s boobs down. He didn’t look at the pretty doctor while he did it.
He said, “I’m a boy, but someone didn’t get the memo. Can you tell me what else is going to freak the hell out on me in the next couple of years?”
More silence than Dean could stand. Blood pounded hard and hot and betrayed in his ears.
The pretty doctor made a sad, apologetic sound in her throat, and set her fingers in Dean’s buzzed-short hair. “It must be hard,” she said, and then treated Dean like an older brother asking about what his sister would be going through for the rest of the appointment.
--
His skin stretched too tight at the shoulders and waist, too loose in the front and hips. He moved too oily, like there was a film of sweat all over him that never came off.
Dean’s bones felt right, the size and shape and weight of them, they were okay. But everything hanging off them wasn’t his.
--
Dean’s relationship with girls was complicated.
On the one hand, they were. They were everything he wasn’t, everything he tried so hard not to think about most of the time. They were Darla. They were the enemy.
On the other hand, they were hot.
Dean asked out Cindy Gallagher halfway through eighth grade. It was the tame kind of dating, holding hands in the hallways and making gooey eyes back and forth from their desks in class.
Dean kissed her after school, when he managed to isolate her from the rest of the girls. She tasted sweet and waxy, the fruit punch chapstick that counted as makeup. It was soft. It was warm.
Dean really, really liked her. A lot. He told her so.
Cindy beamed and blushed and wiped his lips with her thumb. It came away shiny. “It rubbed off on you,” she whispered. “And I like you, too.”
Two weeks later, Dad announced they were moving that weekend.
And because Dean really, really liked Cindy, he wanted her to see. He needed someone to know all of him and to still like him.
But she didn’t understand. He told her, and she didn’t understand, and he came away with another shallow wound on his heart, but they were starting to dig too deep, each one hurt worse than the one before, and, and.
--
In his dreams, Dean was a man, in his own body and not Darla’s. He pushed a girl back on the bed and moved in her, push-push-pull, thrust in and out and smiled and loved every second, treasured it, drank it in, more at peace than ever.
She opened her mouth and said, “Dean,” with Sam’s voice, and Dean woke up.
Sam was crouched by his bed, staring. “Dean. You’re crying.”
“Yeah,” Dean agreed, and held his arms open so Sam would climb in between them.
--
Freshman year of high school, Darla flipped a switch somewhere and blood started coming out of her body, and Dean had to hang around for every exciting second of it.
He’d been expecting it, sort of dreading it.
Dean went to the bathroom in the morning and he’d ruined his underwear, and he felt like crap so he tumbled straight back into bed until noon. He took an extra-long shower and tried to wash off the drippy feeling, and by the time he got out, a pack of pads and a bar of chocolate were sitting on the counter.
Dean stuck his head out the door and yelled, “You’re fucking eleven! Shouldn’t you still think girls have cooties?”
“I do,” Sam deadpanned, twisting around on the couch toward the hallway. His cheeks were still red from the bike ride to the store.
“Why the hell do you know anything about this?” Dean demanded.
Sam shrugged and turned back to the TV. “The Lifetime channel.”
That night, right when the cramps hit and Dean was about ready to kill himself, Sam steamed a washcloth and gave it to him as a hot pad.
Dean said, “I’m serious, Sammy, girls have cooties.”
Sam nodded solemnly. “I know. You’re not a girl.”
--
Kissing was the best.
Girls were warm and firm under him, and soft in all the right places, and Dean loved running his fingers through their hair and inching a hand higher and higher up their skirts.
It was connection, even though he couldn’t tell them anything real about himself.
--
When Sammy was thirteen, Dean caught him sheepishly stripping the sheets off his bed. They were sticky and shiny in a crusty, ugly mess in the middle.
And because Dean had done so much reading about it, so much research and thinking about it, Dean knew what was up.
He smirked and laughed at his little brother, “Had a naughty dream, Sammy?”
Sam turned red and angry. “No,” he said, and bundled the sheets up to hide the mark. “Shut up.”
“It’s just ‘cause you haven’t,” Dean said, and curled his hand into a loose fist and drew it up and down, like porn stars did to guys, and he hoped, really hoped, that it didn’t look as awkward as it felt. “Y’know.”
And Sammy didn’t say, what would you know about it, even though the fear of it was heavy and sick on Dean’s tongue. Sam just blushed again and glared at his feet. “Don’t know how,” he admitted, grumbling into his gross messy sheets.
Dean panicked for a second, because holy shit neither did he, but he recovered with, “Just try stuff until it feels good, dork. Twist your wrist a little, tighter or looser, Jesus, just figure out what you like.”
Sam looked at Dean, and his eyes were huge and brown-green, and this was his I’m-so-glad-you’re-my-big-brother face.
Dean sort of turned to goo inside.
--
It only took one bad experience with a barfly’s wandering hands for Dean to know that he had to stop fooling around with women.
Whatever connection he’d had with them was gone. Dean lost the thing that tethered him most strongly to his bones.
Sam understood, though. Sam knew. Sam still loved him, no matter what.
It helped.
--
Dad trained Dean to fight like a man, but Dean could see that he was conflicted about it. Sam was stronger, because Sam was really a boy.
So, Dean tried harder. He was Dad’s son, the perfect son. He didn’t fight Dad like Sam did, because Dean didn’t have that luxury.
He was already a freak. He didn’t want to disappoint Dad any more than he already had.
--
Dean missed kissing. He missed fooling himself into thinking he was a little bit normal. He missed liking a person and thinking that person might like him back.
He was alone.
He was alone.
--
Sam kissed Dean.
Sam anchored Dean in the world, always had. Sam knew what Dean was and treated him like it wasn’t anything special. Sam never mixed up his pronouns, like Dad did sometimes.
Dean needed that. Needed that like breathing.
Sam was the world, for one bright-flash second of clarity, and that meant that everyone in the world loved Dean just like he was, even if he wasn’t strapped down and stuffed up in flannel.
And Dean loved him back, Sam, Sammy, the only thing that always made sense, that he never had to pretend around.
It was them against the world, and Dean wasn’t alone after all, he’d never been alone.
--
Sam went to Stanford, and Dean couldn’t feel that connection whenever he needed it anymore.
It hurt like a phantom limb. Like thinking he was supposed to have something in his boxers that wasn’t there.
Dean was familiar with the feeling. It still sucked.
--
Sam sent him an email about Darla, her bank account information. They started saving up for an operation, even thought neither of them said it.
Every time Dean put money into the account, he felt that connection to Sam - like sharing a kiss, but further away.
--
Dean went into a sex shop, nothing new there, and bought an average-sized dildo. It was red and bendy-plastic, shaped with a rounded end and a flat end, like a bullet.
He had a story ready about buying it as a present for his girlfriend, but the girl at the counter didn’t look at him twice, let alone ask.
He’d never had this freedom before, traveling alone with no risk of Dad or Sam digging through his bag for an extra shirt and stumbling over - this.
Dean took it out of the sanitary packaging and put it between his thighs, squeezed his legs together, wrapped his hand around the dildo and closed his eyes and thought, [what if].
--
Cassie was.
Well.
Cassie knew, and Cassie still loved Dean, and Dean needed it so badly by then.
--
There was enough in Darla’s account for the operation.
Dean made an appointment, and started taking the testosterone pills, and had to clumsily teach himself to shave, which was only a small disaster.
He walked around in a daze, and it was always at the forefront of his mind.
He saw a hot girl and wondered if he could fuck her once he had the operation.
He saw a couple and wondered if they would have a kid that was like Dean, switched around the wrong way and alone without someone like Sam.
Waiting, waiting.
He was on the waiting list. His heart beat in double-time, anticipation, he’d been waiting for a quarter of a century but suddenly three months seemed like an eternity.
--
When they put him under, he thought about Darla. This was the last thing, like salt-and-burn.
Without her body, nothing would tie her to him anymore.
And when he woke up again, he felt like himself for the first time.
It would take another seven surgeries in series, but. It was a beginning.
Everything was new.
Part one, and part two
--
When he was young, just before Mom and the start of hunting, Dean was still called Darla. He already knew that he didn’t like the sound of that.
He looked at the boys in the park, shoving and screaming in the dirt, and wanted that more than the pretty pink dress that Mom thought Darla loved.
Maybe Darla did love it. Dean had never met her.
But he was only four, then. He knew that he was flat all the way down until his toes, and he knew that Mom was bumpy up high and rolling like hills. Dad was a mystery, because Dad didn’t take baths together like Dean and Mom.
Then, the only difference between girls and boys was the length of their hair. And maybe the clothes.
After Mom, Dean assumed that he would be free of the dresses, and then went and got his hair cut short. He figured that that made him a boy.
It wasn’t that easy, though.
--
Sammy called him Dee, and that was closer.
It was too simple to say, “Call me Dean.”
Sammy shrugged and tilt-sucked a few drops from his sippy cup. “Okay.”
--
Irrationally, Dean kept hoping. Even after he figured out the physical difference between sexes, he assumed - he thought, maybe, - that it was just a mistake. That, as he grew out of the androgyny of youth, it would turn out that he was right all along, give the man a cigar.
And then the ghost of Darla rose up like a jealous, nasty creature. Her body came up with two hard, painful circles, just under the nipples, and Dean was trapped inside her skin, sharing space with them.
He sort of hoped they were tumors. Cancer. An accident.
For a long time, he flat ignored them. They grew bigger, though, and Dean found himself poking one experimentally, looking in the mirror, and it hurt. Tender and delicate.
Like a girl.
Dean stared at Darla’s face and the dust of Darla’s pubic hair and the downy-soft, blondish hair on her legs, and he didn’t trust the person in the mirror.
--
“Dude, Dean, you fatass, you have man-boobs!” one of the kids in class said, and that set the whole class laughing. Like they’d all noticed, but had been waiting for someone else to say it first.
Dean had to stay in his seat until the end of school, and then he had to sit still on the bus. Every time someone glanced at him, he knew they were thinking about Darla’s boobs, her revenge against him for stealing her body.
He taught himself how to bind them down that night, tight and flat, and it hurt and it ached until he got used to it.
--
Dad tried to talk to him about it. It didn’t work.
“Dee, sweetie,” he started cautiously, sitting down on the couch next to Dean. “I know you must be confused about a lot of things, right now, but. You’re just staring to grow into the woman you’re meant to be.”
Dean said, “I’m not a girl. I know Sammy told you. My name’s Dean.”
That was the last time Dad brought it up to him.
--
In seventh grade, they had sex ed. Dean went with the boys to learn about parts he didn’t have, while the girls trooped off to see the secret girl-hood initiation handshake, or something.
That stuff was probably important, though, so Dean looked up a free clinic and went in.
The doctor was a woman. She glanced over his sign-in sheet and smiled, red lipstick dark and pretty. She was pretty.
“Hello, Dean. You wrote on here that you had a few questions about puberty?”
Dean clenched his jaw tight and steeled himself against the humiliation curling in his gut, pulled up his shirt, unwound the Ace bandage holding Darla’s boobs down. He didn’t look at the pretty doctor while he did it.
He said, “I’m a boy, but someone didn’t get the memo. Can you tell me what else is going to freak the hell out on me in the next couple of years?”
More silence than Dean could stand. Blood pounded hard and hot and betrayed in his ears.
The pretty doctor made a sad, apologetic sound in her throat, and set her fingers in Dean’s buzzed-short hair. “It must be hard,” she said, and then treated Dean like an older brother asking about what his sister would be going through for the rest of the appointment.
--
His skin stretched too tight at the shoulders and waist, too loose in the front and hips. He moved too oily, like there was a film of sweat all over him that never came off.
Dean’s bones felt right, the size and shape and weight of them, they were okay. But everything hanging off them wasn’t his.
--
Dean’s relationship with girls was complicated.
On the one hand, they were. They were everything he wasn’t, everything he tried so hard not to think about most of the time. They were Darla. They were the enemy.
On the other hand, they were hot.
Dean asked out Cindy Gallagher halfway through eighth grade. It was the tame kind of dating, holding hands in the hallways and making gooey eyes back and forth from their desks in class.
Dean kissed her after school, when he managed to isolate her from the rest of the girls. She tasted sweet and waxy, the fruit punch chapstick that counted as makeup. It was soft. It was warm.
Dean really, really liked her. A lot. He told her so.
Cindy beamed and blushed and wiped his lips with her thumb. It came away shiny. “It rubbed off on you,” she whispered. “And I like you, too.”
Two weeks later, Dad announced they were moving that weekend.
And because Dean really, really liked Cindy, he wanted her to see. He needed someone to know all of him and to still like him.
But she didn’t understand. He told her, and she didn’t understand, and he came away with another shallow wound on his heart, but they were starting to dig too deep, each one hurt worse than the one before, and, and.
--
In his dreams, Dean was a man, in his own body and not Darla’s. He pushed a girl back on the bed and moved in her, push-push-pull, thrust in and out and smiled and loved every second, treasured it, drank it in, more at peace than ever.
She opened her mouth and said, “Dean,” with Sam’s voice, and Dean woke up.
Sam was crouched by his bed, staring. “Dean. You’re crying.”
“Yeah,” Dean agreed, and held his arms open so Sam would climb in between them.
--
Freshman year of high school, Darla flipped a switch somewhere and blood started coming out of her body, and Dean had to hang around for every exciting second of it.
He’d been expecting it, sort of dreading it.
Dean went to the bathroom in the morning and he’d ruined his underwear, and he felt like crap so he tumbled straight back into bed until noon. He took an extra-long shower and tried to wash off the drippy feeling, and by the time he got out, a pack of pads and a bar of chocolate were sitting on the counter.
Dean stuck his head out the door and yelled, “You’re fucking eleven! Shouldn’t you still think girls have cooties?”
“I do,” Sam deadpanned, twisting around on the couch toward the hallway. His cheeks were still red from the bike ride to the store.
“Why the hell do you know anything about this?” Dean demanded.
Sam shrugged and turned back to the TV. “The Lifetime channel.”
That night, right when the cramps hit and Dean was about ready to kill himself, Sam steamed a washcloth and gave it to him as a hot pad.
Dean said, “I’m serious, Sammy, girls have cooties.”
Sam nodded solemnly. “I know. You’re not a girl.”
--
Kissing was the best.
Girls were warm and firm under him, and soft in all the right places, and Dean loved running his fingers through their hair and inching a hand higher and higher up their skirts.
It was connection, even though he couldn’t tell them anything real about himself.
--
When Sammy was thirteen, Dean caught him sheepishly stripping the sheets off his bed. They were sticky and shiny in a crusty, ugly mess in the middle.
And because Dean had done so much reading about it, so much research and thinking about it, Dean knew what was up.
He smirked and laughed at his little brother, “Had a naughty dream, Sammy?”
Sam turned red and angry. “No,” he said, and bundled the sheets up to hide the mark. “Shut up.”
“It’s just ‘cause you haven’t,” Dean said, and curled his hand into a loose fist and drew it up and down, like porn stars did to guys, and he hoped, really hoped, that it didn’t look as awkward as it felt. “Y’know.”
And Sammy didn’t say, what would you know about it, even though the fear of it was heavy and sick on Dean’s tongue. Sam just blushed again and glared at his feet. “Don’t know how,” he admitted, grumbling into his gross messy sheets.
Dean panicked for a second, because holy shit neither did he, but he recovered with, “Just try stuff until it feels good, dork. Twist your wrist a little, tighter or looser, Jesus, just figure out what you like.”
Sam looked at Dean, and his eyes were huge and brown-green, and this was his I’m-so-glad-you’re-my-big-brother face.
Dean sort of turned to goo inside.
--
It only took one bad experience with a barfly’s wandering hands for Dean to know that he had to stop fooling around with women.
Whatever connection he’d had with them was gone. Dean lost the thing that tethered him most strongly to his bones.
Sam understood, though. Sam knew. Sam still loved him, no matter what.
It helped.
--
Dad trained Dean to fight like a man, but Dean could see that he was conflicted about it. Sam was stronger, because Sam was really a boy.
So, Dean tried harder. He was Dad’s son, the perfect son. He didn’t fight Dad like Sam did, because Dean didn’t have that luxury.
He was already a freak. He didn’t want to disappoint Dad any more than he already had.
--
Dean missed kissing. He missed fooling himself into thinking he was a little bit normal. He missed liking a person and thinking that person might like him back.
He was alone.
He was alone.
--
Sam kissed Dean.
Sam anchored Dean in the world, always had. Sam knew what Dean was and treated him like it wasn’t anything special. Sam never mixed up his pronouns, like Dad did sometimes.
Dean needed that. Needed that like breathing.
Sam was the world, for one bright-flash second of clarity, and that meant that everyone in the world loved Dean just like he was, even if he wasn’t strapped down and stuffed up in flannel.
And Dean loved him back, Sam, Sammy, the only thing that always made sense, that he never had to pretend around.
It was them against the world, and Dean wasn’t alone after all, he’d never been alone.
--
Sam went to Stanford, and Dean couldn’t feel that connection whenever he needed it anymore.
It hurt like a phantom limb. Like thinking he was supposed to have something in his boxers that wasn’t there.
Dean was familiar with the feeling. It still sucked.
--
Sam sent him an email about Darla, her bank account information. They started saving up for an operation, even thought neither of them said it.
Every time Dean put money into the account, he felt that connection to Sam - like sharing a kiss, but further away.
--
Dean went into a sex shop, nothing new there, and bought an average-sized dildo. It was red and bendy-plastic, shaped with a rounded end and a flat end, like a bullet.
He had a story ready about buying it as a present for his girlfriend, but the girl at the counter didn’t look at him twice, let alone ask.
He’d never had this freedom before, traveling alone with no risk of Dad or Sam digging through his bag for an extra shirt and stumbling over - this.
Dean took it out of the sanitary packaging and put it between his thighs, squeezed his legs together, wrapped his hand around the dildo and closed his eyes and thought, [what if].
--
Cassie was.
Well.
Cassie knew, and Cassie still loved Dean, and Dean needed it so badly by then.
--
There was enough in Darla’s account for the operation.
Dean made an appointment, and started taking the testosterone pills, and had to clumsily teach himself to shave, which was only a small disaster.
He walked around in a daze, and it was always at the forefront of his mind.
He saw a hot girl and wondered if he could fuck her once he had the operation.
He saw a couple and wondered if they would have a kid that was like Dean, switched around the wrong way and alone without someone like Sam.
Waiting, waiting.
He was on the waiting list. His heart beat in double-time, anticipation, he’d been waiting for a quarter of a century but suddenly three months seemed like an eternity.
--
When they put him under, he thought about Darla. This was the last thing, like salt-and-burn.
Without her body, nothing would tie her to him anymore.
And when he woke up again, he felt like himself for the first time.
It would take another seven surgeries in series, but. It was a beginning.
Everything was new.
Part one, and part two