Far Greater
Title: Far Greater
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 1200
Disclaimer: Not my boys. Kripke broke them long before I ever got to them.
Summary: Dean has dyscalculia. This doesn't mean he's stupid. Not really. It just means he's useless when Ben needs help with his math homework.
There's a ton of fic with Dean being dyslexic which doesn't make sense to me when we see him reading and writing no problem, but the moment he needs to do math, he starts counting with his fingers. I couldn't find any dyscalculia fic, so I wrote this. It's probably way too short and someone else would do a much better job with the subject matter, but I needed to write something, so uhm...yeah.
Dean cried, the first time they sent him home with a note saying he was dumber than the other kids. He was scared too, of what Dad was gonna do, but Dad only got that sad look on his face and told him to keep trying. Then he told him to get his books off the kitchen table because he needed the space for his new shotgun.
Dean didn’t really mind, because it wasn’t like the numbers stopped tumbling over each other and spontaneously started to make sense if he just kept looking at them long enough.
“Hey, can you help me with this?”
The question comes out of the blue. Like a knock-out punch in a boxing match Dean had no idea he was even a part of and he's already seeing stars before he's figured out who he's fighting.
Ben’s looking at him from the kitchen table, surrounded by checked paper, rulers, pointing his pencil at his math book and that’s enough to make Dean’s heart jump up into his throat while cold sweat breaks out all over his back and upper lip.
It’s enough to have his mind flooded with Dad disappointed, shaking his head, teachers sneering, Sammy scoffing as he watches Dean pushing pens and red-and-blue erasers around on the table and counting with his fingers.
Sammy was eight, maybe nine when he figured out that he could give Dean a calculator and still run circles around his older brother.
“You don’t gotta help me,” he’d say, pack up his shit and ask Jim or Bobby or Caleb. Or do it on his own because Sammy was a whiz like that and all Dean’s help ever did was slow him down.
It doesn’t mean he’s stupid. Not really. He can figure out mechanics and electrical stuff just fine and most of the time he doesn’t need to be able to do the math to back it up.
Clapton and Hendrix and a dozen other killer guitarists couldn’t read a note of music.
Still…
Still.
All Sam - and everyone else, if he’s honest with himself, which he’d rather not be - ever had to do was look at the problem and the numbers added up in his head, even when he had to subtract and the second number ended in a number higher than the first which is something Dean still can’t get right even when he breaks down and uses his fingers like a preschooler.
“Dean?”
Ben is still looking at him, his pen precariously balanced between his fingers, dipping up and down. Dean twists a smile onto his face like he used to do for Sam and steps closer.
It’s sixth grade math. How hard could it possibly be?
Ben shoves the book across the table and turns it around for Dean to see.
Dean’s always hated fractions. They mess up his head. Halves he gets, and quarters too as long as they’re not written as ½ or ¼ because that makes it seem like an either or kind of thing which doesn’t even make sense.
His heart is in his throat and this is it. This is when Ben figures out Dean's too stupid to ask for advice.
It’s the same sick feeling, bitter in his stomach and metallic in the back of his throat, he had when he was in high school and had to ask his little brother to do his math homework for him. Sam was twelve and Dean was sixteen and they didn’t have a whole lot in common as it was and this was just one more reason for Sam to roll his eyes with that mix of pity and disgust.
“I gotta find the least common denominator, right?”
Ben is pointing his pencil at the problem he’s copied onto his notepad.
“I uh…yeah.”
Least common denominator is something Dean’s heard of before. He bites his lower lip and blinks when the cold sweat starts to drop down into his eyes because he can tell Ben’s got another question coming.
“Okay, but when I do that, I end up with 31, which isn’t even a fraction.”
“Right,” Dean nods. He can see the 31 scrawled after the equals sign. He just has no idea how it came to be there.
When he was nine, Bobby gave him a box of colored pencils for his birthday. Dean pretended he was too old for them, but they were great for math. It was a huge set, so as long as he got to take notes on the side of his book, Dean could roll one pen after the other across the table and sometimes he even got the answers right. One, two, three, four, five pens. Add six, seven, yellow means ten, seventeen, blue is a hundred, a-hundred-and-seventeen. Then he started middle school and they came up with the stupid fractions.
“Maybe it’s supposed to be 3/1,” he suggests and immediately regrets saying anything. Ben gives him a strange look over his shoulder. Clearly 3/1 is just as stupid an answer as 31.
Suddenly Dean really, really needs a drink.
“Listen,” he says and his voice comes out breathless, like he’s got something wrapped around his chest. “You’re uh…you’re doing great, kid. I’ll be right back.”
He can’t drink in front of Ben, so he digs up the bottle of whiskey he keeps in his toolbox in the garage. He hasn’t really had to do this in a couple of months, but now he takes four deep gulps right from the bottle and doesn’t even feel bad.
He checks the clock above the door to see if he can get away with hiding in here until Lisa gets home, so she can help Ben. (After the second or third note, Dad sat him down and Dean told him about how the numbers just didn’t make sense. He knew 6 and 9 meant different things, he just couldn’t tell them apart, no matter how hard he tried. Dad gave him his watch because reading time was never an issue for Dean and that way he could check and double check and figure out which of the two he was looking at.)
He manages to empty the bottle in under ten minutes (it wasn’t exactly full when he started out, so it’s okay) and wanders back inside. He remembers Sam’s face when he finally looked up and realized what a dumb idiot he had for a big brother, but he also remembers what it was like to have no-one help him at all, so he figures he should maybe try again.
“Figured it out yet?” he asks and decides to focus on the warm burn in his veins, rather than his heart beating furiously against his ribcage.
“Nah,” Ben sighs. He shoots Dean another strange look and Dean remembers that sure, Ben’s eleven, but with some things he can be scary smart. “It’s okay, I’m just gonna copy Jake’s stuff before class tomorrow.”
Dean doesn’t think about how a sixth grader could do a better job of helping Ben with his homework than him
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 1200
Disclaimer: Not my boys. Kripke broke them long before I ever got to them.
Summary: Dean has dyscalculia. This doesn't mean he's stupid. Not really. It just means he's useless when Ben needs help with his math homework.
There's a ton of fic with Dean being dyslexic which doesn't make sense to me when we see him reading and writing no problem, but the moment he needs to do math, he starts counting with his fingers. I couldn't find any dyscalculia fic, so I wrote this. It's probably way too short and someone else would do a much better job with the subject matter, but I needed to write something, so uhm...yeah.
Dean cried, the first time they sent him home with a note saying he was dumber than the other kids. He was scared too, of what Dad was gonna do, but Dad only got that sad look on his face and told him to keep trying. Then he told him to get his books off the kitchen table because he needed the space for his new shotgun.
Dean didn’t really mind, because it wasn’t like the numbers stopped tumbling over each other and spontaneously started to make sense if he just kept looking at them long enough.
“Hey, can you help me with this?”
The question comes out of the blue. Like a knock-out punch in a boxing match Dean had no idea he was even a part of and he's already seeing stars before he's figured out who he's fighting.
Ben’s looking at him from the kitchen table, surrounded by checked paper, rulers, pointing his pencil at his math book and that’s enough to make Dean’s heart jump up into his throat while cold sweat breaks out all over his back and upper lip.
It’s enough to have his mind flooded with Dad disappointed, shaking his head, teachers sneering, Sammy scoffing as he watches Dean pushing pens and red-and-blue erasers around on the table and counting with his fingers.
Sammy was eight, maybe nine when he figured out that he could give Dean a calculator and still run circles around his older brother.
“You don’t gotta help me,” he’d say, pack up his shit and ask Jim or Bobby or Caleb. Or do it on his own because Sammy was a whiz like that and all Dean’s help ever did was slow him down.
It doesn’t mean he’s stupid. Not really. He can figure out mechanics and electrical stuff just fine and most of the time he doesn’t need to be able to do the math to back it up.
Clapton and Hendrix and a dozen other killer guitarists couldn’t read a note of music.
Still…
Still.
All Sam - and everyone else, if he’s honest with himself, which he’d rather not be - ever had to do was look at the problem and the numbers added up in his head, even when he had to subtract and the second number ended in a number higher than the first which is something Dean still can’t get right even when he breaks down and uses his fingers like a preschooler.
“Dean?”
Ben is still looking at him, his pen precariously balanced between his fingers, dipping up and down. Dean twists a smile onto his face like he used to do for Sam and steps closer.
It’s sixth grade math. How hard could it possibly be?
Ben shoves the book across the table and turns it around for Dean to see.
Dean’s always hated fractions. They mess up his head. Halves he gets, and quarters too as long as they’re not written as ½ or ¼ because that makes it seem like an either or kind of thing which doesn’t even make sense.
His heart is in his throat and this is it. This is when Ben figures out Dean's too stupid to ask for advice.
It’s the same sick feeling, bitter in his stomach and metallic in the back of his throat, he had when he was in high school and had to ask his little brother to do his math homework for him. Sam was twelve and Dean was sixteen and they didn’t have a whole lot in common as it was and this was just one more reason for Sam to roll his eyes with that mix of pity and disgust.
“I gotta find the least common denominator, right?”
Ben is pointing his pencil at the problem he’s copied onto his notepad.
“I uh…yeah.”
Least common denominator is something Dean’s heard of before. He bites his lower lip and blinks when the cold sweat starts to drop down into his eyes because he can tell Ben’s got another question coming.
“Okay, but when I do that, I end up with 31, which isn’t even a fraction.”
“Right,” Dean nods. He can see the 31 scrawled after the equals sign. He just has no idea how it came to be there.
When he was nine, Bobby gave him a box of colored pencils for his birthday. Dean pretended he was too old for them, but they were great for math. It was a huge set, so as long as he got to take notes on the side of his book, Dean could roll one pen after the other across the table and sometimes he even got the answers right. One, two, three, four, five pens. Add six, seven, yellow means ten, seventeen, blue is a hundred, a-hundred-and-seventeen. Then he started middle school and they came up with the stupid fractions.
“Maybe it’s supposed to be 3/1,” he suggests and immediately regrets saying anything. Ben gives him a strange look over his shoulder. Clearly 3/1 is just as stupid an answer as 31.
Suddenly Dean really, really needs a drink.
“Listen,” he says and his voice comes out breathless, like he’s got something wrapped around his chest. “You’re uh…you’re doing great, kid. I’ll be right back.”
He can’t drink in front of Ben, so he digs up the bottle of whiskey he keeps in his toolbox in the garage. He hasn’t really had to do this in a couple of months, but now he takes four deep gulps right from the bottle and doesn’t even feel bad.
He checks the clock above the door to see if he can get away with hiding in here until Lisa gets home, so she can help Ben. (After the second or third note, Dad sat him down and Dean told him about how the numbers just didn’t make sense. He knew 6 and 9 meant different things, he just couldn’t tell them apart, no matter how hard he tried. Dad gave him his watch because reading time was never an issue for Dean and that way he could check and double check and figure out which of the two he was looking at.)
He manages to empty the bottle in under ten minutes (it wasn’t exactly full when he started out, so it’s okay) and wanders back inside. He remembers Sam’s face when he finally looked up and realized what a dumb idiot he had for a big brother, but he also remembers what it was like to have no-one help him at all, so he figures he should maybe try again.
“Figured it out yet?” he asks and decides to focus on the warm burn in his veins, rather than his heart beating furiously against his ribcage.
“Nah,” Ben sighs. He shoots Dean another strange look and Dean remembers that sure, Ben’s eleven, but with some things he can be scary smart. “It’s okay, I’m just gonna copy Jake’s stuff before class tomorrow.”
Dean doesn’t think about how a sixth grader could do a better job of helping Ben with his homework than him