Fic - Misplaced Childhood [SPN, gen]

[sophiap]

Title: Misplaced Childhood
Author: sophiap
Rating: PG
Word Count: c.5,000
Warnings: Language, but that's about it
Author's Notes: Set early in season 9, sometime after "Slumber Party" and before "Bad Boys" and certainly well before Sam knows the truth about Gadreel. Title is from the album of the same name by Marillion, and I had the song 'Childhood's End?' very much in mind during certain parts of this.
Many thanks to my wonderful beta readers and cheerleaders, aishuu, incandescens, fufaraw and phebemarie. This was originally posted for SPN Summergen, and obviously, I have taken my sweet, sweet time about posting it to my own journal.

Summary: The boys find a stash of old board games in the bunker. Sam goads Dean into a 'friendly' match, but there's more to the game than bragging rights and the loser having to pick up extra (and extra unpleasant) chores for a month.


Sam first saw the games not long after he and Dean moved into the bunker. They had been piled semi-neatly at the far end of one of the stacks, propping up a few sets of oversized notebooks and archival boxes that otherwise only filled half their shelves. The games were out of the sight-lines of any casual passersby but easy to find if you knew to look for them. At the time, Sam just gave them a 'huh' and a raised eyebrow, then kept looking for anything that might give them some lead on the Judah Initiative.

The second time he saw them was months later. This time, the boxes had been hauled out from the stacks and strewn haphazardly across one of the library tables. Dean was leaning over them, grinning in delight as he picked up each box in turn, examining the games from all angles. A few had even been unpacked and semi-set up.

It had been a good while since Sam had seen Dean smile without something else haunting it, or worse, twisting it into more of a desperate grimace than a smile. He waited a moment or two before breaking the silence.

"So. You want to tell me why it looks like Milton Bradley threw up in here?"

Dean looked up. The rare, uncomplicated smile faded before being replaced with something only half-genuine.

"Dude, did you even know these were here? This is awesome!"

Sam shrugged. He'd known but hadn't had cause to give it any thought until just now. He supposed it wasn't surprising that the Men of Letters would keep something of the kind around to help fill the dead times. Netflix and HBO weren't exactly options back in the fifties.

Sam opened the Monopoly box and looked under the board. All the pieces, money, and cards were put away neatly but had clearly been used. The instructions were missing, but Sam guessed most of the pieces were still there, unlike the games they used to borrow from motel business offices back when they were kids. Monopoly was almost always available, but they never got sick of it.

He and Dean used to fight over who got to be the race car.

Of course, that all stopped when Dean suddenly and emphatically decided he was 'too old' for stupid games. But now, on the downhill side of thirty, Dean was as giddy as an eight-year-old who'd just been handed the keys to the local toy store and told to 'have at it.'

"You should've said something, man! Charlie would've gotten a real kick out of all this retro shit." Dean plucked one of the Clue character cards from the table and flicked it at Sam. "You know she would have insisted on playing Colonel Mustard."

The false cheer had slowly shifted back to real cheer although one tinged with bittersweet. He doubted they would ever be seeing Charlie again, but at least this one time it wasn't yet another burden on their conscience.

"No, I see her going for Miss Scarlet."

Dean laughed, and it sounded genuine enough. "Yeah. In more ways than one. Seriously - look at this stuff. Monopoly. Yahtzee. Sorry. Clue. All the classics, plus..." Here, he picked up a box and held it up for Sam to view. Pieces tumbled and rattled inside. "...the ever popular 'Rat Patrol Desert Combat Game.'" He turned the box so he could study the cover. "Sounds like the great-great-granddaddy of 'Call of Duty' to me. We should give it a try."

Sam recognized another ploy to keep him distracted from... from whatever it was Dean didn't want him worrying about these days. But he had to admit he was intrigued by the games.

"What are these other boxes?" There were two plain boxes off to the side, clearly separated from the old fashioned and cartoony futurism covering the rest of the table. One was a heavy cardboard box the faded olive of old library binding, and the other was a wooden case with tarnished brass trim.

Dean looked up, shrugged, then went back to reading the instructions for 'Rat Patrol.'

"Boring shit. Nothing much."

There was something to the curt dismissal that had Sam going straight for those two plain boxes over the multi-colored enticements of 'Uranium' and 'Ludo.' It was petty, but Sam was tired of Dean pushing him away from things without explanation. If he couldn't get honest answers on the important stuff, he could at least get them here.

The wooden box held mahjong tiles, but Sam only knew enough about mahjong to recognize the tiles when he saw them. At least here, the verdict of 'boring shit' was reasonably on point. When he reached for the green box, however, Dean watched him out of the corner of his eye.

Sam wasn't sure what he was expecting when he opened the box, but it wasn't a combo chess and checkers set with two white checkers and a black rook missing. Unlike most of the other games out on the table, this one had seen consistent, heavy use. The pieces that were still there were dinged and worn, and the playing board had been re-taped several times along its fold. When Sam opened it, shreds of dried brown tape fell like dirty snow.

"Wanna play?" he said, more testing the waters than anything else. There was something about the way Dean looked at the board - fear and famine warring for ascendency - that told him he might be on the trail of something big. "Most of these other games need at least three players to be any kind of fun, and do you really want to play Monopoly against Crowley?"

That got a snort of laughter, but no smart remarks about deals, or what the rent would be at the crossroads of Broadway and Park Place. All the while, Dean didn't take his eyes off the chessboard.

"Chess is a game for geeks, Sam."

And... check, Sam thought, fighting back a grin when Dean didn't even give the checkers a moment's consideration.

"You mean, you don't want to play against me because you know I would kick. your. ass."

Dean's eyes narrowed.

Check, and mate.

"Do you even know how to play?" Dean asked, but it was a weak counter.

"Of course. My roommate taught me back at Stanford."

"Right. Cause that's what all you braniacs did instead of actually having, you know, a social life."

Sam glared at Dean and pushed the other board games aside. He plunked the board down square between them. "Loser cleans the bathroom for the next month."

All of Dean's hesitation vanished in an instant. "Oh, you are on."

Sam pulled up a chair, sat down, and started taking pieces out of the box. For some reason, Dean muttered something under his breath and gave the board a sharp quarter turn.

"Anal, much?" Sam said.

Dean just stared at him for a moment then grinned like a shark. "I hope you like the smell of Pine Sol in the morning. You can take white."

Once Dean figured out that a stack of black checkers would make a workable substitute for his missing rook, they started setting up the board. Dean set up his pieces methodically but quickly, moving from out to in, from rook to knight to bishop without hesitation, and Sam wondered if maybe he should have made the bet for two weeks instead of a month.

He used his best poker face, though, and yawned to cover the pause as he watched the order in which Dean placed his king and queen.

Queen on the right, king on the left. Got it.

He placed his royalty the same way Dean had them and got another puzzled look. Before Dean could say anything, Sam finally remembered how it was supposed to go. He switched his king and queen so the queen was on the white square. The puzzled look turned to a smirk.

It had been a long time since he'd played - Christ, nearly ten years - so sue him if he was a little rusty on the finer points of the rules.

"Flip to see who goes first?" Sam asked.

"Huh? Nah, you go," Dean said with a smile that Sam normally associated with some poor sucker about to get skunked out of a week's wages at pool.

The play was quieter than Sam would have expected. He would have thought Dean would make some sarcastic remark about how dull this was, or would start taunting Sam when he took Sam's first piece, a knight. Instead, Dean watched the board with a sniper's concentration, only occasionally letting slip a flicker of a grin or frown.

When Dean captured Sam's bishop, Sam had the sinking feeling that his brother knew exactly what he was doing. It would be a long month of scrubbing toilets, and he suspected Dean's aim was about to suffer a precipitous decline. Still, the game wasn't over. Sam reached for his remaining knight, then saw that all its possible landing squares would result in its capture or put his king in check. If he sacrificed a pawn to Dean's bishop, however, he could -

Dean literally slapped his hand away from the pawn. "Hey, hey, HEY! You touch the knight, you play the knight. That's the rules, pal."

Sam looked up sharply, brows drawn so tightly together he could feel the pinch. "What? Since when's that a rule? You can't just make up a new rule because I'm about to make a move that'll put your queen in the open."

"One, only in your dreams would you get your filthy hands on my sweet lady. Two, it's been a rule since always."

"Bullshit."

Dean pulled out his phone and ran a quick internet search, pursing his lips and humming smugly to himself as he selected a link, waited for the page to load, and scrolled down. He handed the phone to Sam. "See for yourself. You touch it, you move it."

Sam skimmed the first sentence under 'touch-move' rule and immediately protested. "It says it's a rule in serious play!"

"We are talking about me cleaning up the hairballs you leave in the shower for an entire month! That's serious!"

Sam glared at Dean, but moved his knight all the same. This time, Dean did cackle and gloat as he captured the piece, using the base of his own knight to tip Sam's over on its side.

Soon, they were playing in tense quiet again, moves coming more thoughtfully as the number of pieces was slowly whittled down and things got closer and closer to an endgame. Even though Sam was able to get Dean in check a couple of times, it felt like more and more of his own moves were desperate attempts to get out or stay out of check himself.

Sam had learned the basics of the game in college - certainly nothing like that stupid touch-move rule - and could win a decent amount of the time in casual games. This, though, this wasn't casual. Dean would make a move that made no sense at the time but would put him in a killer position two moves down the line. He never seemed surprised by Sam's moves (except for one where the expression on his face said "why the hell would you do that?" with contemptuous clarity).

Sam knew his own style of play was that of an intelligent person who had picked up the game late enough in life and played infrequently enough that long-game strategy wasn't easy or even an option. Dean, though, Dean was playing like someone who had played since he was a kid and could see the patterns on the board even before they happened and almost without thinking. He probably wasn't grandmaster level or anything close to it, but he was good.

It didn't make sense.

Unless Dean was some sort of chess-centric freak of nature, which... no. When and how the hell had he learned to play so well in the first place? When it came to seeking out time away from the family to do normal things that had nothing to do with hunting or scamming, that was Sam's specialty, not Dean's. And why? Dean had applied himself with rigor to pool and darts and every kind of poker under the sun, but those were things he could use to hustle cash in nearly any town in America. Places where you could hustle someone in chess were much fewer and farther between and didn't involve nearly as much alcohol.

Plus, as Dean had said, chess was a game for geeks. For much of his life, Dean would have shied away from anything like that the way he shied away from board games or anything too 'babyish' after he turned fifteen.

Sam let out a sharp breath. Funny, how a sudden sense of loss could up and sock you in the gut nearly twenty years after the fact.

"You know... when we're done with this, we ought to try one of the others. I bet 'Uranium' is a blast." Sam thought his voice sounded too loud and too echoey in the quiet of the library.

"I'm trying to figure out if that's supposed to be a pun or not," Dean said, and it didn't sound like he was dismissing the idea. In fact, the glance he gave the boxes hinted very much otherwise.

"It's been ages since we've done anything like this. Remember we used to play all the time when we were on the road or staying with Bobby or Pastor Jim?"

"Yeah." That one word was heavy with memory and loss. "Good times - even though you were one hell of a poor loser. Holy crap, the whining... Why'd we stop doing that, anyway?"

It took an incredible amount of self control not to say anything. Because you decided it was more important to start being a macho dickwad would have killed off any chance Sam might have had to dig deeper into this something new he was learning about his brother.

Even after all the years they had spent together in close quarters with bathroom doors providing the only thing resembling privacy most of the time, there was still a lot Sam had never learned or even suspected about his brother.

For one thing, Dean was good with kids. Not all kids and not all the time, but good enough with enough kids that Sam knew his brother would have been a fantastic dad if their lives weren't so completely and irreversibly fucked up. Now that he could look at it from a distance, it made perfect sense. When Dad wasn't around - which was probably much less in reality than in Sam's memory, not that it helped - Dean got to be a parent as much as he got to be a sibling, and wouldn't a psychiatrist have a fucking field day with that?

Then there was the recent revelation that Dean was capable of cooking a reasonably healthy meal that actually tasted really good. That was a nice surprise now that they had a place with a good kitchen, a kitchen that Dean was obsessive about keeping clean. Speaking of that, Sam had also been knocked for a loop by the care and consideration Dean gave to his own room. He'd even decorated the damned thing.

Once he took the time to observe and truly think about what he saw, it was painfully clear to Sam that Dean had always had a deep nurturing streak amongst all that macho bluster. It was obvious now that Dean had always been desperate on some level to create something that felt like home and safety, but it had taken Sam a while to figure out why he hadn't seen it then. When he poked at his earliest childhood memories, he realized he could see those qualities in his brother. At the time, though, and for a long time after, he didn't think about them any more than he'd thought about that stack of games after he'd first seen them. There was no reason to think about them. They were just there.

Until Sam was around eleven. Then, it just stopped, just like so many other things stopped as Sam was pulled more and more into hunting, and Dean became more and more obsessed with being tough and strong and not giving a flying fuck about anything besides that.

One day, just a couple of years back, Sam was at Bobby's and found a picture of sixteen-year-old Dean. Sam remembered exactly when that particular picture was taken. It was just a few weeks before he decided he had had enough of both his father and his brother and ditched them in Flagstaff. A decade and a half later, he was finally old enough to see just how young and not-tough his brother had truly been back then. Even how he could feel his stomach twisting as he realized what people - especially the kind of people the Winchesters ran with - must have assumed about someone who looked like that. He finally understood some of what must have triggered Dean's sudden and desperate transformation into a twisted copy of their dad. Thinking back, he wondered for a moment if Dean had ever fully understood it himself. Probably not.

Still, now that they had the bunker, those long-buried qualities finally had the room and the time to grow and even flourish. Things that Sam hadn't seen in a long time were slowly starting to become visible again. Visible, and for the most part, welcome. It was becoming easier to remember all the parts of their childhood that didn't suck. There were more of them than he had suspected.

The chess, though... It didn't fit. There had been no sign of it, and there should have been given the tense, quiet delight with which Dean played. This was something Dean enjoyed and was good at; he probably could have been damned fantastic at if he had had a different life. When he finally shouted "Checkmate!" it was with such satisfaction that Sam nearly forgot he'd be on toilet duty for the next month.

"Fuck you," Sam said by way of congratulations. His king was hemmed in on three sides by his own damned pieces and even though he could capture Dean's queen, the next move would see him steamrollered by a stack of checkers pretending to be a rook.

"I hope you're ready to get down and scrub, Cinderella, because I think that chili dog I had for lunch is going to have some consequences, if you know what I mean."

Sam meant to reply with another profanity but instead blurted out: "Who taught you to play chess?"

And just like that, a steel curtain clanged down over Dean's happy gloating. "Pastor Jim."

"I don't remem-"

"You were a kid. I mean, a little kid. Maybe a year old when we first stayed there, maybe not even that old."

Sam nodded. Pastor Jim had been one of their more frequent babysitters when they were little. Sam only had a few fragmented memories of the church nursery with Noah's ark and all the animals painted on the walls, and the brightly colored wooden blocks, and the Big Wheel he was allowed to ride down the hallways when there was no one there for Sunday School. He did remember being happy there. And feeling safe.

"Anyhow, Pastor Jim had to do something to keep me entertained when you were taking a nap, so he taught me to play chess. Dad would've shot him if he tried to get me to memorize scripture."

Sam gave a half-laugh and shake of his head at that. "Yeah, I can see that. So the two of you played whenever we stayed there?"

"Yeah."

And with that, Sam knew where this particular piece of information fell. It was something that Dean could keep for himself, the way they couldn't really keep anything else for themselves for very long on the road. The last time they had stayed at Jim's for any length of time, Sam was thirteen and had been able to join the school soccer team and make some friends. He was usually only at the rectory to sleep and not much else. And Dean was -

"And when you were seventeen, we were staying there because you'd torn the shit out of your ankle and couldn't keep up with Dad on a hunt."

"Yeah. Stepping off a god-damned curb while walking to the car, can you believe it? But yeah, you're right. I was on the D-list for a good eight weeks. Couldn't even drive for most of it. So, while you were out there trying to be David Beckham but with worse hair, I had to wait around after school for Pastor Jim to pick us up, and..."

Sam couldn't help smiling at the way Dean squirmed.

"And?" he prompted.

Dean winced and scrunched down in his chair in a vain attempt to look smaller. "I maybe kinda-sorta joinedthechessclub?"

"No. Way." Sam wanted to laugh and very much didn't want to at the same time. "You were a chess geek?"

"Shut up! That is exactly why I didn't tell you, okay? Anyhow, I stopped playing pretty soon after that."

"Why?" There was a story there, and Sam couldn't guess at what it might be. He hoped it wasn't something to do with Dad.

"Wasn't fun anymore. That's it. End of story."

Sam settled back in his chair, arms crossed. He waited.

Dean scowled at him but continued with his story just as Sam had suspected he would. There were so many other things that Dean was holding back that something eventually had to break somewhere. Whatever this story was, Dean must have thought was safe enough to use as a pressure valve.

"Look - it wasn't just that that those super-nerds handed my ass to me nine times out of ten. I won most of the games I played at ho... at the rectory, but that didn't count, you know?"

"Are you saying Pastor Jim threw his games?" Sam would admit, that yes, there was a little taunting there.

Dean scoffed. "Please. It was more that we were on the same level, but I took wild risks and it paid off more often than not. I mean, why not take the risk when it's just a bunch of little wooden guys? You lose, you just set up the board and try again, or you put the pieces back in their box and call it a day. No harm, no foul." Dean reached out and pivoted the chessboard back and forth through a ninety degree arc. "He taught me the basics first, of course. Probably the same crap your nerdy roommate taught you. It took me forever to learn how the knight's supposed to move, but then one day I didn't have to think about it anymore." He tapped the side of his head. "I could just see it. You know?"

Sam nodded. He remembered that beautiful moment when mathematics changed from something that was just a set of rules to something that flowed like music.

"When I was seven, I dunno, maybe eight, we moved past the bare basics to other stuff. You know, fiddly stuff that's more like manners. Things like the white square on the row closest to you is supposed to be white." He stopped pivoting the chessboard. "White on right. Also, the queen's supposed to be on her own colored square. Black on black, white on white. Hell, he even taught me what castling was, but we didn't get a chance to use it much."

Sam nodded. He'd heard of castling, but had no idea how or when it would be used. "So that's why you moved the chessboard and got me on the touching thing."

"Yes on the board, no on the touchy-feely." Dean grinned. "That, I learned in chess club."

Well, that confirmed one suspicion. "So... what you're saying is that you called me on that just to be a dick."

"Pretty much, yeah." The smile faded. "There's more, though. All this technical and prissy shit about who's supposed to do what and how with pawn promotion. En-passant capture, which is just bullshit if you ask me. Time clocks. How you call time. All that crap."

It was a simple enough explanation, but Sam felt like they were on the edge of tipping into something much deeper than frustration with rules-lawyering.

"It's like..." Dean was quiet for a good while, and he reached out and picked up his king. He rolled it around in his hand for a bit, and Sam wondered if he was expected to fill the uncomfortable silence. But then Dean spoke again. "It's supposed to be simple, right? Your job is to take out the other guy's king while protecting your own. The knights are all kinds of crazy, but once you really know how to use 'em, you can set up some awesome ambushes. And there's this killer rush when you know you've figured out how the other guy's thinking and you can turn it against him. It ain't always easy, and you're gonna lose some pieces on the way, but it's a real blast if you're any kind of good at it."

Dean rubbed his finger around the king's head and worried at the rough spot where the little finial had been snapped off some time long ago. Sam waited.

Dean took a deep breath, let it out sharply. "Then it all starts turning to shit. Turns out there's some stupid rule you never even heard of that messes up everything you thought you knew. Or there's someone so much smarter and better than you that it would take a freaking miracle or sheer dumb luck to win, so why even fucking bother anymore?"

Dean threw the king back down on the table. It clattered loudly before rolling in a long, lazy arc that finally came to a stop against the edge of the board.

"At least I was able to quit. Just... walk away and never think about it again." Dean let out a huh that wasn't quite a laugh. "Well, hobble away. Ah, you know what I mean."

"Yeah. I do." More and more, Sam wished they could just take out a plain old haunting for a change. Find a grave, burn some bones, call it done, and go home.

Why did it all have to change on them? Why couldn't things just be simple again? No angels, no demons, no prophecies... just simple rules where black was black and white was white and you could just put everything away and forget about it when you were done.

Then maybe - just maybe - there would be a day when all the ghosts were finally put to rest and they would be done.

Sam tried to think of something to lighten the mood, but his brother beat him to it. Dean leaned back in his chair, fingers laced behind his head, and gave a cocky grin that was only a little forced.

"Anyhow, maybe those nerds could beat me, but I cleaned your clock, Sam. Admit it."

Sam started to protest then held up his hands, palms out in a placating gesture. "Fine. I admit it. You did. The clock is so squeaky clean Martha Stewart would be proud. Oh - just for the record, I didn't whine when I lost."

"No. You just cussed me out."

Sam scowled and flipped him the bird.

There was part of him that wanted to take the opportunity to call Dean out for not letting him in on everything before they started playing for such high stakes; he might have chosen some very different moves if his queen and king had started in the wrong place. He liked to think Dean would have corrected his mistake, but he couldn't be sure of that. Not any more.

He pondered for a moment but decided not to bring it up. Secrecy over freaking chess rules was pretty far down on the list of crap Dean needed to be called out on, though, and right now wasn't the time.

Soon, though. They would talk about it. All of it. All the crap that Dean had been hiding from him - whatever it was. In the meantime, that didn't mean they had to leave behind whatever scraps of good that were left in their lives. Sam had a sinking feeling that once everything did come out in the open, those scraps might be their only chance of salvaging anything.

"We should play again, sometime," Sam offered as they put away the board. He made a mental note to see if he could find the missing rook. "Pastor Jim rules, though, not chess club rules."

Simpler rules, from simpler times and with any luck, the happy memories that went with them.

"You know," Dean said slowly, thinking things through as he spoke, "Monopoly wasn't so bad with just the two of us. Back then. I mean, it's better with more people, and we could maybe wait for the next time Kevin's here, but..."

They were on the same page at least on this. In light of everything else going on, it wasn't much, but it was something, and it was something real.

"Deal. I will be laughing as I send you to the poorhouse," Sam promised.

"In your dreams." Dean put the box of chess pieces back with the other games and gave it a gentle pat as he did so. It reminded Sam of the kind of pat Dean would give the Impala. "But hey, you're stuck with potty patrol for the next month, so I'll throw you a bone, here."

Sam raised an eyebrow. "Oh?"

"I'll let you be the race car."

It was a moment before Sam could allow himself to speak. Dean started to look worried.

"I'd like that," Sam said at last.

Dean's worry gave way to a smile, open and honest, and for a little while Sam could allow himself to believe that maybe they'd be okay.