SPN Fic: dys · lex · i · a
Title: dys·lex·i·a
Author: namegoeshere
Rating: PG.
Fandom: Supernatural.
Genre: Gen.
Wordcount: 3500ish
Summary: Steve McQueen was dyslexic.
Author's notes: This fic was not betaed for spelling stuff, so any spelling mistakes are very much my own. However, I do owe clex_monkie89 a huge shout out for telling me to write this, and another huge, massive thank you with a million hugs to i_knowkungfu for helping me get the specifics about dyslexia right, and another thank you to kelex who first suggested Dean might have a learning disability.
†
dys·lex·i·a, n.
: a variable often familial learning disability involving difficulties in acquiring and processing language that is typically manifest by a lack of proficiency in reading, spelling, and writing.
†
Sam brings home a book from kindergarten, Where the Wild Things Are, excited by the colourful drawings and the black script on each page. Dean is nine, struggling through Tuck Everlasting, tosses the book aside in disgust. He's only in fourth grade and he already hates school, hates wading through pages of words that just go wrong somewhere.
He hates the way his Sam looks at him, holding out the thin and colourful book and asks, "Dean, will you read it to me?" He still doesn't really know how, takes hours to make sense of his homework... but he can't tell his little brother no.
They look at the pictures together, Sam sitting next to him on the couch, and Dean weaves a story that has nothing to do with the words on the page. The letters are too hard to decipher, and he's too tired to try. He doesn't want to spend the time to figure it out, and he doesn't want Sammy to see how hard it is.
The next day, when Sam's teacher reads the book out loud to the class, he tells her she's reading it wrong.
†
One of Dean's fifth grade teachers tells John that his son doesn't try. "I understand", she says, "that moving in the middle of the year must be hard on him... But Dean won't even open the book. He refuses to pay attention in class."
John sits his older son down on the couch in their shabby apartment after putting Sammy down to sleep. "I do try," Dean says. "It just... it just doesn't work. But I do try, Dad, I promise I do."
That's when John knows that the teachers are just wrong, that they're doing for Dean exactly what they did for him when he was Dean's age: nothing. "Why didn't you tell me?"
"I didn't want you to think I was dumb."
John smiles then, and ruffles his ten-year-old's hair. "You're not dumb, Dean." His son is different, the same way John has always been, and he understands. "Go get your homework. I'll help you, okay? We'll figure it out together."
†
Sam, Dean decides, is smarter than any eleven-year-old has the right to be. He thinks he knows everything, and sometimes his older brother suspects he actually might. They sit at the table in their kitchen, Sammy leaning over the rough draft of Dean's English essay. He's talking about the subtleties of the subordinate clause, and Dean isn't entirely sure what that is. Sam's only in sixth grade, and by the end of the night, he's rewritten the entire assignment, handing the sheaf of papers back to his brother.
It isn't the first time he's gotten Sammy to do his homework, even though Dean's in tenth grade and Sam's only in sixth. Sometimes he thinks maybe he should be embarrassed that his kid brother is the only thing that keeps him passing some of his classes, but it's not his fault Sam just gets it. Dean doesn't know about subordinate clauses or the past participle, and he sucks at sentence structure even when he understands what the assignment is supposed to be about.
"I like your homework better than mine anyway," Sam tells him. "Except for that physics stuff. I don't get that." Physics is pretty much the only class Dean likes, because he can draw down the problem and find the answer there. The hardest part is keeping the numbers straight, but if he checks it over a couple times he can usually catch the mistakes.
He picks Sam up from school three days later and buys him ice cream on the way home. "You got a B- on my essay."
"That's it?" he asks, a little disappointed. "I got a B+ on the last one."
"He didn't like some of my ideas," Dean says, ruffling Sam's hair, smiling at the face his brother makes at him. "Not your fault."
He's actually a little disappointed too, because The Catcher in the Rye is one of the only books he's actually liked. He read the whole thing even though it took him two weeks to finish it, fighting get through every chapter. When they leave town a month later, Dean tucks his copy into the side pocket of his duffel bag instead of returning it to the classroom library. He doesn't think he'll ever reread it, but he likes the idea of having it.
†
Dean helps their father with the case, armed with stacks of notes and pictures and a box of bright coloured pushpins. Sam tries, putting up the notes where they seem to fit, tacking an idea next to a related item, but Dean moves it clear across to the other side of the room. "It doesn't go there," he says.
John and Dean know where everything goes. To Sam, the papers on the wall look like mayhem, stuck up with no particular order or design. Ideas are written in Dean's large, clear block print, scattered among newspaper clippings, coroners reports, and designs from a book of satanic symbols. John brings in more pages, aged and wrinkled photographs that he puts into the few empty spaces on their wall.
Dean doesn't complain this time, doesn't tell him that it's wrong. Sam grits his teeth when his brother puts on Metallica like he does whenever he wants to think, and sits on the bed and stares at the mess of pages as if there's an answer there he just hasn't found yet. Sam doesn't understand how anyone could expect to find a thing there, and he finally gives up and turns back to his history book.
That wall and everything on it represent the secret code of John and Dean, one Sam cannot hope to understand. The Winchesters are a family of outcasts, but Sam is the outcast among them. He doesn't get it the way they do, can't carefully arrange information into complete madness and get something from it. Sometimes he thinks they speak a different language, and there are no lessons he can take to learn it.
They're two minutes into "Sad But True" when Dean turns to their father and says, "Have we checked the cemetery down by the river yet?"
"No, I didn't think there was anything there."
Sam doesn't have to turn around to know that Dean is smiling, because he's found his answer from that wall somehow, as if the photographs that John added were the missing piece. None of those faded pictures are even of the cemetery by the river. "We should check in the morning," Dean says, and Sam knows he's probably right.
†
At college, Sam feels normal. People think in straight lines, without codes or confusion. Every assignment it not a puzzle in the foreign language of his family, and no one operates under the peculiar rules that govern his father and brother. There is no hidden wrong place to put a note, and he sorts things in order by name, date or place.
Jess makes lists. Their apartment is full of them: grocery lists, to do lists, Christmas lists, lists of homework, lists of books, lists of birthdays. Sam loves them, the way he can understand them just by looking, something as simple and easy as breathing. He feels at home like he never has before, knows where each and every thing in their apartment belongs.
Still, when he's struggling with an English literature assignment and needs to think, he finds himself at the local record store buying a used copy of ...And Justice For All. He remembers how he used to do his brother's homework, sitting at the table and trying to decode the tangles mess of Dean's first draft. There were always good ideas buried beneath the spelling mistakes and the fragmented sentences, the paper's outline a tangle of thoughts without direction. Sam had to unwind it, translate Dean's thinking into English before it could be understood.
Standing there in the record shop with his new Metallica album in his hands, Sam wonders if that's some kind of a metaphor. Maybe there were as many truths hidden in what he'd called their secret code. Maybe if he'd worked a little harder at untangling their mess, he could have found the answers the same way he did in Dean's homework.
He finally goes home and sees the book sitting on the edge of his desk: The Catcher in the Rye. It takes him only a second to remember he's done this before, one of Dean's homework assignments. He finds the old and yellowed pieces of paper in a box at the back of the closet. He isn't even entirely sure why he kept it, except that it's the only one Dean didn't throw away, but instead gave to Sam to show him the B- in the upper right hand corner.
He doesn't change much when he types it up, just fixes a few spelling mistakes he made ten years ago and doesn't worry about the style even though he knows it isn't perfect. Dean said he was smart for an eleven year old, but he was still eleven, so there's issues he just doesn't feel like fixing. Besides, he's curious to see how well an assignment he wrote when he was in grade six holds up at Stanford.
He hands it in the next day and has it back a week later. There's a B- in the corner, and the note attached to the front says, "Excellent ideas, although the composition could use some work. Your paper is also slightly under the word limit." It's the only time Sam ever cheats on an assignment at Stanford, and it's the closest he ever comes to calling Dean.
†
Dean doesn't tack things up on the walls anymore, and Sam realises this was his father's thing, not his brother's. No, Dean spreads the papers out on the floor, the little table in the corner, any and every available surface. Sam thinks back to his father's motel in Jericho, and realises that the wall he'd become so familiar with growing up is a compromise between John's slightly more ordered approach, where things appeared in clumps of related content, and Dean's utter chaos. There are no large, easy to read labels among the pages scattered throughout their motel room, just pages that Sam has to step over to avoid marking or tearing.
"Dean," he finally says when the papers overtake not just Dean's bed but his. "They make tables for this kind of thing, you know."
His brother looks up from the chair on the far side of the room, where he's sitting to overlook the mess he's made of their motel. "Huh?"
Sam sighs, starting to clear the papers off his bed, stacking them into a neat pile. "Either put this crap on the table, or put it on the wall. This place is a total disaster."
Dean is up, navigating neatly around the papers he's spread out on the floor. "Dude, you're screwing up where they go," he says, snatching the papers out of is brother's hand, quickly reshuffling them into an order just as random as the one Sam put them in. "Fine, I'll move them."
After that, Dean spreads his notes out on his bed, the same mess of pages but crammed together into one small space. If there's a method to madness, Sam hasn't learned to see it, and it's even harder now without everything being labelled the way Dean used to do for their father. He feels like an alien, because he can't see whatever it is Dean does, can't figure out any way to make suggestions or to help. Finally he asks, "You find anything?"
"Not yet. Still missing something."
When they go to bed, Dean cleans the papers off his bed, stacks the pages into a messy pile with bent corners and rough edges, and Sam knows without asking that there's some kind of a reason for it each and every mark.
†
"You can't put that page there," Dean says, glancing at Sam across the table. The diner is quiet and mostly empty, and Sam is making a futile attempt to put a new page into their father's journal.
"It's the last page. Why not?" He knows there's some secret order, but at least with just the two of them it feels less like a secret and more like Dean is just weird and a little anal.
He's hoping Dean will give him a reason, something he can understand and file away to remember next time he tries this exercise, but all Dean says is, "Because the reapers go up front."
Sam looks from the pages in his hands to the journal open on the table, trying to figure out the connection. He absently smoothes out a bent corner, only to have Dean reach across the table and put it back how it was. It's just another meaning that Sam doesn't understand. "But it's not a reaper," he says slowly, feeling the crease form in his forehead because he just doesn't get it. He doesn't get Dean.
"No shit, Sherlock," Dean says, but smiles at the waitress when she comes up. Sam rolls his eyes, tucks the page in the front of the journal so that Dean can put it wherever he wants later.
Dean doesn't look at the menu, but orders pancakes, bacon, eggs, hashbrowns and a side of sausage. He's never really thought about it, but Sam realises that his brother almost never reads the menu, doesn't bother to find out what's actually there and just orders whatever comes to mind. It's a contrast to when they were growing up, and their father would spend thirty minutes deciding what he wanted, and Dean would just say, "I'll have what he's having."
He's sure it means something, the way everything with Dean means something, but he isn't sure what. He never is.
†
Sam looks at him weird when he pulls the weather-beaten book out of his bag. He hates that, as if he's not supposed to be reading a book, or maybe his brother's just surprised he's kept it for twelve years. It's the only novel Dean owns, and it's falling apart from too many times being shoved in the bottom of a duffle bag and dragged across the country.
He never reads very much at a time, because although it doesn't take him as long as it used to, it still takes a while to get through it. He doesn't like reading, even if he likes the book, and ends up putting it away when he gets tired of wading through the words to get to the story.
Still, sometimes the mood grips him, and he settles into the thinly stuffed armchair in their short-term apartment, listens to Sam types while he tries to remember where he last left off.
It's an hour later when Sam says, "Are you actually reading that book, or just looking at it?"
Dean looks up, folding the page to mark his place. "What?"
"You've been on the same page for the last thirty minutes."
His brother just smiles a little, stretches. "I like that page," he says, putting the book back in his bag.
†
Sam's at the library looking up some information for a job when he overhears a mother talking to the librarian. She says, "My ten-year-old daughter is dyslexic, and she hates reading. I'm trying to find some books that might interest her..."
Sam's curious, isn't even sure why the word means something to him. He looks it up in the dictionary, repeating the definition to himself. He murmurs quietly, running his fingers over the definition a second and a third time. "Familial learning disability. Difficulties in acquiring and processing language," he says quietly out loud as he scribbles down the main points of the description, "typically manifest by lack of proficiency in reading, spelling, writing."
This means something. It's like one of the pieces in the puzzles of clues that Dean assembles, and this one is important. It seems wrong, though, that he could consider this, because although Dean's never liked reading and still makes constant spelling mistakes when he writes, there's never been any reason to think there's anything wrong.
Has there?
†
Sam's been looking at him weird, spending longer than usual on the computer. It makes Dean a little edgy as he goes over the stuff for their current job, trying to sort the pages into the order that makes it all come together, where he can see everything and how it fits. He knows he's still missing a few pieces.
"Dude, would you stop staring at me? I'm trying to work over here."
Sam finally looks away, and it's another fifteen minutes before he finally asks, "Dean, have you ever heard of dyslexia?"
Dean doesn't look up from his papers, although he smirks. "No. What is it? Some kind of STD you picked up?" He switches some of the pictures to see he can force the puzzle in front of him to solve itself. "'Cause I'm pretty sure it doesn't have anything to do with the job."
"It's a learning disability," Sam says instead of shutting up, and Dean realises that for whatever reason, his brother wants to talk about this. He sits up, leaning back against the headboard. "People who have it tend to be spacial thinkers, and less skilled at reading and writing."
"Okay. Your point?" Dean is beginning to see where this is going, and starts sorting the pages back into a stack. He doesn't particularly want to hear Sam's point, because he suspects he knows what it's going to be.
Sam closed the laptop and looks across the room at his brother sitting on the bed. "It's just... it sounds a lot like you, Dean. I was just wondering--"
But Dean cuts him off. "I'm not disabled, Sam," he says flatly. "I just look at things different than you. Doesn't mean anything."
"I'm just saying, Dean... It would fit, you know, with all the stuff you do, the way you have to do all the weird stuff with the case notes, and --"
"Whoa, hang on for a minute, dude. Have to? I don't have to do anything. I could do another way, but this way works for me. Same way your way works for you." Dean knows he looks at things skewed, in a way that Sam's never really understood, but he doesn't like the word disability because it's never really held him back, at least not since he finished school.
"But it's just --"
"I don't really want to talk about this, Sam."
He doesn't like the idea of having something, of being told he's got some kind of a handicap. He doesn't like the word dyslexia because it sounds like some kind of disease. Dean's a lot of things, but sick isn't one of them. He leaves Sam sitting at the table in their motel room, doesn't come back until it's dark and Sam's left eight messages on his cell phone wondering where the hell he is.
†
Sam buys him a new copy of The Catcher in the Rye. "Your old one's falling apart," he says, putting it down on the table. Falling apart is an understatement; Dean's got a rubber band around it to keep the pages together because the book's spine split clean in half.
Dean looks up from what he's doing, trying to fix the EMF metre because Sam dropped it and one of the wires must have come loose or something. "Okay," he says. It's as close as he's going to get to a thank you, although Dean's touched, really. He knows this is Sam's way of saying sorry.
†
"I'm dyslexic," Dean says one night over pizza. He looked it up online, spent a few hours going through websites. Most them are aimed at helping kids, which Dean doesn't really need anymore. Growing up he always had John, and then there was Sam to do his homework for him when Dean couldn't or didn't want to. Now he knows how to work in the world, how to arrange things around him so he sees the answers. He admits there's a name for the way he puzzles things out, but he still doesn't like the word disability.
"I know," Sam tells him. There's not much more to say than that. They eat their pizza in silence.
"You wanna go see a movie or something?" Dean finally asks, and Sam actually smiles. It's still Dean, dyslexic or not, the same man he's always been.
"Yeah, sure." He pauses for a second. "You know, when I was looking up stuff about dyslexia... apparently Steve McQueen was dyslexic."
Dean laughs then, grinning. "No shit? Dude, that's awesome."
Author: namegoeshere
Rating: PG.
Fandom: Supernatural.
Genre: Gen.
Wordcount: 3500ish
Summary: Steve McQueen was dyslexic.
Author's notes: This fic was not betaed for spelling stuff, so any spelling mistakes are very much my own. However, I do owe clex_monkie89 a huge shout out for telling me to write this, and another huge, massive thank you with a million hugs to i_knowkungfu for helping me get the specifics about dyslexia right, and another thank you to kelex who first suggested Dean might have a learning disability.
†
dys·lex·i·a, n.
: a variable often familial learning disability involving difficulties in acquiring and processing language that is typically manifest by a lack of proficiency in reading, spelling, and writing.
†
Sam brings home a book from kindergarten, Where the Wild Things Are, excited by the colourful drawings and the black script on each page. Dean is nine, struggling through Tuck Everlasting, tosses the book aside in disgust. He's only in fourth grade and he already hates school, hates wading through pages of words that just go wrong somewhere.
He hates the way his Sam looks at him, holding out the thin and colourful book and asks, "Dean, will you read it to me?" He still doesn't really know how, takes hours to make sense of his homework... but he can't tell his little brother no.
They look at the pictures together, Sam sitting next to him on the couch, and Dean weaves a story that has nothing to do with the words on the page. The letters are too hard to decipher, and he's too tired to try. He doesn't want to spend the time to figure it out, and he doesn't want Sammy to see how hard it is.
The next day, when Sam's teacher reads the book out loud to the class, he tells her she's reading it wrong.
†
One of Dean's fifth grade teachers tells John that his son doesn't try. "I understand", she says, "that moving in the middle of the year must be hard on him... But Dean won't even open the book. He refuses to pay attention in class."
John sits his older son down on the couch in their shabby apartment after putting Sammy down to sleep. "I do try," Dean says. "It just... it just doesn't work. But I do try, Dad, I promise I do."
That's when John knows that the teachers are just wrong, that they're doing for Dean exactly what they did for him when he was Dean's age: nothing. "Why didn't you tell me?"
"I didn't want you to think I was dumb."
John smiles then, and ruffles his ten-year-old's hair. "You're not dumb, Dean." His son is different, the same way John has always been, and he understands. "Go get your homework. I'll help you, okay? We'll figure it out together."
†
Sam, Dean decides, is smarter than any eleven-year-old has the right to be. He thinks he knows everything, and sometimes his older brother suspects he actually might. They sit at the table in their kitchen, Sammy leaning over the rough draft of Dean's English essay. He's talking about the subtleties of the subordinate clause, and Dean isn't entirely sure what that is. Sam's only in sixth grade, and by the end of the night, he's rewritten the entire assignment, handing the sheaf of papers back to his brother.
It isn't the first time he's gotten Sammy to do his homework, even though Dean's in tenth grade and Sam's only in sixth. Sometimes he thinks maybe he should be embarrassed that his kid brother is the only thing that keeps him passing some of his classes, but it's not his fault Sam just gets it. Dean doesn't know about subordinate clauses or the past participle, and he sucks at sentence structure even when he understands what the assignment is supposed to be about.
"I like your homework better than mine anyway," Sam tells him. "Except for that physics stuff. I don't get that." Physics is pretty much the only class Dean likes, because he can draw down the problem and find the answer there. The hardest part is keeping the numbers straight, but if he checks it over a couple times he can usually catch the mistakes.
He picks Sam up from school three days later and buys him ice cream on the way home. "You got a B- on my essay."
"That's it?" he asks, a little disappointed. "I got a B+ on the last one."
"He didn't like some of my ideas," Dean says, ruffling Sam's hair, smiling at the face his brother makes at him. "Not your fault."
He's actually a little disappointed too, because The Catcher in the Rye is one of the only books he's actually liked. He read the whole thing even though it took him two weeks to finish it, fighting get through every chapter. When they leave town a month later, Dean tucks his copy into the side pocket of his duffel bag instead of returning it to the classroom library. He doesn't think he'll ever reread it, but he likes the idea of having it.
†
Dean helps their father with the case, armed with stacks of notes and pictures and a box of bright coloured pushpins. Sam tries, putting up the notes where they seem to fit, tacking an idea next to a related item, but Dean moves it clear across to the other side of the room. "It doesn't go there," he says.
John and Dean know where everything goes. To Sam, the papers on the wall look like mayhem, stuck up with no particular order or design. Ideas are written in Dean's large, clear block print, scattered among newspaper clippings, coroners reports, and designs from a book of satanic symbols. John brings in more pages, aged and wrinkled photographs that he puts into the few empty spaces on their wall.
Dean doesn't complain this time, doesn't tell him that it's wrong. Sam grits his teeth when his brother puts on Metallica like he does whenever he wants to think, and sits on the bed and stares at the mess of pages as if there's an answer there he just hasn't found yet. Sam doesn't understand how anyone could expect to find a thing there, and he finally gives up and turns back to his history book.
That wall and everything on it represent the secret code of John and Dean, one Sam cannot hope to understand. The Winchesters are a family of outcasts, but Sam is the outcast among them. He doesn't get it the way they do, can't carefully arrange information into complete madness and get something from it. Sometimes he thinks they speak a different language, and there are no lessons he can take to learn it.
They're two minutes into "Sad But True" when Dean turns to their father and says, "Have we checked the cemetery down by the river yet?"
"No, I didn't think there was anything there."
Sam doesn't have to turn around to know that Dean is smiling, because he's found his answer from that wall somehow, as if the photographs that John added were the missing piece. None of those faded pictures are even of the cemetery by the river. "We should check in the morning," Dean says, and Sam knows he's probably right.
†
At college, Sam feels normal. People think in straight lines, without codes or confusion. Every assignment it not a puzzle in the foreign language of his family, and no one operates under the peculiar rules that govern his father and brother. There is no hidden wrong place to put a note, and he sorts things in order by name, date or place.
Jess makes lists. Their apartment is full of them: grocery lists, to do lists, Christmas lists, lists of homework, lists of books, lists of birthdays. Sam loves them, the way he can understand them just by looking, something as simple and easy as breathing. He feels at home like he never has before, knows where each and every thing in their apartment belongs.
Still, when he's struggling with an English literature assignment and needs to think, he finds himself at the local record store buying a used copy of ...And Justice For All. He remembers how he used to do his brother's homework, sitting at the table and trying to decode the tangles mess of Dean's first draft. There were always good ideas buried beneath the spelling mistakes and the fragmented sentences, the paper's outline a tangle of thoughts without direction. Sam had to unwind it, translate Dean's thinking into English before it could be understood.
Standing there in the record shop with his new Metallica album in his hands, Sam wonders if that's some kind of a metaphor. Maybe there were as many truths hidden in what he'd called their secret code. Maybe if he'd worked a little harder at untangling their mess, he could have found the answers the same way he did in Dean's homework.
He finally goes home and sees the book sitting on the edge of his desk: The Catcher in the Rye. It takes him only a second to remember he's done this before, one of Dean's homework assignments. He finds the old and yellowed pieces of paper in a box at the back of the closet. He isn't even entirely sure why he kept it, except that it's the only one Dean didn't throw away, but instead gave to Sam to show him the B- in the upper right hand corner.
He doesn't change much when he types it up, just fixes a few spelling mistakes he made ten years ago and doesn't worry about the style even though he knows it isn't perfect. Dean said he was smart for an eleven year old, but he was still eleven, so there's issues he just doesn't feel like fixing. Besides, he's curious to see how well an assignment he wrote when he was in grade six holds up at Stanford.
He hands it in the next day and has it back a week later. There's a B- in the corner, and the note attached to the front says, "Excellent ideas, although the composition could use some work. Your paper is also slightly under the word limit." It's the only time Sam ever cheats on an assignment at Stanford, and it's the closest he ever comes to calling Dean.
†
Dean doesn't tack things up on the walls anymore, and Sam realises this was his father's thing, not his brother's. No, Dean spreads the papers out on the floor, the little table in the corner, any and every available surface. Sam thinks back to his father's motel in Jericho, and realises that the wall he'd become so familiar with growing up is a compromise between John's slightly more ordered approach, where things appeared in clumps of related content, and Dean's utter chaos. There are no large, easy to read labels among the pages scattered throughout their motel room, just pages that Sam has to step over to avoid marking or tearing.
"Dean," he finally says when the papers overtake not just Dean's bed but his. "They make tables for this kind of thing, you know."
His brother looks up from the chair on the far side of the room, where he's sitting to overlook the mess he's made of their motel. "Huh?"
Sam sighs, starting to clear the papers off his bed, stacking them into a neat pile. "Either put this crap on the table, or put it on the wall. This place is a total disaster."
Dean is up, navigating neatly around the papers he's spread out on the floor. "Dude, you're screwing up where they go," he says, snatching the papers out of is brother's hand, quickly reshuffling them into an order just as random as the one Sam put them in. "Fine, I'll move them."
After that, Dean spreads his notes out on his bed, the same mess of pages but crammed together into one small space. If there's a method to madness, Sam hasn't learned to see it, and it's even harder now without everything being labelled the way Dean used to do for their father. He feels like an alien, because he can't see whatever it is Dean does, can't figure out any way to make suggestions or to help. Finally he asks, "You find anything?"
"Not yet. Still missing something."
When they go to bed, Dean cleans the papers off his bed, stacks the pages into a messy pile with bent corners and rough edges, and Sam knows without asking that there's some kind of a reason for it each and every mark.
†
"You can't put that page there," Dean says, glancing at Sam across the table. The diner is quiet and mostly empty, and Sam is making a futile attempt to put a new page into their father's journal.
"It's the last page. Why not?" He knows there's some secret order, but at least with just the two of them it feels less like a secret and more like Dean is just weird and a little anal.
He's hoping Dean will give him a reason, something he can understand and file away to remember next time he tries this exercise, but all Dean says is, "Because the reapers go up front."
Sam looks from the pages in his hands to the journal open on the table, trying to figure out the connection. He absently smoothes out a bent corner, only to have Dean reach across the table and put it back how it was. It's just another meaning that Sam doesn't understand. "But it's not a reaper," he says slowly, feeling the crease form in his forehead because he just doesn't get it. He doesn't get Dean.
"No shit, Sherlock," Dean says, but smiles at the waitress when she comes up. Sam rolls his eyes, tucks the page in the front of the journal so that Dean can put it wherever he wants later.
Dean doesn't look at the menu, but orders pancakes, bacon, eggs, hashbrowns and a side of sausage. He's never really thought about it, but Sam realises that his brother almost never reads the menu, doesn't bother to find out what's actually there and just orders whatever comes to mind. It's a contrast to when they were growing up, and their father would spend thirty minutes deciding what he wanted, and Dean would just say, "I'll have what he's having."
He's sure it means something, the way everything with Dean means something, but he isn't sure what. He never is.
†
Sam looks at him weird when he pulls the weather-beaten book out of his bag. He hates that, as if he's not supposed to be reading a book, or maybe his brother's just surprised he's kept it for twelve years. It's the only novel Dean owns, and it's falling apart from too many times being shoved in the bottom of a duffle bag and dragged across the country.
He never reads very much at a time, because although it doesn't take him as long as it used to, it still takes a while to get through it. He doesn't like reading, even if he likes the book, and ends up putting it away when he gets tired of wading through the words to get to the story.
Still, sometimes the mood grips him, and he settles into the thinly stuffed armchair in their short-term apartment, listens to Sam types while he tries to remember where he last left off.
It's an hour later when Sam says, "Are you actually reading that book, or just looking at it?"
Dean looks up, folding the page to mark his place. "What?"
"You've been on the same page for the last thirty minutes."
His brother just smiles a little, stretches. "I like that page," he says, putting the book back in his bag.
†
Sam's at the library looking up some information for a job when he overhears a mother talking to the librarian. She says, "My ten-year-old daughter is dyslexic, and she hates reading. I'm trying to find some books that might interest her..."
Sam's curious, isn't even sure why the word means something to him. He looks it up in the dictionary, repeating the definition to himself. He murmurs quietly, running his fingers over the definition a second and a third time. "Familial learning disability. Difficulties in acquiring and processing language," he says quietly out loud as he scribbles down the main points of the description, "typically manifest by lack of proficiency in reading, spelling, writing."
This means something. It's like one of the pieces in the puzzles of clues that Dean assembles, and this one is important. It seems wrong, though, that he could consider this, because although Dean's never liked reading and still makes constant spelling mistakes when he writes, there's never been any reason to think there's anything wrong.
Has there?
†
Sam's been looking at him weird, spending longer than usual on the computer. It makes Dean a little edgy as he goes over the stuff for their current job, trying to sort the pages into the order that makes it all come together, where he can see everything and how it fits. He knows he's still missing a few pieces.
"Dude, would you stop staring at me? I'm trying to work over here."
Sam finally looks away, and it's another fifteen minutes before he finally asks, "Dean, have you ever heard of dyslexia?"
Dean doesn't look up from his papers, although he smirks. "No. What is it? Some kind of STD you picked up?" He switches some of the pictures to see he can force the puzzle in front of him to solve itself. "'Cause I'm pretty sure it doesn't have anything to do with the job."
"It's a learning disability," Sam says instead of shutting up, and Dean realises that for whatever reason, his brother wants to talk about this. He sits up, leaning back against the headboard. "People who have it tend to be spacial thinkers, and less skilled at reading and writing."
"Okay. Your point?" Dean is beginning to see where this is going, and starts sorting the pages back into a stack. He doesn't particularly want to hear Sam's point, because he suspects he knows what it's going to be.
Sam closed the laptop and looks across the room at his brother sitting on the bed. "It's just... it sounds a lot like you, Dean. I was just wondering--"
But Dean cuts him off. "I'm not disabled, Sam," he says flatly. "I just look at things different than you. Doesn't mean anything."
"I'm just saying, Dean... It would fit, you know, with all the stuff you do, the way you have to do all the weird stuff with the case notes, and --"
"Whoa, hang on for a minute, dude. Have to? I don't have to do anything. I could do another way, but this way works for me. Same way your way works for you." Dean knows he looks at things skewed, in a way that Sam's never really understood, but he doesn't like the word disability because it's never really held him back, at least not since he finished school.
"But it's just --"
"I don't really want to talk about this, Sam."
He doesn't like the idea of having something, of being told he's got some kind of a handicap. He doesn't like the word dyslexia because it sounds like some kind of disease. Dean's a lot of things, but sick isn't one of them. He leaves Sam sitting at the table in their motel room, doesn't come back until it's dark and Sam's left eight messages on his cell phone wondering where the hell he is.
†
Sam buys him a new copy of The Catcher in the Rye. "Your old one's falling apart," he says, putting it down on the table. Falling apart is an understatement; Dean's got a rubber band around it to keep the pages together because the book's spine split clean in half.
Dean looks up from what he's doing, trying to fix the EMF metre because Sam dropped it and one of the wires must have come loose or something. "Okay," he says. It's as close as he's going to get to a thank you, although Dean's touched, really. He knows this is Sam's way of saying sorry.
†
"I'm dyslexic," Dean says one night over pizza. He looked it up online, spent a few hours going through websites. Most them are aimed at helping kids, which Dean doesn't really need anymore. Growing up he always had John, and then there was Sam to do his homework for him when Dean couldn't or didn't want to. Now he knows how to work in the world, how to arrange things around him so he sees the answers. He admits there's a name for the way he puzzles things out, but he still doesn't like the word disability.
"I know," Sam tells him. There's not much more to say than that. They eat their pizza in silence.
"You wanna go see a movie or something?" Dean finally asks, and Sam actually smiles. It's still Dean, dyslexic or not, the same man he's always been.
"Yeah, sure." He pauses for a second. "You know, when I was looking up stuff about dyslexia... apparently Steve McQueen was dyslexic."
Dean laughs then, grinning. "No shit? Dude, that's awesome."