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Love and Duty	By : rae_roberts Category: Supernatural > AU - Alternate Universe Views: 3443 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I don't own Supernatural and make no profit from this story. Just borrowing Papa Winchester and his boys for fun.

Chapter List
- 6
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- 8
Another breakfast, another pat on the ass and leering wink from the captain of the guard. Fortunately Rufus and Bobby had been embroiled in a debate about irrigation, so at least Sam was spared any conversation with the two curmudgeons. With an actual job to report to, he had an excuse to flee the table as soon as he’d finished eating. Sam hurried back upstairs, returning with a canvas backpack slung over one shoulder.
“I hope you’re not planning on assigning homework from all of those,” Jo said sassily as he arrived on the front porch, eyeing the bulky pack which was clearly loaded down with books.
Sam grinned at the girl. “I might,” he teased.
“Don’t forget your lunch, Joanna Beth.” Ellen Harvelle arrived with two lunch boxes in hand. She passed one to Jo, giving the young teen a quick kiss on the cheek, then offered the other to Sam. “I hear Missouri’s counting on you to referee the kids’ soccer games. You won’t have time to come back to the main house for lunch,” Ellen said briskly.
“Thank you, ma’am.” Sam was touched by the woman’s consideration, but she’d already turned away, bustling back into the sprawling ranch house. Sam was about to step off the porch when a hand fell heavily on his shoulder.
“Hey,” he protested, whirling to find Dean hauling on the strap of his bookbag.
“We’re courting, remember?” Dean’s expression was sour. “I’ll carry your books for you.”
“I can carry my own books,” Sam snapped, clinging tight to the backpack. A brief struggle ensued.
“Sam and De-ean, sitting in a tree,” Jo crowed in a gleeful sing-song, jumping back as Dean reached to aim a swat at her head.
Sam took advantage of the distraction to yank his books out of his fiance’s grasp, settling the backpack firmly on both shoulders.
“K-I-S-S-I-N-G!” Jo taunted, dancing around Dean, her blonde hair swirling around her face. “Let Sam carry his precious books. You can carry me!”
Sam watched with amusement as she got behind Dean and leapt on his back. He knew the pair weren’t siblings, but Jo was acting for all the world like a pesky little sister. He suppressed a momentary pang of homesickness for his friends and students back at the academy in St. Louis.
“I’ll scrape you off on the nearest tree,” Dean growled, but the threat was obviously an empty one as he took off across the yard, carrying Jo piggyback.
Sam fell in step beside him, grateful for the easy resolution of what might have turned into an unpleasant argument. The two young men walked in silence until they reached the schoolyard and Jo slid off Dean’s back, running off to meet her friends.
“I’ll pick you up here at four o’clock,” Dean told Sam brusquely.
“More mandatory courting, huh?” Sam couldn’t resist a smirk at the handsome, green-eyed country boy’s expense.
“Shut up,” Dean scoffed. He turned on his heel and strode away. Sam shrugged and walked across the yard to begin his first day on the job.

Days passed and Sam began to acclimate to life on the estate.
“‘Morning, Sam,” Pamela Barnes leered, giving him a wink with her good eye as she gave his ass a squeeze.
“Good morning, Ms. Barnes.” Sam’s voice was flat as he returned the greeting, eyes narrowed and lips pressed tight in disapproval, but the captain of the guard just chuckled as he pulled out her chair for her.   At least the unwanted attention didn’t make him blush any more, though Sam was slightly worried she’d step up her game and try something even more outrageous to get a reaction.
John Winchester ignored him, which was just fine by Sam.
“Hey, Sam, why is six afraid of seven?” Rufus Turner piped up.
“Er, I don’t know, sir.”
“Because seven, eight, nine! Get it? Seven ate nine?”
“You’re an ijit.” Bobby Singer gave Rufus a withering look as the man guffawed loudly at his own joke.
Sam just shook his head and helped himself to coffee.
“Are we going to have a surprise math quiz today, Mr. Harvelle?” Jo asked sweetly as he stepped out onto the porch.
“If I told you in advance it wouldn’t be much of a surprise, now, would it?... Miss Harvelle,” Sam added with exaggerated courtesy.
Jo rolled her eyes. “Whatever, Sam.” She squirmed as Ellen straightened her collar, handed her her lunch box, and kissed her cheek. “‘Bye, Mom!”   She scampered off the porch and across the yard.
Ellen handed Sam his own lunch box, brushing off his thanks as usual.   “Thank you, ma’am,” Sam said anyway. He had to admit, the Winchester estate had some of the best food he’d ever eaten in his life.
“I’ll be back at four to walk you home.”
Sam simply grunted a response as Dean turned and walked away. It wasn’t that he felt hostile toward his fiance, Sam thought as he made his own way across the yard and up the wooden steps of the schoolhouse. It was more that he felt nothing at all. No doubt Dean felt the same way.
After school he sat on the same sun-warmed steps, writing in a notebook as he waited for the requisite walk with Dean back to the main house, where they would spend the hour before dinner sitting on the porch in silence. The first day had been horrible, Sam recalled with a rueful chuckle, but by the next he’d hit upon the idea of bringing along papers from school to grade or lesson plans to work on to fill the awkward span of time. Dean had caught on and now brought along guns to clean or knives to sharpen… Anything to avoid conversation. They simply had nothing in common.
Sam put the thought aside and wrote another line in his notebook. Out here in the boondocks nearly everyone carries a weapon... Or two, he wrote.   It’s also common practice for people to carry packets of salt to ward off ghosts, which they insist still lurk in the old ruins— Sam’s pencil left a short scrawl across the page as the notebook was tweaked off his knees.
He startled, feeling his cheeks heat up as he looked up to see his fiance grinning wickedly, skipping back out of reach. “Give it back, Dean. That’s private.”   Sam tried to keep his voice level, but the blush creeping up his neck gave away his discomfort with this turn of events.
“What you writing, Sammy?” Dean opened to a random page and Sam lunged, making a grab for the book but closing on empty air as Dean skipped back again.
“Give it back,” he gritted.
“Private, huh? You shouldn’t keep secrets from me. We’re betrothed!” he teased, pretending affront.
Sam lunged again and caught Dean around the waist, throwing him to the hard-packed dirt of the schoolyard. They grappled in the dust, but Dean broke away, scrambling to his feet and sprinting across the yard with Sam right behind. Dean caught the lowest branch of a pine tree and pulled himself up less than a second before Sam’s hands could close around his ankle.
“You’re so immature. What are you, five?” He could easily climb the tree, but Dean would just jump down and the chase would start again. All Sam could do was scowl. He crossed his arms over his chest, smearing dirt on his white button-up shirt and glaring up at his tormentor.
Dean whistled in mock admiration. “That’s quite the bitch-face you’ve got there.”   He’d climbed up several more of the branches that stuck out at regular intervals around the trunk like the rungs of a ladder and now leaned casually against the trunk of the pine, giving his aggrieved fiance that insufferable smirk of his as he opened the notebook to the first page.
“Dear Audrey,” he read out loud, “Kansas Territory is every bit as wild and terrifying as you could imagine. There’s wilderness with no people at all for miles and ruins infested with ghosts. Fortunately my fiance is young and brave, not old and gnarly at all like a certain someone we both know… What is this?” Dean broke off, leaning out to give Sam a quizzical look through the branches.
Sam huffed out a sigh. “It’s a letter to a former student of mine,” he said with exaggerated patience. “She’s just a little girl who wanted me to write her a letter if I got the chance.”
“You really think I’m handsome? With the greenest eyes you’ve ever seen?” Dean batted his eyelashes.
“No, I think you’re a moron. She’s six years old, Dean, what do you want me to tell her? That I’m stuck out here breeding the next generation of rednecks with the world’s biggest jerk?”
Dean ignored the insults, flipping through the pages. “There’s like, a dozen letters in this thing. You planning to post them any time soon or are you waiting until you can fill a whole mail sack all on your own?” He tossed the notebook down.
Sam caught it and clutched it to his chest. “It costs a lot to mail a letter all the way back to St. Louis,” he pointed out the obvious to his oblivious, aggravating fiance.   “I was hoping maybe, you know, after I got pregnant, your father would let me—”
“We send mail out every week.” Dean dropped down out of the tree and landed in front of Sam, giving the taller boy an incredulous look. “You don’t have to bribe my dad to post a letter. Just address it and put it in the mail pouch in Dad’s office.”
“Oh. I didn’t know.” Some of Sam’s anger ebbed away at the unexpected revelation.
“There’s a lot about us ‘rednecks’ you don’t know.”    Dean walked back to the steps and retrieved Sam’s lunch box and backpack. “Come on.”
Sam fell into step, feeling chastened. He did seem to keep drawing the worst conclusions about the Winchesters. Still, he thought sullenly, his fiance was kind of a jerk.
“Who’s Max?” Dean asked as they approached the main house. “Some guy you had a crush on, back east?”
“None of your business,” Sam retorted, but he couldn’t quite stop a snort of laughter. The thought of himself, romantically involved with shy, twitchy little Max Miller…It was just too ridiculous. “Max is a friend from the academy. He’s… He’s had a rough time,” Sam admitted.
“I kind of figured when you assured him you were being treated kindly. That’s not something you need to tell people who expect to get a fair deal out of life.”
Sam’s face heated up again. Dean was smarter than he let on, he realized. He’d only appeared to skim through the pages, but he’d gleaned more information than Sam was comfortable sharing. “I’m getting a fair deal here,” he said quietly.
“If you ever think you’re not, tell me. I’ll do whatever I can to make things right.” Dean looked straight ahead, clearly embarrassed by the exchange.
“Thanks, Dean. I mean it.”
Dean didn’t acknowledge Sam’s gratitude. “Go on and mail your letters,” he said gruffly. “And from now on, write to Max on your own time, not when we’re supposed to be courting.”
Sam held in another incredulous snort of laughter until he was out of Dean’s earshot. Was the Winchester scion actually jealous of his old friend? Talk about ridiculous, Sam thought, but the idea that Dean cared for him on some level other than as a means to fulfill his familial duty—even something as childish and petty as jealousy—well, that thought warmed him in spite of himself.
- 6
- 7
- 8
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Love and Duty