Chapter Text
Sam grew up speaking Latin.
John hadn’t been the one to teach him. He’d taught Dean what he knew: mostly exorcisms, a few spells here and there. Just enough to keep him safe, make him useful on hunts. Then he’d tell Dean to teach what he’d learned to his brother. A simple task, hard to screw up.
Of course, Dean hadn’t. He did good. Maybe too good.
Since before Sam could talk, John could hear Dean speaking to his little brother in Latin. He’d say protective spells over his makeshift beds in dresser drawers or nests of blankets. He’d point to John and animatedly whisper to Sam, “that’s our pater, little brother. Our dad.” Then he would point to himself and say, “I’m Dean. Frater maior. Your big brother.” John wasn’t sure what use knowing how to say ‘dad’ would be to Sam on a hunt, but he didn’t bother putting a stop to it. There was no harm in Sam learning to understand the language early on, he thought.
From the time Sam had uttered his first word, John would overhear the boys holding lessons in the backseat of the impala on long car rides. Always the important stuff first (Sam had every exorcism John knew memorized by the time he was five) but then John started noticing… more. Words that weren’t necessary, or that he just didn’t know. Their pronunciation was nothing like John’s stilted, awkward rendition. It was fluent, fast. They rolled ‘r’s and strung words together in contractions that made John lose track of the conversation fast. He wasn’t sure when Dean had taken the time to learn all this extra content, or why he’d decided to teach it to Sam. What he did know was that his boys were having entire conversations that he couldn’t understand. And he didn’t like it.
He didn’t like the way Dean would switch to Latin after Sam had a nightmare, effectively locking John out of the interaction entirely. He wasn’t comfortable with how easily his own sons could hide entire conversations from him, even when he was in the room. He tried to put a stop to it, he really did. He banned all Latin aside from spells, and told his sons that if he caught either of them speaking words he didn’t know, they’d never do birthdays at Denny’s again. That worked a charm. Sort of.
To John’s surprise, Sam seemed to be genuinely struggling with the new rule. He’d open his mouth to speak and then close it again, seemingly stopping himself from speaking in a tongue so natural to him. Or he’d be mid-sentence and get caught on a word, forgetting the English translation, and be forced to explain it in some roundabout way. Dean, though not as lost as Sam, was clearly upset about the layer of communication between him and his brother being stripped away. They had been so used to speaking to each other in what John could admit, now, was their second language, that when English was their only option their conversations became stiff. Awkward. It made things so unnecessarily complicated, John lifted the ban after only two weeks.
He could admit, despite how uncomfortable it sometimes made him, that his sons being fluent in a long dead language had its benefits. Dean had become especially useful to have around, the kid was practically a Latin dictionary. If John needed a text translated, he could just hand it off to his kid and tell him to read it aloud to him. And Sam… well, Sam wasn’t aware of the supernatural yet. But once he was old enough to go hunting, John knew that having someone who understood the spells and exorcisms he was reciting— as opposed to just having them memorized— would be an asset. Not to mention that both of his boys were safer as a result.
But that didn’t make it less frustrating.
John wasn’t young anymore, and learning a new language was pretty much out of the question for him. But even if he did pick up new words or phrases here and there, he still couldn’t understand half of what was being said. Sam and Dean had, at some point, begun filling in the gaps left by a language that hadn’t been in casual use for millenia. They created their own slang, using words outside of their intended context or even combining Latin and English to get their point across. They simplified words down to unrecognizable versions of themselves, and created their own words or pronunciations if they couldn’t find the Latin translation for it. The boys knew Latin, sure. But somewhere along the way, they’d begun speaking their own version of it.
John had long since given up trying to understand any of it when Sam did something he hadn’t done in a long time.
“Are you comin’ home soon, Pati?”
John opened his mouth on the other side of the call, ready to answer Sam’s question, when he registered what he’d heard. His brow creased in confusion and he frowned, trying to make sense of the word.
He’d been gone about a week already, hunting down a djinn in Portland, Oregon. It was longer than he would have liked, but he knew the boys would be fine for a couple more days, so he hadn’t stressed about it much. But he knew from experience that the boys tended to speak more Latin when they were alone, and sometimes it would take Sam’s brain a second to remember that John couldn’t fuckin’ understand him when he did that.
“Patty?” John asked, trying to clarify the completely foreign word. Sam had said it with an accent that told John it was, in fact, Latin. But it wasn’t a word he knew. He was pretty sure it wasn’t a word that actually existed. “What the hell is Patty, Sam? It sure as hell ain’t me.”
On the other end of the line, John could hear Dean shushing his brother, muttering angrily and snatching the phone away from him.
“Non ita eum vocas, intelligisne?” John heard. Do not call him… something. Call him what? What the fuck was Pati?
“Sed pater meus est—,” Sam tried to reply. He is my father. Okay. So, pati like pater? John was still lost.
“Itaque eum ‘dad’ appella,” Dean snapped. Call him ‘dad’. So Sam had called John… what, Daddy? Sam had never even called John ‘daddy’ in English, let alone Latin. Where the hell had that come from?
“Boys,” John said, sternly, trying to get their attention. They continued to bicker on the other end and John sighed, rubbing his hand over his face. These damn boys were going to be the death of him someday, he just knew it.
“Doleo,” Sam said. John didn’t know that one, but he’d guess it was some kind of apology, based on the telltale pitch in his voice of a child holding back tears. “Te pati plerumque appello—,”
Dean shushed him, but John had caught the gist of it, he thought. I call you pati.
Had Sam… had Sam been calling Dean ‘dad’ while John was gone?
“Boys!” John snapped, finally cutting through their argument. The line fell silent, and John cleared his throat, trying to clear the familiar feeling of guilt bubbling up from his chest like bile. “You’d both better stop that before I drive home and make you. Just because I let you speak to each other like that doesn’t mean it’s okay for you to have an entire conversation with me on the other end, capiche?”
“Yes, sir,” Dean said, his voice quiet. “It wasn’t anything bad, I swear—,”
“I don’t care,” John sighed. “Whatever patty is, let’s just agree not to say it anymore, alright?”
“But—,”
“Dean.” Dean’s refutal died in his throat at John’s hard tone. Then, quieter, “You are his brother.” Dean didn’t say anything for a moment, and when he tried his voice caught in his throat with a squeak and John was reminded that he was only ten. Just a boy. “Don’t let him call you that anymore, that’s an order.”
“Yes, sir,” Dean whispered. “I didn’t teach him that.”
“Fine.” There was a pregnant silence for about thirty seconds, wherein John was left alone with nothing but the initials scratched into the impala’s dash and the consequences of every action he had taken since the night Mary died. Two boys who’d never had— and likely never would have— a home. A son who feared what lurked in the dark and memorized exorcisms, and another who was more familiar with an empty motel room than his own father. Who called his big brother ‘daddy’ because his was never around.
Two children he couldn’t even understand anymore.
“Tell Sam that I’ll be home in a few days,” John said eventually, his voice gentler now. It was his fault, all of it. He knew that. “I’ll be home and then we can… we’ll…” He had nothing to offer. He didn’t even know where to begin. How do you make up for protecting someone? How can you ask for understanding from your charges?
“Okay, dad,” Dean said, his tone placating in a way that reminded John so much of Mary it made him angry all over again. “We’ll see you in a bit.”
“Stay inside. Stay safe.”
“Yes, sir.”
“‘Night, son.”
“G’night, dad.”
“‘Night, Sam.”
“Dad tibi b— uhm, he says goodnight, Sammy.” John ground his teeth.
“Goodnight, Dad,” John heard; a small, distant voice. He was so young. So confused. They both were. And it was his fault.
He didn’t say ‘I love you’. He rarely did. He couldn’t, not without thinking of how he used to say it to Mary. Or how she used to say it to Dean. He couldn’t stand hearing them say it to each other either; it was one of the only things he didn’t mind about their second language.
Maybe Sam could get love in Latin where he wouldn’t get any in English. John hoped so. He hoped not, too. He didn’t know what he wanted for those boys. Just that it wasn’t this.