Sam and Dean have found a flat and London that has no other borrowers living in it, and no family pets. It looks perfect at first glance, but with five human brothers living there, the Winchesters are in for more than they can handle!
- ( A special note for this AU: Changing things up in a big way, we decided to take the age range of the characters and skew them. Normally in our other AUs, Dean is one year younger than Stan, who is the youngest of the Bakers. In Brothers Befriended, Dean is the oldest in the group at 17, and Stan is the youngest, at only 10. All of the other Bakers have been aged down like Stan, leaving Simon (who is the oldest of the Baker brothers) at 16 years old. )
The sun was low, barely a trickle through the shaded windows.
Dean had no need of the few streams of sunlight as he arrived at his destination, humming contentedly as he found the supplies he needed just as he’d thought.
Several paper clips were strewn through the papers scattered over the table. Distantly, Dean could hear voices. He stayed alert and at the ready, prepared to jump into action.
If they waited until night fell, the supplies they needed, left so carelessly strewn about, would be cleaned up and packed away. The food would be sealed back up in the pantry, and any effort to dig it out would yield much less food for much more work.
Slipping in while the kids that lived in the flat were busy elsewhere sounded like a good plan, but would only last until one of them got bored and came back.
Considering there were five brothers living in the place, growing up together, that was a tall order.
Dean had chosen to go for the supplies they needed for building, stuff that could be anywhere in the dining room, while Sam fetched what food he could find from the pantry. Sam would have a much easier time diving out of sight if someone came into the pantry, making it a safer endeavor, relatively, than Dean’s. Plus Dean’s familiarity with the more mechanical aspects of building a new home in the walls was a boon for his side of the supply run.
Dean’s ability was a huge help at tracking down specifically what he was looking for amid the scattered school supplies of several teenagers and two elementary-aged kids. It would save him time and help him get back under cover sooner than Sam could.
Up on the table, Dean was high away from any real cover, but he was able to collect several paper clips, leaving enough behind to make it seem like nothing had been touched. Tucking those into his bag, he pushed some papers aside, searching for used and discarded staples that he could unbend. Thinner and more delicate than the paperclips, they were equally useful for Dean’s planned projects in the flat, and wouldn’t be noticed if they went missing.
So long as he didn’t steal any that were still in use, naturally.
The brothers had only recently moved in, selecting an open space in the walls to start their new home. No other borrowers lived in this building that they could find, and the local community kept to itself, a fact that Dean preferred. He stayed out of the others way, and so far they had stayed out of his.
Sometimes Dean wondered what it would be like to be a part of a community, but those wonderings were always cut short. He could provide for his younger brother, just as he always had. They had no need to be in debt to anyone else.
Just recently turned seventeen, Dean had found this flat and judged it a decent enough place to live. There were three teenagers and two kids, but no pets that could sniff them out. He and Sam could rest peacefully there.
Sam had been disappointed that there were no dogs, and Dean had to remind him just why dogs were so bad to have around. An animal several stories tall? Able to track them by scent and movement, with teeth the length of Dean’s arm? No, thank you.
Dean’s search yielded a used staple under one of the papers he moved. He plucked it up, testing the remaining tensile strength. If it was too weak, it would do him no good.
Finding it in good condition, he slipped that into the side of his bag, wondering how Sam’s search was going. If they both had a successful supply run, they’d be eating good that night.
Being the youngest of five brothers had its ups and downs. Most of the time Stan Baker took these in stride as just a part of being a family.
One thing that was sort of an up and a down was that at ten years old, he was hardly expected to be good at much. For instance, the strategic card game that his oldest older brothers tried to teach him on one of their odd nights off.
Stan had tried his best to keep up, and by the end of a few rounds he felt that he was starting to get a better grasp of how the game worked, but his interest as a player had greatly weaned by then. His brothers didn’t fuss too much when Stan decided to back out of the upcoming round since he was still interested in watching.
He needed something to do with his hands, though. While his brothers were shuffling and redistributing the cards, he snuck off to a shelf in the corner where things usually got discarded when they either didn’t have a place or the brothers were too busy or lazy to put them back where they belonged right that second. He found a coloring book that caught his eye, but no colored pencils.
His brothers were already getting started with the next round of the game, so Stan needed to hurry if he was ever going to follow the action. Stan knew for certain that there were colored pencils with the rest of the school supplies left behind in the other room with the rest of the Bakers’ collective homework. Tucking the book under his arm, he rushed down the hall to fetch what he needed.
Just when he rounded the corner, he found himself stopping short as his deep green eyes widened at an unexpected sight.
The coloring book slipped out of his grasp and landed sprawled on the floor, and Stan hardly spared it a glance in favor of the tiny man on the table, sifting through the papers that easily dwarfed him many times over. Stan’s jaw nearly dropped to the floor, his hunt for colored pencils forgotten in an instant.
Dean heard the gasp from behind him, and twisted around in a rush.
Murky green eyes met the youngest Bakers’ wide eyes, and Dean felt his most recent acquisition slip from his hands, landing with a clatter next to a boot planted on a half-completed assignment.
The tense moment stretched out between the borrower and the kid, and then Dean shifted his weight to one leg.
And bolted.
Stan gave a jolt when the tiny person took off running, and his first impulse was to follow.
Even as the smallest in his family, Stan’s little legs closed the distance easily.
“Wait! Don’t go!”
His hands shot out to block the borrower’s way before he could get out of sight. All he accomplished was throwing Dean off-balance with his movements and ended up sweeping him off his feet with both cupped around him. Stunned by this turn of events but undeniably curious, Stan lifted him closer to eye level for a better look. As tiny as the man was, Stan’s hands were barely big enough for him on their own, but together they formed a little alcove around him.
“Whoa,” Stan breathed, awestruck there was an actual, real person in his hands, with hair and a face and clothes and everything. Even a leather jacket that looked as real as anything Stan had ever seen on grownups his own size, and his thumb moved to nudge at the little shoulder to see if it was.
Brothers Apart 