His life, in short, was a living hell. Sure, it might sound like an exaggeration, but considering he'd actually been to hell, and that had been far worse, it still wasn't far off. Things were bad. Even so, he wouldn’t change a thing. He knew he was needed, and that was enough.

One day, he crossed paths with a teenager—no older than sixteen, though he could be wrong. They were stealing, plain and simple. It struck a chord, reminding him of his younger self. In fact, the kid even looked a bit like him, now that he thought about it. Still, he wasn’t about to snitch on a kid for swiping bread and whatever else they needed to get by. Instead, he approached them.

"Hey, kid," he said, almost before he realised it, offering to pay for their groceries. Damn his soft spot for kids.

But the teen took one look at his face, dropped the bread, and stumbled back before bolting out of there.

Right, he thought. That wasn’t weird at all.

The next time he saw them wasn’t too far off—maybe a couple of weeks later. They were standing with a rough-looking crowd, the usual kind of bad news: teens smoking, drinking, and doing all sorts of reckless things at an hour when they definitely should’ve been home. He couldn’t do much about it, though. He was stuck in his car, watching a store across the street, focused on his hunt.

Then a car pulled up in front of the group. A man got out, grabbed that same teen from the store, and shoved them into the car before speeding off.

It wouldn’t be the last time he saw them.

Months later, he somehow found out—that kid... they were his. Yes, Dean Winchester had a kid—how or when, he had no idea. Was this fate playing another cruel trick on him? He learned that the troubled kid he’d been pulling out of messes these past few months was his—biologically his. And their mom? God only knows. The kid barely knew themselves, having bounced from group home to group home ever since.

"Here," he said, draping his jacket over their shoulders, after he'd saved their ass for the umpteenth time.