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Dean always patched Sammy up, and he usually patched himself up as well. John wasn’t sure exactly when he lost his position as the de-facto person for applying bandaids, but it was pretty early on.
He hadn’t thought much of it at the time: when he first left Sam and Dean alone for a few days, he’d left them with a first aid kit. Dean was seven, Sammy recently turned three, and he’d already taught Dean how to deal with scrapes and bruises by then, so he guessed he’d been expecting Dean to stand in during his absence.
He was still a little surprised when, after having checked the warding and the salt lines, he spotted a bandaid on Sam’s knee as he sat on the ground drawing… something with a lot of blue involved. “Sammy trip on something?” John had asked, not really surprised he had - three year olds tripped a lot - but surprised at the miraculous appearance of the plaster.
Dean looked up at him with wide eyes. “I was keeping an eye on him, I swear, he just fell over. And I cleaned it out good, just like how you showed me,” Dean insisted. John crouched down in front of Sam, who looked up at him with at least some recognition.
“Heya, Sammy, can you show me your knee?” Sam stared at him, before shifting so he was sitting with both his knees out in front of him. John peered at injured knee as Dean hovered by his side: it didn’t look red at least, and John couldn’t see the scrape, so Dean must have put the bandaid in about the right place.
John got up with a grunt and ruffled Dean’s hair. “Looks good to me,” he’d said, feeling some mixture of pride and relief. Dean’s clear worry melted into a wide grin, exposing a missing front tooth.
From then on Dean would often offer to deal with anything minor, and John figured it was good practice so he’d usually sit back and watch. Even that young, Dean was always careful with Sam, and Sam never seemed to take any issue, besides with whatever injury had prompted their first aid lesson in the first place.
Dean also stopped coming to him for help, which John initially counted as a relief - he was too busy to deal with skinned elbows - and by the time he realised he might have missed something, it was too late.
(The thing that set him on edge was one time Dean was at school when Sam scraped his arm playing outside the asphalt, and he’d wandered uncertainly into the motel like hadn’t known who to ask. John had been right there.)
Still, John maintained his position as the person who dealt with serious injuries. Bashed up knees, he’d leave to Dean, but stitches were his purview. When a ten year old Dean cut his hand open on some glass from a smashed window, and ten minutes later sheepishly admitted that ‘it was still kind of bleeding a lot’, John dealt with it.
He’d briefly considered bringing Dean to the hospital, but the cut was small, maybe an inch and half across, just deep enough that it wasn’t going to stop bleeding on its own, and he had been stitching himself up for years by then. So, feeling like a horrible father (he usually did) he sat Dean down on a chair, and gave him what he judged to be a ten-year-old-appropriate amount of whiskey (Dean didn’t say anything about the taste, but the grimace on his face was evidence enough). Sam sat on the floor and hugged Dean’s leg.
Dean, for his part, kept a stiff upper lip about the whole thing, but John saw him get real pale at the sight of the needle. John had told him it was gonna hurt, that he was sorry, then got on with it.
Dean sat as still as he could, and made as little noise as he could, and at the time John had figured he was playing tough, but looking back he wondered if Dean was trying to spare his feelings: wouldn’t have been the first time. He’d gone as quick and careful as he could, being a damn sight more gentle than he’d ever been with himself, but he wasn’t used to being that cautious with an injury, and he’d been so eager to get it over with that… God, he had to wonder if he could have done better. But when wasn’t that the case?
Still, it was over in about two minutes, and afterwards he’d wrapped Dean’s hand in gauze and told him he was brave, because that was the sort of thing you told kids. Sam had looked up at Dean with big, hazel eyes and asked Dean if he was alright, and Dean had nodded, stood up, then fainted, and John had hated the part of him that said it wasn’t even that bad of a cut.
When Sam cut up his leg up on some rocks a few years later, he’d automatically gone to Dean, and Dean had reluctanly admitted he didn’t know how to do stitches. John had felt so clumsy under Dean’s watchful eye: he knew the kid could do better than him, he had a gentleness, a patience, that John had lost a long time ago.
Sam wasn’t like Dean. He wasn’t a sissy, not really, John had seen men older than Sam make more of a fuss over less, but he wasn’t as good at gritting his teeth and dealing with it as Dean was. Sam had buried his head in Dean’s shirt as Dean rubbed his back and observed. Logically, John knew Dean was probably just trying to learn from him, but he couldn’t help but see Dean’s stare as scrutinising.
Sam let out a whine and winced when John first stuck the needle in, and the guilt hit John like a tonne of bricks. He tried to reason that Sam was being dramatic, but the kid was nine, and John knew most nine year olds would have been howling.
He carried on stitching so they could get it over with, trying to shut off the part of his mind that recoiled at the knowledge that he was hurting Sam, because getting squeamish would only slow him down. Up on the carseat, Dean muttered a constant string of ‘you’re doing well, Sammy’s, or ‘just a bit more’s, which only served to add to the gnawing shame: when he’d stitched up Dean’s hand, the best he’d had to offer was a perfunctory ‘just the gauze now, well done on being brave, kiddo’. He should have done more, shouldn’t he?
It was a gruelling and unpleasant few minutes, and at the end of it both his boys were white-knuckle gripping each other. He could hear Sam’s hitching breaths and see Dean’s pale face and wide, horrified eyes, and John swore to himself the next time he’d just bite the bullet and go to the ER, that he wouldn’t, couldn’t, do that again, but ‘I’m sorry’ still seemed to catch between his teeth. “Almost over, Sammy, just got to bandage it,” he said instead.
Sam let out a low whine, and Dean murmured something John couldn’t hear. He did his best to go carefully now the worst of it was over, but Sam would still tense every time John brushed his leg whether or not it was anywhere near the wound.
Still, for better or worse, it got done. John straightened up and patted Sam’s shoulder, feeling him wince, and neither Sam nor Dean made any move to separate from where they were locked together, shutting out the rest of the world, shutting out John.
From what he could see, Sam looked shaky, so he dug a blanket out the trunk, but it was Dean that wrapped it around Sam’s shoulders. They stayed inseparable for the rest of the car journey back to the motel, and they were still joined at the hip for the entire rest of the evening. Only when Sam was asleep did Dean break off from his brother and walk up to John, a cautious expression on his face: John knew what he was going to ask.
John knew he was wrong for bristling when Dean asked him, carefully, if he could learn how to do stitches, but he’d had some whiskey once they got back to block out the image of Sam flinching as he sunk the needle in, and he couldn’t shake the implication that Dean didn’t think he’d done a good enough job. A part of him knew Dean was right. A part of him knew he’d done a crap job on Dean as well, and Dean hadn’t even had a big brother to go bitching to.
John had said no, probably said Dean was too young or some other crap, and Dean nodded, but he would watch as John sewed up his own injuries, so a few months later John just showed him anyway. He’d need to learn sooner or later, and it was invariably better that he learnt sooner.
Dean was sixteen when he sewed John up for the first time. He’d taken Dean out on a hunt, and got nice, long cut running down his back for his troubles. He’d been planning to struggle in front of a mirror then just put a hefty load of cotton over it, but Dean had worked up the nerve to offer. John had figured Dean could use the experience, and it wasn’t as if he gave a rat’s ass if it hurt, and no matter how inept Dean was, he knew for a fact that it was still going to be better than him trying to do it himself.
It didn’t hurt that much, though, and Dean didn’t do a shitty job. They’d sat in silence for the most part, save for Dean’s occasional mutter of ‘sorry’ for things John hadn’t really noticed. He’d taken a bit longer than John would have, but at the end of it there was a row of perfectly respectable stitches in his back.
Dean had looked up at him from where he was sat down on a chair, ‘is it good enough?’ written all over his face. “Looks alright to me,” John had said, clapping Dean on the shoulder. Dean had smiled, not wide and toothy like he did when he was seven, more just… relieved.
When he met up with his boys all those years later, after Stanford, John couldn’t earnestly bring himself to be surprised that Dean went to Sam for help over him. It was a comfort, in some ways, that they had each other. For all the ways he’d fucked up, at least they’d be fine when he was gone.