Faith, Love, and Sin - Chapter 1
Chapter 1
“Audi nos!” At Father Winchester’s final shouted words, black smoke poured from the mouth of the man in the devil’s trap and flew out the broken pane of the window. Caleb stepped through the markings on the floor to untie the man’s wrists.
“Thanks, Padre. This was a tough one, couldn’ta done it without your help.”
“Don’t mention it. ‘Swhat I’m here for.” Dean always downplayed it, but he had become known for his exorcisms throughout the entire hunting community. Hunters came to him when they had a particularly stubborn demon or other evil spirit to banish, and he’d saved people no one believed could be freed from the demon tied to their bodies. He would sometimes travel to homes terrorized by the most stubborn of poltergeists to perform blessings that would let trembling families feel comfortable once again when tucking their children in at night.
“No need to play modest, Father Winchester. No one else in the country could have pulled off exorcising a demon of this level and kept the meat suit alive.”
Dean cringed at the formal moniker as well as at the dismissive descriptor of the possession victim sitting in the chair before them; he also wasn’t too comfortable with the open praise of his special set of skills. It was the saving lives and helping people that lead him to this, and not the need for recognition. He gave a small nod to Caleb in answer to the compliment and then turned to leave the abandoned house.
Caleb’s voice stopped him at the door. “Give my best to Pastor Jim. And if you two ever need anything, you know you can count on me.”
“Of course. Take care, Caleb. Don’t get yourself killed out there.”
Dean stepped through the door and walked to the Impala. He smiled as he ran his hand over her shiny black flank. The car had been a gift from his father on his 17th birthday. It had come with the suggestion that Dean join John on the hunt for the thing that killed his mother and brother. If it had come a year earlier, Dean might have been tempted, but by 17, Dean was already embedded in the seminary, a decision John never fully understood.
Dean sighed as he opened the door to the Impala and settled behind the wheel, remembering the look of John’s disappointment when Dean turned him down. John would always be his father, but it had been Pastor Jim that raised Dean. Jim’s church was as much home to Dean as the pastor’s house, and young Dean had spent hours combing through the rare books in the library hidden underneath the old stone building.
The Impala roared to life as Dean turned the key, and he smiled to himself as he remembered how excited he was the first time he’d started her up. As was too often the case when Dean was tired or stressed, the smile drifted away as the memory of the rumbling engine carrying John away from a four-year-old Dean floated to the surface.
There wasn’t a lot from that time in his life that Dean could remember very clearly. He’d only been four, after all, and it was more trauma than most adults saw in their life, packed into a few weeks that had overwhelmed his tiny brain and heart. He did remember standing on Pastor Jim’s porch clinging to John, begging with his limbs the way he couldn’t with the words he’d lost. John had left anyway, promising to return for Dean in a few weeks after he caught the thing that had killed Mom and Sammy.
John had come back in just over a month. He still hadn’t caught the monster, but he was “getting closer.” Those words and “Won’t be much longer now, son,” became the mantra John would repeat every time he saw Dean. And every time he left, he would repeat the same, “I’ll be back, Dean, I promise.” True to his word, John always came back, sometimes in weeks, usually in months, and at one point in just under a year, but in the end, he would always leave Dean alone on that porch as he pulled away in the rumbling classic Chevy.
Dean pulled the Impala onto the road and pointed it back towards the home he still shared with Pastor Jim. He shook off the maelstrom of disappointment, anger and rejection that always rose in his gut when he thought about how John had left him behind. Dean took some deep breaths and thought of the kind face of Pastor Jim who had been more of a father to Dean than John had ever been.
Jim had always been patient with young Dean. Even though it was nearly a full year after his arrival at Jim’s before Dean had spoken, Jim had just allowed the boy to move quietly through the house. He would talk to Dean, but he never pushed for an answer. It was that quiet acceptance and simply allowing Dean the space to heal that had helped him to find his voice again. Not long after he started speaking to Jim, he began going to the pastor’s Sunday services. It was a small congregation and Dean settled into a pew in the front row where he could easily see Jim. He was too small to really understand any of the lessons, but he loved listening to Pastor Jim.
As Dean grew up, he wanted to be more and more involved in the church. He developed relationships with the members and friendships with the few other kids that were around; the adults all held a special place in their hearts for the nearly-orphaned boy. He learned to read from the collection of texts full of religion and lore. As soon as he had mastered reading English, he’d begged Jim to teach him Latin, and he picked it up so easily that before long there wasn’t a book in the church library that Dean hadn’t read cover to cover at least once. Once John learned of Dean’s new interest, he started bringing Dean books each time he returned; Dean kept those volumes on a special shelf in his room.
By his early teens, Dean was leading the Sunday school lessons for the young children, and all the parents remarked at how good he was with little kids. Dean beamed at the praise, but what he seemed to get most excited about was when Jim let him help with the hunters that came around regularly looking for Pastor Jim’s assistance. Dean always seemed to be able to track down the perfect obscure reference or incantation to expel a spirit.
When Dean entered high school, he began expressing interest in following Pastor Jim’s footsteps, and by his sophomore year, he had asked to enroll in the Catholic seminary nearby. Jim was at first taken aback that Dean would want to join that particular branch of religion with its strict vows for priests, but Dean insisted the Catholics had the longest history battling demons and the most useful exorcisms. Dean felt sure that he could best help people by donning a collar, and if it meant he had to take certain vows, so be it. Whether Dean followed the letter of the law or the spirit of it was a whole different matter. He kept to his vows as much as he deemed necessary to keep him in line with God’s word so as to be of maximum assistance to those around him. There was always confession for any dalliances if he got carried away.
John put up a bigger fight than Jim against Dean’s chosen path, insisting that the best way for Dean to help the hunting world was for him to join his father on the road and actually hunt the evil things down. Dean was proud that his father felt he would make a good hunting partner, but he felt little tie to the man who had dropped in and out of his life with decreasing frequency over the years.
Instead, Dean picked up extra classes and did summer school to graduate high school early, and he entered the seminary a month later. John had begrudgingly attended his ceremony at seminary graduation where he received his first collar, but it was Jim who beamed at him from the front row, clapping loudest of anyone in the auditorium.
Dean stayed on at Pastor Jim’s, helping with some Sunday masses but mostly focusing on other duties. Jim had started a school for troubled boys while Dean was at seminary, and Dean took over many of the teaching duties upon his return. He had a way with the kids that came from understanding and experience most couldn’t pull off. The other role that brought the new Father Winchester his greatest joy was his renewed work with the hunters who sought assistance from Pastor Jim. It wasn’t long before his reputation grew among the hunting community and people came to Blue Earth seeking assistance from Father Winchester himself.
Pastor Jim had encouraged Dean to move out and find his own home, but Dean insisted on staying. With Jim’s help, and time put in by boys from the school working off their penance, Dean had built an apartment in the basement of the church, surrounded by all the tomes he’d come to know inside and out. It was a modest place, but Dean didn’t need much: a bathroom, a bedroom just big enough for a double bed, and a common room that served as kitchen, living room and study. The walls of the bedroom and common room were all lined with floor to ceiling shelves that housed the ever-growing library of rare and obscure books Dean collected. Many were gifts from hunters grateful for his assistance, some came from retired libraries when the librarians wanted their “special” books to have a good home, but most, Dean had tracked down himself.
The Impala slowed to a stop outside the church and Father Winchester slid out from behind the wheel, grabbed his bag from the trunk and headed inside to his bed for a much-needed good night’s sleep.
* * * * *
Samuel Campbell only got in the old black truck because the cops had said he could either go with this man, John Winchester, or go to jail. Jail this time, not juvie. It seemed not everyone shared his sense of humor about hacking into the police database to put his history teacher’s face on the most wanted list. What was Sam expected to do when his latest guardians had grounded him to his room - basically locked him in - for two weeks?
The scruffy man had taken him back to his house for his things, but Sam really couldn’t care less about his meager belongings at this point. He had lived in six houses in half as many years since he’d first been sent away from the only one that had ever felt like home. He shoved the few things he could be bothered to take with him, including his laptop, into his backpack and two duffel bags. Just before leaving the room, he grabbed the one photo he’d kept from the corkboard above his bed.
He climbed back into the truck and neither he nor John spoke as they pulled away from the house. His uncle (or maybe this one was a second cousin, Sam had lost track at this point) said John was family, but he didn’t offer any more details and Sam didn’t care enough to ask.
“How long’s the drive?” Sam asked flatly.
John looked at him with a raised eyebrow, “Don’t you wanna know where we’re going?”
“Does it matter?” Sam asked, meeting his gaze levelly.
John shrugged and put the truck into gear, heading out from the driveway onto the road. “About eight hours.” Sam settled back into his seat, resting his head against the window and staring out into the dark night. He really hoped Uncle John, or whoever, wasn’t a chatter; just to be safe, he closed his eyes and feigned sleep.
A familiar dark feeling twisted around his gut and he scrunched his eyes against the loneliness that crept through him. He hadn’t always felt this isolated, though the feeling had become familiar over the last two years. It peaked whenever they moved him; when whatever family member had taken in the “problem child” realized that he messed up their perfect little lives too much and decided to pass him on to the next. Like now.
His life hadn’t started this way. Sam’s earliest memories were with Robert and Elise Campbell, raised as their son with their other child, Christian, who Sam thought was his brother for most of his young life. It had been a fairly unremarkable childhood, but happy. There were family dinners most nights, and either Mom or Dad would help him with his homework. Elise always tucked him in with a story. He and his brother were close in age, and though they didn’t avoid the usual bickering between most siblings, they had been close. They played t-ball together, and when he was old enough, Chris walked Sam to school.
Chris had begun acting differently toward him just after his fourteenth birthday, brushing him off, barely speaking to him and often going out of his way to avoid Sam. Sam thought it probably had something to do with hitting puberty and being more interested in girls than in his little brother. He discovered there was much more behind it when, in the middle of an argument, Chris had angrily blurted out the words that changed Sam’s entire life. Sam had been in Chris’s room, asking his brother for help with their chores for the night. They’d been arguing for 20 minutes, voices getting louder and louder, when it finally came out.
“Why should I? You’re not even my real brother!” As soon as the words left his mouth, Chris’s face registered the same shock that must have shown on Sam’s.
“What?” Sam asked, sure this was just more mean-spirited ribbing from his brother. Needing for that to be the case.
“N-nothing. I…just forget it. I’m not doing the freakin’ dishes.”
Sam started to turn to go, but something ate at him, some piece that had always felt just a little off. He faced Chris and asked again, “Chris, what do you mean, ‘not your real brother’?”
Chris’s eyes fell to the floor and he took a deep breath.
“Chris, what did that mean? Tell me!”
“Sam…I’m not supposed to say anything.” Chris’s tone changed, the anger completely gone, and his hazel eyes turned soft and damp. “You’re adopted. Mom and Dad took you in when you were just a baby after your parents died in a fire.”
Sam’s head spun, he felt dizzy and nauseous and suddenly the ground that had been under his feet rose up under his ass. He cradled his head in his hands and shook it in denial of everything he’d just heard.
“No,” Sam whispered. “No.” He looked up at Chris. “No!”
“I’m sorry, Sammy. Mom and Dad wanted to talk to you themselves…I wasn’t supposed to know, but I found the papers when I was snooping through Dad’s desk looking for the key to the liquor cabinet.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“What?”
“Sammy. You. Don’t get to call me that. Anymore.”
Sam backed out of Chris’s room and ran down the hall shutting himself into his own room. The life he’d known really ended that day. He confronted his parents that night when they got home. Before they even uttered a word in reply, the looks on their faces gave everything away. They said they loved him, he was their son and it didn’t matter how he’d come to them. When Sam asked about his birth parents, the only answers Robert and Elise had were that they had been family, and they had indeed died in a fire, along with his brother - his real brother.
Sam tried to accept what they said, that his parents loved him the same as Chris, but he just didn’t feel it deep down. Instead, the wriggling dark loneliness began to grow. Sam hated it, and he began looking for anything he could to keep it at bay. And that’s when his new life began. He stopped being able to care about school, except to pick up the skills he’d later use for hacking and creating fake ID’s. He started to numb himself with alcohol by the time he was 15, and he was expelled from school shortly after that. Then came the boys, and an occasional girl. His parents said the expulsion was the last straw, but Sam could never really be sure what had put them over the edge. He did know for sure that they had lied. They didn’t love him the same as they did Chris, because it was Sam they sent away.
The next year and a half had been a blur of homes with more family that claimed to love him, until he became too much trouble. Each had a limit on the number of times they would tolerate catching him naked with another boy, getting suspended from school, or being brought home by the police. Then it was on to the next relative without so much as a second thought as far as Sam could tell. There never had been someone in his life that wasn’t willing to give him up.
And now Sam was on his way to some other relative. He wondered how many months this one would last as he drifted into a restless sleep.
* * * * *
Dean jolted awake, sitting up so fast in his bed that his still sleep-heavy head ached. He was panting, his eyes were wet and his throat was dry and a look down showed that his hands were trembling. He tried to piece the dream back together, but all that came back were flashes of heat on his face and smoke stinging his eyes, a small bundle being placed into his arms and the screams of an infant. Dean blinked a few times, and when he closed his eyes again, all he saw were flames.
He swung his feet out of the bed and planted them on the floor. Dean scrubbed his hands down his face and shook his head again in hopes of clearing the vision. He knew from years of having this nightmare that it would be useless to try to go back to sleep. His mind would just keep trying to grasp at the story it would never be able to put together, and even if he fell back asleep it would end in another sweaty nightmare filled with fire and screams. According to the clock on his nightstand it was 4:13am, but Dean knew that without looking. It was always 4:13 when he had this nightmare.
Dean stood and stretched; he pulled on sweats and a t-shirt. He started the coffee maker, and as it brewed, he wondered again if he would ever figure out what the nightmare meant and why he kept having it.
Chapter 2
“Audi nos!” At Father Winchester’s final shouted words, black smoke poured from the mouth of the man in the devil’s trap and flew out the broken pane of the window. Caleb stepped through the markings on the floor to untie the man’s wrists.
“Thanks, Padre. This was a tough one, couldn’ta done it without your help.”
“Don’t mention it. ‘Swhat I’m here for.” Dean always downplayed it, but he had become known for his exorcisms throughout the entire hunting community. Hunters came to him when they had a particularly stubborn demon or other evil spirit to banish, and he’d saved people no one believed could be freed from the demon tied to their bodies. He would sometimes travel to homes terrorized by the most stubborn of poltergeists to perform blessings that would let trembling families feel comfortable once again when tucking their children in at night.
“No need to play modest, Father Winchester. No one else in the country could have pulled off exorcising a demon of this level and kept the meat suit alive.”
Dean cringed at the formal moniker as well as at the dismissive descriptor of the possession victim sitting in the chair before them; he also wasn’t too comfortable with the open praise of his special set of skills. It was the saving lives and helping people that lead him to this, and not the need for recognition. He gave a small nod to Caleb in answer to the compliment and then turned to leave the abandoned house.
Caleb’s voice stopped him at the door. “Give my best to Pastor Jim. And if you two ever need anything, you know you can count on me.”
“Of course. Take care, Caleb. Don’t get yourself killed out there.”
Dean stepped through the door and walked to the Impala. He smiled as he ran his hand over her shiny black flank. The car had been a gift from his father on his 17th birthday. It had come with the suggestion that Dean join John on the hunt for the thing that killed his mother and brother. If it had come a year earlier, Dean might have been tempted, but by 17, Dean was already embedded in the seminary, a decision John never fully understood.
Dean sighed as he opened the door to the Impala and settled behind the wheel, remembering the look of John’s disappointment when Dean turned him down. John would always be his father, but it had been Pastor Jim that raised Dean. Jim’s church was as much home to Dean as the pastor’s house, and young Dean had spent hours combing through the rare books in the library hidden underneath the old stone building.
The Impala roared to life as Dean turned the key, and he smiled to himself as he remembered how excited he was the first time he’d started her up. As was too often the case when Dean was tired or stressed, the smile drifted away as the memory of the rumbling engine carrying John away from a four-year-old Dean floated to the surface.
There wasn’t a lot from that time in his life that Dean could remember very clearly. He’d only been four, after all, and it was more trauma than most adults saw in their life, packed into a few weeks that had overwhelmed his tiny brain and heart. He did remember standing on Pastor Jim’s porch clinging to John, begging with his limbs the way he couldn’t with the words he’d lost. John had left anyway, promising to return for Dean in a few weeks after he caught the thing that had killed Mom and Sammy.
John had come back in just over a month. He still hadn’t caught the monster, but he was “getting closer.” Those words and “Won’t be much longer now, son,” became the mantra John would repeat every time he saw Dean. And every time he left, he would repeat the same, “I’ll be back, Dean, I promise.” True to his word, John always came back, sometimes in weeks, usually in months, and at one point in just under a year, but in the end, he would always leave Dean alone on that porch as he pulled away in the rumbling classic Chevy.
Dean pulled the Impala onto the road and pointed it back towards the home he still shared with Pastor Jim. He shook off the maelstrom of disappointment, anger and rejection that always rose in his gut when he thought about how John had left him behind. Dean took some deep breaths and thought of the kind face of Pastor Jim who had been more of a father to Dean than John had ever been.
Jim had always been patient with young Dean. Even though it was nearly a full year after his arrival at Jim’s before Dean had spoken, Jim had just allowed the boy to move quietly through the house. He would talk to Dean, but he never pushed for an answer. It was that quiet acceptance and simply allowing Dean the space to heal that had helped him to find his voice again. Not long after he started speaking to Jim, he began going to the pastor’s Sunday services. It was a small congregation and Dean settled into a pew in the front row where he could easily see Jim. He was too small to really understand any of the lessons, but he loved listening to Pastor Jim.
As Dean grew up, he wanted to be more and more involved in the church. He developed relationships with the members and friendships with the few other kids that were around; the adults all held a special place in their hearts for the nearly-orphaned boy. He learned to read from the collection of texts full of religion and lore. As soon as he had mastered reading English, he’d begged Jim to teach him Latin, and he picked it up so easily that before long there wasn’t a book in the church library that Dean hadn’t read cover to cover at least once. Once John learned of Dean’s new interest, he started bringing Dean books each time he returned; Dean kept those volumes on a special shelf in his room.
By his early teens, Dean was leading the Sunday school lessons for the young children, and all the parents remarked at how good he was with little kids. Dean beamed at the praise, but what he seemed to get most excited about was when Jim let him help with the hunters that came around regularly looking for Pastor Jim’s assistance. Dean always seemed to be able to track down the perfect obscure reference or incantation to expel a spirit.
When Dean entered high school, he began expressing interest in following Pastor Jim’s footsteps, and by his sophomore year, he had asked to enroll in the Catholic seminary nearby. Jim was at first taken aback that Dean would want to join that particular branch of religion with its strict vows for priests, but Dean insisted the Catholics had the longest history battling demons and the most useful exorcisms. Dean felt sure that he could best help people by donning a collar, and if it meant he had to take certain vows, so be it. Whether Dean followed the letter of the law or the spirit of it was a whole different matter. He kept to his vows as much as he deemed necessary to keep him in line with God’s word so as to be of maximum assistance to those around him. There was always confession for any dalliances if he got carried away.
John put up a bigger fight than Jim against Dean’s chosen path, insisting that the best way for Dean to help the hunting world was for him to join his father on the road and actually hunt the evil things down. Dean was proud that his father felt he would make a good hunting partner, but he felt little tie to the man who had dropped in and out of his life with decreasing frequency over the years.
Instead, Dean picked up extra classes and did summer school to graduate high school early, and he entered the seminary a month later. John had begrudgingly attended his ceremony at seminary graduation where he received his first collar, but it was Jim who beamed at him from the front row, clapping loudest of anyone in the auditorium.
Dean stayed on at Pastor Jim’s, helping with some Sunday masses but mostly focusing on other duties. Jim had started a school for troubled boys while Dean was at seminary, and Dean took over many of the teaching duties upon his return. He had a way with the kids that came from understanding and experience most couldn’t pull off. The other role that brought the new Father Winchester his greatest joy was his renewed work with the hunters who sought assistance from Pastor Jim. It wasn’t long before his reputation grew among the hunting community and people came to Blue Earth seeking assistance from Father Winchester himself.
Pastor Jim had encouraged Dean to move out and find his own home, but Dean insisted on staying. With Jim’s help, and time put in by boys from the school working off their penance, Dean had built an apartment in the basement of the church, surrounded by all the tomes he’d come to know inside and out. It was a modest place, but Dean didn’t need much: a bathroom, a bedroom just big enough for a double bed, and a common room that served as kitchen, living room and study. The walls of the bedroom and common room were all lined with floor to ceiling shelves that housed the ever-growing library of rare and obscure books Dean collected. Many were gifts from hunters grateful for his assistance, some came from retired libraries when the librarians wanted their “special” books to have a good home, but most, Dean had tracked down himself.
The Impala slowed to a stop outside the church and Father Winchester slid out from behind the wheel, grabbed his bag from the trunk and headed inside to his bed for a much-needed good night’s sleep.
* * * * *
Samuel Campbell only got in the old black truck because the cops had said he could either go with this man, John Winchester, or go to jail. Jail this time, not juvie. It seemed not everyone shared his sense of humor about hacking into the police database to put his history teacher’s face on the most wanted list. What was Sam expected to do when his latest guardians had grounded him to his room - basically locked him in - for two weeks?
The scruffy man had taken him back to his house for his things, but Sam really couldn’t care less about his meager belongings at this point. He had lived in six houses in half as many years since he’d first been sent away from the only one that had ever felt like home. He shoved the few things he could be bothered to take with him, including his laptop, into his backpack and two duffel bags. Just before leaving the room, he grabbed the one photo he’d kept from the corkboard above his bed.
He climbed back into the truck and neither he nor John spoke as they pulled away from the house. His uncle (or maybe this one was a second cousin, Sam had lost track at this point) said John was family, but he didn’t offer any more details and Sam didn’t care enough to ask.
“How long’s the drive?” Sam asked flatly.
John looked at him with a raised eyebrow, “Don’t you wanna know where we’re going?”
“Does it matter?” Sam asked, meeting his gaze levelly.
John shrugged and put the truck into gear, heading out from the driveway onto the road. “About eight hours.” Sam settled back into his seat, resting his head against the window and staring out into the dark night. He really hoped Uncle John, or whoever, wasn’t a chatter; just to be safe, he closed his eyes and feigned sleep.
A familiar dark feeling twisted around his gut and he scrunched his eyes against the loneliness that crept through him. He hadn’t always felt this isolated, though the feeling had become familiar over the last two years. It peaked whenever they moved him; when whatever family member had taken in the “problem child” realized that he messed up their perfect little lives too much and decided to pass him on to the next. Like now.
His life hadn’t started this way. Sam’s earliest memories were with Robert and Elise Campbell, raised as their son with their other child, Christian, who Sam thought was his brother for most of his young life. It had been a fairly unremarkable childhood, but happy. There were family dinners most nights, and either Mom or Dad would help him with his homework. Elise always tucked him in with a story. He and his brother were close in age, and though they didn’t avoid the usual bickering between most siblings, they had been close. They played t-ball together, and when he was old enough, Chris walked Sam to school.
Chris had begun acting differently toward him just after his fourteenth birthday, brushing him off, barely speaking to him and often going out of his way to avoid Sam. Sam thought it probably had something to do with hitting puberty and being more interested in girls than in his little brother. He discovered there was much more behind it when, in the middle of an argument, Chris had angrily blurted out the words that changed Sam’s entire life. Sam had been in Chris’s room, asking his brother for help with their chores for the night. They’d been arguing for 20 minutes, voices getting louder and louder, when it finally came out.
“Why should I? You’re not even my real brother!” As soon as the words left his mouth, Chris’s face registered the same shock that must have shown on Sam’s.
“What?” Sam asked, sure this was just more mean-spirited ribbing from his brother. Needing for that to be the case.
“N-nothing. I…just forget it. I’m not doing the freakin’ dishes.”
Sam started to turn to go, but something ate at him, some piece that had always felt just a little off. He faced Chris and asked again, “Chris, what do you mean, ‘not your real brother’?”
Chris’s eyes fell to the floor and he took a deep breath.
“Chris, what did that mean? Tell me!”
“Sam…I’m not supposed to say anything.” Chris’s tone changed, the anger completely gone, and his hazel eyes turned soft and damp. “You’re adopted. Mom and Dad took you in when you were just a baby after your parents died in a fire.”
Sam’s head spun, he felt dizzy and nauseous and suddenly the ground that had been under his feet rose up under his ass. He cradled his head in his hands and shook it in denial of everything he’d just heard.
“No,” Sam whispered. “No.” He looked up at Chris. “No!”
“I’m sorry, Sammy. Mom and Dad wanted to talk to you themselves…I wasn’t supposed to know, but I found the papers when I was snooping through Dad’s desk looking for the key to the liquor cabinet.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“What?”
“Sammy. You. Don’t get to call me that. Anymore.”
Sam backed out of Chris’s room and ran down the hall shutting himself into his own room. The life he’d known really ended that day. He confronted his parents that night when they got home. Before they even uttered a word in reply, the looks on their faces gave everything away. They said they loved him, he was their son and it didn’t matter how he’d come to them. When Sam asked about his birth parents, the only answers Robert and Elise had were that they had been family, and they had indeed died in a fire, along with his brother - his real brother.
Sam tried to accept what they said, that his parents loved him the same as Chris, but he just didn’t feel it deep down. Instead, the wriggling dark loneliness began to grow. Sam hated it, and he began looking for anything he could to keep it at bay. And that’s when his new life began. He stopped being able to care about school, except to pick up the skills he’d later use for hacking and creating fake ID’s. He started to numb himself with alcohol by the time he was 15, and he was expelled from school shortly after that. Then came the boys, and an occasional girl. His parents said the expulsion was the last straw, but Sam could never really be sure what had put them over the edge. He did know for sure that they had lied. They didn’t love him the same as they did Chris, because it was Sam they sent away.
The next year and a half had been a blur of homes with more family that claimed to love him, until he became too much trouble. Each had a limit on the number of times they would tolerate catching him naked with another boy, getting suspended from school, or being brought home by the police. Then it was on to the next relative without so much as a second thought as far as Sam could tell. There never had been someone in his life that wasn’t willing to give him up.
And now Sam was on his way to some other relative. He wondered how many months this one would last as he drifted into a restless sleep.
* * * * *
Dean jolted awake, sitting up so fast in his bed that his still sleep-heavy head ached. He was panting, his eyes were wet and his throat was dry and a look down showed that his hands were trembling. He tried to piece the dream back together, but all that came back were flashes of heat on his face and smoke stinging his eyes, a small bundle being placed into his arms and the screams of an infant. Dean blinked a few times, and when he closed his eyes again, all he saw were flames.
He swung his feet out of the bed and planted them on the floor. Dean scrubbed his hands down his face and shook his head again in hopes of clearing the vision. He knew from years of having this nightmare that it would be useless to try to go back to sleep. His mind would just keep trying to grasp at the story it would never be able to put together, and even if he fell back asleep it would end in another sweaty nightmare filled with fire and screams. According to the clock on his nightstand it was 4:13am, but Dean knew that without looking. It was always 4:13 when he had this nightmare.
Dean stood and stretched; he pulled on sweats and a t-shirt. He started the coffee maker, and as it brewed, he wondered again if he would ever figure out what the nightmare meant and why he kept having it.
Chapter 2