What Once Was Lost - Sam/Dean - 6/6
Title: What Once Was Lost - 6/6
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 3482 - 15,637 total
Warnings: mentions of child torture/murder (no graphic details)
Disclaimer: I just play with them. I don't get to keep them.
Summary: 13 years ago Sam was left behind while his father and brother went on a hunt. Now, the sadistic cultists that Dean thought his father had destroyed are killing children again and Sam finds out that the long ago hunt didn’t go as smoothly as he had been told.
Author's Notes: Yay! The end! Thank you to everyone who has read, and especially the ones who reviewed. I hope you all loved this story as much as I do. Enjoy this last part!
What Once Was Lost
“Eat, Ryan,” Dean said, his voice just this side of a command. He knew, he knew, that Ryan didn’t want to eat. That he didn’t want to breathe. That all he wanted was to curl up in a dark hole and never come out again.
But Dean also knew that Ryan was a strong kid. That someday he would be able to move on and live a normal life, with what had happened not 48 hours ago just a memory and pale lines on his skin.
Dean just had to keep him functioning until then. Like his dad had done for him.
Ryan pushed the macaroni noodles around on his plate a little more before taking what couldn’t even be considered a ‘bite’. Dean sighed and stood up, walking over to the bed and sitting down next to Ryan.
It made something inside him clench when Ryan didn’t flinch or pull away. Dean had seen him react to Sam’s touch, tense and ready to flee. And Dean had demanded that no more male nurses or doctors be sent in to check on Ryan after the boy had nearly gone into a panic attack that morning during a routine vitals check. But with Dean he felt safe.
“I know this is hard, Ryan…” Dean said softly, one hand reaching out to pat the boy’s knee.
Ryan’s fork landed on the plate with a clatter and he pushed the rolling table away so hard it crashed into the wall next to the bed. “You don’t know shit,” Ryan hissed, his face turning red; morphing into an ugly, pinched look that said he was trying really hard not to cry. “You sound like my stupid counselor at school. She has the perfect freaking family and she tells me ‘she knows’. She doesn’t know anything, and neither do you! You don’t know-”
Dean grabbed the thin, flailing wrists that were threatening to seriously damage something, and held on tightly. “I do know,” he said softly, patiently. “I know, Ryan.”
Ryan struggled for just a moment, then went limp, staring up at Dean from beneath wet eyelashes. “How?” he demanded, his voice breaking but defiant.
Dean smiled; a sad kind of smile. Ryan reminded him a lot of himself. Proud; rebellious; bold. “Because,” he said, looking Ryan in the eyes, letting him see the truth. “They hurt me too. A long time ago, when I was your age.”
Ryan’s eyes went wide and his mouth dropped open. “But you… I mean, Sam said… Is that why you’re hunters? Because of them?”
Dean shook his head and ran a nervous hand through his hair. This wasn’t how he had intended on filling Ryan in on their lives. But now was as good a time as any, he supposed. “No. We were raised as hunters. Our mom was killed when we were just kids, and our dad… our dad raised us to fight the kinds of things that killed her.”
Dean lifted the hem of his shirt, fingers brushing over the pale, white scar on his abdomen. “You can’t really see them anymore. Not unless you know they’re there. See, me and my dad were… we were trying to catch them, but we couldn’t, so… I was a decoy, and my dad was supposed to follow us.
But we didn’t know that they used a spell that would make him fall asleep, so he couldn’t follow me. I was there for… hours, before he rescued me.”
Neither of them said anything for a long time. Dean’s fingers passed back and forth over the scar in his stomach, tracing the lines of the ritual symbol, his mind far away. Finally Ryan’s small, frightened voice drew his attention back.
“Does it… get better?”
Dean sighed, pushing away the gripping sense of fear that always took over when memories of that day returned. Honest, sad eyes turned to the frightened boy. “You’ll never forget,” Dean said, his voice hollow and tired. “No matter how hard you try or how badly you wish you could. You’ll never forget. But one day… you’ll wake up and realize that you haven’t thought about them in days. And then it’ll be weeks. And sometimes it’ll be like nothing happened, and sometimes someone will say something or do something, touch you the wrong way, and everything will come back and it’ll hurt just like it does today.”
Dean stopped talking and took a deep breath, fingers picking at a spot on his jeans that wasn’t really there. “But you always go on, right?” He looked over at Ryan, the ghost of a smile pulling up the corners of his mouth. “Because you’re stronger than them. Because you’re here and they’re not, and that’s what matters.”
Dean reached over and ruffled Ryan’s hair, trying to change the look in his eyes, trying to make him smile. Ryan sniffed back tears, brushing away the damp lines on his face and batting at Dean’s hand. He breathed in a deep, shaky breath and gave Dean a small smile that gave the older man a glimpse of the Ryan before.
“Sleep or eat,” Dean said, playfully shaking a finger at the boy. “Your choice.” Ryan looked over at the discarded macaroni and scowled, then carefully scooted down in the bed until he was far enough down for Dean to pull the blankets up over his shoulders.
“Will you be here when I wake up?” Ryan asked, his eyes already dropping with sleep. His body was still exhausted from the blood loss.
“Yeah, pal,” Dean said, smiling down at the boy and brushing the dark hair from his eyes. “I’ll be here.”
Ryan drifted off to sleep, Dean staying close by for when the nightmares came. His mind hadn’t shut down since early that morning, before the sun had risen and he had promised his life away from the boy on that bed.
Sam had been very specific in his demands. No hunting, none at all, until after Ryan graduated. They would get a home, not a hotel room. They would get real jobs and enroll Ryan in sports and go to every one of his parent/teacher meetings. They would be a family.
And Dean didn’t know if he could do it. How do you just give up your whole life, change everything you know and are and had always been, in the time it took to drive across the country?
But he had to. He knew he had to learn how to live a normal life, no matter what it took. He had known since the moment he had untied Ryan from the too-familiar altar that he could never leave him.
He hadn’t told Ryan what they planned yet. They had agreed, early that morning before Sam had disappeared to go ‘take care of things’, that they wouldn’t tell the boy until they were sure it would work. Another one of Sam’s demands was that they get custody of Ryan legally. How Sam was planning on accomplishing that Dean wasn’t quite sure, but he also knew that if anyone could do it, it would be his brother.
Ryan stirred in his sleep, a distressed crease forming between his eyebrows, nightmares plaguing him already. Dean reached over to him and rubbed his back until he calmed down. He would do whatever it took.
***
“Where the hell have you been for the past two days?” Dean demanded when Sam trudged wearily through the door. “We haven’t seen you. You didn’t call. Where were you?”
Dean had known that Sam had a lot to do, and for the first day he hadn’t worried that Sam had gone MIA; not a word on his progress, nothing to know that he was even alive, and in their line of work that wasn’t always a sure thing.
But when he had woken up the next morning and Sam still hadn’t come back from wherever it was he had gone Dean had started getting worried. A couple dozen unanswered phone calls and another night spent staving off nightmares--Ryan’s and his own--Dean was nearly frantic. And now Sam was there, casually walking through the door like he hadn’t been missing for two days.
Sam glanced at Dean, then over to Ryan who was staring nervously at the two of them. The youngest Winchester dropped a pile of papers onto the small rolling table in front of Dean and sank wearily into a chair.
“What’s all this?” Dean asked, flipping through the official-looking papers.
“That,” Sam sighed, running a hand over his pale face. “Is everything we need to start a real life.”
He sat up and shuffled through the papers, handing them to Dean one at a time. “Your new birth certificate, California driver’s license, and social security card. Proof of a California GED so you can get a real job, a fake work history, and forged medical records from the last five years, just in case. There’s also a partial personal back story that I want you to memorize before we get to California.
I also have Ryan’s social security card and id, medical records, birth certificate, and his school records. I have a school already lined up for him to start after the New Year, and I’ve contacted a man about a job as a teacher’s assistant at the high school for me.
This is the bank account I set up in both of our names. This is the number of the man we’re going to be renting an apartment from, along with both of our credit histories; yours sucks, but mine is excellent. I’ve contacted a man about a truck, so that we have two vehicles while we’re there, and found numbers for four local mechanics that are hiring right now; I expect you to contact them as soon as we get there.
And last but not least, I had to call in every one of the favors I still had in California, and I’m pretty sure I’ve completely isolated at least three people that I would have liked to get in touch with once we settled in, but I have, legally I might add, the piece of paper that makes me Ryan’s legal guardian so that we can actually leave the state with him.”
Sam flopped back into the chair and let out a heavy sigh.
Dean shuffled through a few of the papers and looked at his little brother with a new kind of respect. “Oh,” was all he could find to say.
“I get to go with you?” Ryan asked, his eyes wide and eager, a smile wanting to break out on his face.
Sam managed to smile back, despite the fact that he hadn’t slept in nearly 48 hours. “Yeah, Ryan, you’re coming with us. We’re going to live in California, just outside San Francisco, until you graduate. And after that… well, we’ll figure that out when we get there.” A smile washed over Ryan’s face so big it looked like it would break, and he scampered from the bed to throw himself at Sam.
Sam huffed out a painful breath when Ryan landed on him, but his smile brightened and he wrapped his arms around the boy, holding him tightly and smiling at Dean over his head.
***
Several hours later Ryan was asleep, but Sam still wasn’t. Too many questions were running through his head. Like ‘how’ and ‘what if’ and a thousand other things.
He knew how to be normal; even if college and having a kid were two totally separate things. He knew how to keep a full time job. How to make friends. How to exist in the real world. He knew how to hear about a strange death on the other side of the country and not get into the car and go investigate. But Dean didn’t.
Dean didn’t know how to wake up in the morning and not immediately check his surroundings for danger. Didn’t know how to walk down the street without looking over his shoulder for watching eyes. Didn’t know how to relax and just live life instead of running off to fight the bad guy of the week.
What Sam didn’t know was how to take care of a teenager. Little kids he could handle. He had nannied for a young couple who were in medical school on daddy’s dollar--something Dean would never ever find out about--for almost 6 months when he first got to California.
But the kid had been two. Ate peanut butter and jelly three meals a day, took 2 hour naps every afternoon, and would quietly occupy himself with Sesame Street whenever Sam needed to study.
A thirteen year old… that was a whole other story. He didn’t know how to deal with a thirteen year old. With school fights, and girl issues, and the emotional rollercoaster that was a teenage boy in puberty. But Dean did.
Dean had practically raised him all his life. From potty training to his first school dance. His first broken heart and his last. Dean had been mother, father, and best friend. And Sam had turned out... well, normal couldn’t apply, but he wasn’t a serial killer so Dean must have done something right.
Sam moved the chair closer to Ryan’s bed. He pulled the flimsy blanket up to his shoulders and checked the IV to make sure it wasn’t twisted.
He looked so young, lying in the big bed, attached to wires and tubes and looking so pale. Sam tried not to picture Dean the same way; young and hurt, waking every hour with nightmares.
“Sam? Why are you awake?” Dean slid into the room, shutting the door quietly behind him. “You should sleep.”
Sam glanced up at his brother and pulled the coffee from his hand. He took a sip and grimaced at the bitter, black taste, handing it back to Dean who laughed quietly. “I can’t sleep in hospitals,” Sam said. “I’ll sleep in the car when we leave. They’re releasing him in the morning.”
Dean pulled up the other chair and sat down next to Sam. Sam turned to him, eyes raw and open. He moved until he was as close to Dean as he could get and laid his head down on Dean’s shoulder.
Dean didn’t protest, didn’t push him away, just wrapped an arm around his drooping shoulders and gently kissed his temple. “We leave tomorrow,” Sam said, fingers curling around Dean’s shirt and holding tightly. “We go back to hiding. To looking over our shoulders. To stealing time.”
Dean’s hand slid into Sam’s hair, petting softly, and he sighed. “Do you regret it already, Sammy?”
Sam looked up; saw Dean’s eyes watching the sleeping boy on the bed. Ryan shifted in his sleep, his face contorting in distress. Dean tensed under Sam’s cheek, ready to jump to the rescue, to fight away the darkness for Ryan like he had always done for Sam.
Sam expected to feel jealous. There was someone else in Dean’s life now that commanded his attention like Sam does. But all he felt was peace. A quiet peace he hadn’t felt in far too long.
Ryan settled back down and Dean relaxed. “No,” Sam said, his eyes closing, Dean’s steady heartbeat soothing him. “Never.”
Epilogue
“Wait, pull over here,” Sam said, pointing to a familiar, blue house on the right side of the street.
An hour ago Sam had signed Ryan out of the hospital, claiming to the sheriff that he was becoming a ward of the state; that they were taking him away from his mother, somewhere safe where he would be taken care of. No one seemed reluctant to let them.
His mother hadn’t been there to see him leave. When Sam had told her that the state was taking him in and that she wouldn’t have to deal with him any more she had readily signed the papers Sam had given her before slamming the door in his face.
Nathaniel had come to say goodbye to Ryan however, and he had thanked Sam and Dean for rescuing him, for taking him away from his mother. And now they were heading west, going to the other side of the country to try and start a new life.
Dean pulled over, shooting Sam a questioning glance, which he studiously ignored as he opened the door and jogged up to the house, throwing a hasty ‘wait here’ over his shoulder as he left.
The door opened to reveal a somber man that reeked of whiskey and cheap soap. “Officer Abrams?” Sam said in his best ‘I’m-your-best-friend-please-listen-to-me’ voice. “Can I talk to you about Ryan Hale?”
***
“See, I told you,” Alicia Meyer said, giving her brother the same impressive eye roll she had the day she was taken by the cultists. “It wasn’t your fault.”
Her brother Steven looked doubtfully at Sam. “You’re sure?” he asked, his eyes pleading for Sam to say yes, to tell him it was all okay.
“I’m sure,” Sam said softly, insistently; willing him to believe. He had said the same thing not 20 minutes ago to the tired, broken Officer Abrams; needing him to believe that he wasn’t at fault, that what had happened to Ryan wasn't because of him. He had left the officer’s house, hopeful that the contemplative look in the older man’s eyes had been a good sign.
“There was nothing you could have done,” Sam reassured Steven once more. “They released the sleeping gas into the whole area; you couldn’t have known it was there, let alone fought it. It’s not your fault.”
Steven nodded slowly, still not entirely convinced. But Alicia just gave Sam her biggest grin and grabbed her brother’s hand, dragging him outside, her soccer ball under one arm. Sam bid goodbye to Mr. and Mrs. Meyer, who looked slightly guilty as Sam shut the door behind himself--he could only imagine what they had said to their son when they found out Alicia had been missing--and walked back out to the car.
“You have such a bleeding heart, Sammy,” Dean grumbled as he threw the car into gear and tore off down the road.
Sam glanced into the back seat where Ryan was soundly asleep, still laced up on pain meds, and smiled softly to himself. “Yeah, Dean, I do.”
***
Across town a junior officer knocked on Sheriff Mitchell’s door. “Sir?” the young woman asked as she walked into his office. “Sir, I found something I think you should see.”
The sheriff put away the papers he had been looking at and took the picture from the woman’s hand. He studied it closely, looking at the small, circled mark in the rib bone of one of the charred skeletons. “What am I supposed to be seeing?”
“Umm…” The woman pointed to the circled mark. “See, this here. I think the investigators from Harrisburg missed. It’s a knife wound. See there, in the ribs, just above where the heart would be.”
The sheriff made a non-committal noise and tried to hand the picture back to the woman. “So?”
“Well, see, the police report said that they all died in the fire, but I think this mark means that, at least this one, didn’t.”
The sheriff looked back down at the picture, eyebrows creasing in thought. He shrugged and handed the picture back. “So one of them didn’t want to burn to death. Probably killed himself before they set off the explosion.”
“Well, see, I thought that too, at first. But then I was going over the evidence log, and there weren’t any knives found that could have made a wound like this. There were just the small ones used in the rituals. Nothing that could have penetrated this deeply.” The woman looked at him eagerly, waiting for his response.
Mitchell took the picture back and stared down at the mark in the blackened ribs. For a while he didn’t say anything, just stared at the photo, a thoughtful expression on his face.
“Sir?”
He handed the picture back and picked up the papers he had been looking at earlier. “The knife probably just got lost in the explosion. Leave it alone.”
“But sir-”
Mitchell sighed and stared up at the woman, tired eyes willing her to understand. “Leave it, deputy,” he said quietly.
The woman looked back down at the picture, then up into her commanding officers face. “Okay.”
END
- Meagan
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 3482 - 15,637 total
Warnings: mentions of child torture/murder (no graphic details)
Disclaimer: I just play with them. I don't get to keep them.
Summary: 13 years ago Sam was left behind while his father and brother went on a hunt. Now, the sadistic cultists that Dean thought his father had destroyed are killing children again and Sam finds out that the long ago hunt didn’t go as smoothly as he had been told.
Author's Notes: Yay! The end! Thank you to everyone who has read, and especially the ones who reviewed. I hope you all loved this story as much as I do. Enjoy this last part!
What Once Was Lost
“Eat, Ryan,” Dean said, his voice just this side of a command. He knew, he knew, that Ryan didn’t want to eat. That he didn’t want to breathe. That all he wanted was to curl up in a dark hole and never come out again.
But Dean also knew that Ryan was a strong kid. That someday he would be able to move on and live a normal life, with what had happened not 48 hours ago just a memory and pale lines on his skin.
Dean just had to keep him functioning until then. Like his dad had done for him.
Ryan pushed the macaroni noodles around on his plate a little more before taking what couldn’t even be considered a ‘bite’. Dean sighed and stood up, walking over to the bed and sitting down next to Ryan.
It made something inside him clench when Ryan didn’t flinch or pull away. Dean had seen him react to Sam’s touch, tense and ready to flee. And Dean had demanded that no more male nurses or doctors be sent in to check on Ryan after the boy had nearly gone into a panic attack that morning during a routine vitals check. But with Dean he felt safe.
“I know this is hard, Ryan…” Dean said softly, one hand reaching out to pat the boy’s knee.
Ryan’s fork landed on the plate with a clatter and he pushed the rolling table away so hard it crashed into the wall next to the bed. “You don’t know shit,” Ryan hissed, his face turning red; morphing into an ugly, pinched look that said he was trying really hard not to cry. “You sound like my stupid counselor at school. She has the perfect freaking family and she tells me ‘she knows’. She doesn’t know anything, and neither do you! You don’t know-”
Dean grabbed the thin, flailing wrists that were threatening to seriously damage something, and held on tightly. “I do know,” he said softly, patiently. “I know, Ryan.”
Ryan struggled for just a moment, then went limp, staring up at Dean from beneath wet eyelashes. “How?” he demanded, his voice breaking but defiant.
Dean smiled; a sad kind of smile. Ryan reminded him a lot of himself. Proud; rebellious; bold. “Because,” he said, looking Ryan in the eyes, letting him see the truth. “They hurt me too. A long time ago, when I was your age.”
Ryan’s eyes went wide and his mouth dropped open. “But you… I mean, Sam said… Is that why you’re hunters? Because of them?”
Dean shook his head and ran a nervous hand through his hair. This wasn’t how he had intended on filling Ryan in on their lives. But now was as good a time as any, he supposed. “No. We were raised as hunters. Our mom was killed when we were just kids, and our dad… our dad raised us to fight the kinds of things that killed her.”
Dean lifted the hem of his shirt, fingers brushing over the pale, white scar on his abdomen. “You can’t really see them anymore. Not unless you know they’re there. See, me and my dad were… we were trying to catch them, but we couldn’t, so… I was a decoy, and my dad was supposed to follow us.
But we didn’t know that they used a spell that would make him fall asleep, so he couldn’t follow me. I was there for… hours, before he rescued me.”
Neither of them said anything for a long time. Dean’s fingers passed back and forth over the scar in his stomach, tracing the lines of the ritual symbol, his mind far away. Finally Ryan’s small, frightened voice drew his attention back.
“Does it… get better?”
Dean sighed, pushing away the gripping sense of fear that always took over when memories of that day returned. Honest, sad eyes turned to the frightened boy. “You’ll never forget,” Dean said, his voice hollow and tired. “No matter how hard you try or how badly you wish you could. You’ll never forget. But one day… you’ll wake up and realize that you haven’t thought about them in days. And then it’ll be weeks. And sometimes it’ll be like nothing happened, and sometimes someone will say something or do something, touch you the wrong way, and everything will come back and it’ll hurt just like it does today.”
Dean stopped talking and took a deep breath, fingers picking at a spot on his jeans that wasn’t really there. “But you always go on, right?” He looked over at Ryan, the ghost of a smile pulling up the corners of his mouth. “Because you’re stronger than them. Because you’re here and they’re not, and that’s what matters.”
Dean reached over and ruffled Ryan’s hair, trying to change the look in his eyes, trying to make him smile. Ryan sniffed back tears, brushing away the damp lines on his face and batting at Dean’s hand. He breathed in a deep, shaky breath and gave Dean a small smile that gave the older man a glimpse of the Ryan before.
“Sleep or eat,” Dean said, playfully shaking a finger at the boy. “Your choice.” Ryan looked over at the discarded macaroni and scowled, then carefully scooted down in the bed until he was far enough down for Dean to pull the blankets up over his shoulders.
“Will you be here when I wake up?” Ryan asked, his eyes already dropping with sleep. His body was still exhausted from the blood loss.
“Yeah, pal,” Dean said, smiling down at the boy and brushing the dark hair from his eyes. “I’ll be here.”
Ryan drifted off to sleep, Dean staying close by for when the nightmares came. His mind hadn’t shut down since early that morning, before the sun had risen and he had promised his life away from the boy on that bed.
Sam had been very specific in his demands. No hunting, none at all, until after Ryan graduated. They would get a home, not a hotel room. They would get real jobs and enroll Ryan in sports and go to every one of his parent/teacher meetings. They would be a family.
And Dean didn’t know if he could do it. How do you just give up your whole life, change everything you know and are and had always been, in the time it took to drive across the country?
But he had to. He knew he had to learn how to live a normal life, no matter what it took. He had known since the moment he had untied Ryan from the too-familiar altar that he could never leave him.
He hadn’t told Ryan what they planned yet. They had agreed, early that morning before Sam had disappeared to go ‘take care of things’, that they wouldn’t tell the boy until they were sure it would work. Another one of Sam’s demands was that they get custody of Ryan legally. How Sam was planning on accomplishing that Dean wasn’t quite sure, but he also knew that if anyone could do it, it would be his brother.
Ryan stirred in his sleep, a distressed crease forming between his eyebrows, nightmares plaguing him already. Dean reached over to him and rubbed his back until he calmed down. He would do whatever it took.
***
“Where the hell have you been for the past two days?” Dean demanded when Sam trudged wearily through the door. “We haven’t seen you. You didn’t call. Where were you?”
Dean had known that Sam had a lot to do, and for the first day he hadn’t worried that Sam had gone MIA; not a word on his progress, nothing to know that he was even alive, and in their line of work that wasn’t always a sure thing.
But when he had woken up the next morning and Sam still hadn’t come back from wherever it was he had gone Dean had started getting worried. A couple dozen unanswered phone calls and another night spent staving off nightmares--Ryan’s and his own--Dean was nearly frantic. And now Sam was there, casually walking through the door like he hadn’t been missing for two days.
Sam glanced at Dean, then over to Ryan who was staring nervously at the two of them. The youngest Winchester dropped a pile of papers onto the small rolling table in front of Dean and sank wearily into a chair.
“What’s all this?” Dean asked, flipping through the official-looking papers.
“That,” Sam sighed, running a hand over his pale face. “Is everything we need to start a real life.”
He sat up and shuffled through the papers, handing them to Dean one at a time. “Your new birth certificate, California driver’s license, and social security card. Proof of a California GED so you can get a real job, a fake work history, and forged medical records from the last five years, just in case. There’s also a partial personal back story that I want you to memorize before we get to California.
I also have Ryan’s social security card and id, medical records, birth certificate, and his school records. I have a school already lined up for him to start after the New Year, and I’ve contacted a man about a job as a teacher’s assistant at the high school for me.
This is the bank account I set up in both of our names. This is the number of the man we’re going to be renting an apartment from, along with both of our credit histories; yours sucks, but mine is excellent. I’ve contacted a man about a truck, so that we have two vehicles while we’re there, and found numbers for four local mechanics that are hiring right now; I expect you to contact them as soon as we get there.
And last but not least, I had to call in every one of the favors I still had in California, and I’m pretty sure I’ve completely isolated at least three people that I would have liked to get in touch with once we settled in, but I have, legally I might add, the piece of paper that makes me Ryan’s legal guardian so that we can actually leave the state with him.”
Sam flopped back into the chair and let out a heavy sigh.
Dean shuffled through a few of the papers and looked at his little brother with a new kind of respect. “Oh,” was all he could find to say.
“I get to go with you?” Ryan asked, his eyes wide and eager, a smile wanting to break out on his face.
Sam managed to smile back, despite the fact that he hadn’t slept in nearly 48 hours. “Yeah, Ryan, you’re coming with us. We’re going to live in California, just outside San Francisco, until you graduate. And after that… well, we’ll figure that out when we get there.” A smile washed over Ryan’s face so big it looked like it would break, and he scampered from the bed to throw himself at Sam.
Sam huffed out a painful breath when Ryan landed on him, but his smile brightened and he wrapped his arms around the boy, holding him tightly and smiling at Dean over his head.
***
Several hours later Ryan was asleep, but Sam still wasn’t. Too many questions were running through his head. Like ‘how’ and ‘what if’ and a thousand other things.
He knew how to be normal; even if college and having a kid were two totally separate things. He knew how to keep a full time job. How to make friends. How to exist in the real world. He knew how to hear about a strange death on the other side of the country and not get into the car and go investigate. But Dean didn’t.
Dean didn’t know how to wake up in the morning and not immediately check his surroundings for danger. Didn’t know how to walk down the street without looking over his shoulder for watching eyes. Didn’t know how to relax and just live life instead of running off to fight the bad guy of the week.
What Sam didn’t know was how to take care of a teenager. Little kids he could handle. He had nannied for a young couple who were in medical school on daddy’s dollar--something Dean would never ever find out about--for almost 6 months when he first got to California.
But the kid had been two. Ate peanut butter and jelly three meals a day, took 2 hour naps every afternoon, and would quietly occupy himself with Sesame Street whenever Sam needed to study.
A thirteen year old… that was a whole other story. He didn’t know how to deal with a thirteen year old. With school fights, and girl issues, and the emotional rollercoaster that was a teenage boy in puberty. But Dean did.
Dean had practically raised him all his life. From potty training to his first school dance. His first broken heart and his last. Dean had been mother, father, and best friend. And Sam had turned out... well, normal couldn’t apply, but he wasn’t a serial killer so Dean must have done something right.
Sam moved the chair closer to Ryan’s bed. He pulled the flimsy blanket up to his shoulders and checked the IV to make sure it wasn’t twisted.
He looked so young, lying in the big bed, attached to wires and tubes and looking so pale. Sam tried not to picture Dean the same way; young and hurt, waking every hour with nightmares.
“Sam? Why are you awake?” Dean slid into the room, shutting the door quietly behind him. “You should sleep.”
Sam glanced up at his brother and pulled the coffee from his hand. He took a sip and grimaced at the bitter, black taste, handing it back to Dean who laughed quietly. “I can’t sleep in hospitals,” Sam said. “I’ll sleep in the car when we leave. They’re releasing him in the morning.”
Dean pulled up the other chair and sat down next to Sam. Sam turned to him, eyes raw and open. He moved until he was as close to Dean as he could get and laid his head down on Dean’s shoulder.
Dean didn’t protest, didn’t push him away, just wrapped an arm around his drooping shoulders and gently kissed his temple. “We leave tomorrow,” Sam said, fingers curling around Dean’s shirt and holding tightly. “We go back to hiding. To looking over our shoulders. To stealing time.”
Dean’s hand slid into Sam’s hair, petting softly, and he sighed. “Do you regret it already, Sammy?”
Sam looked up; saw Dean’s eyes watching the sleeping boy on the bed. Ryan shifted in his sleep, his face contorting in distress. Dean tensed under Sam’s cheek, ready to jump to the rescue, to fight away the darkness for Ryan like he had always done for Sam.
Sam expected to feel jealous. There was someone else in Dean’s life now that commanded his attention like Sam does. But all he felt was peace. A quiet peace he hadn’t felt in far too long.
Ryan settled back down and Dean relaxed. “No,” Sam said, his eyes closing, Dean’s steady heartbeat soothing him. “Never.”
Epilogue
“Wait, pull over here,” Sam said, pointing to a familiar, blue house on the right side of the street.
An hour ago Sam had signed Ryan out of the hospital, claiming to the sheriff that he was becoming a ward of the state; that they were taking him away from his mother, somewhere safe where he would be taken care of. No one seemed reluctant to let them.
His mother hadn’t been there to see him leave. When Sam had told her that the state was taking him in and that she wouldn’t have to deal with him any more she had readily signed the papers Sam had given her before slamming the door in his face.
Nathaniel had come to say goodbye to Ryan however, and he had thanked Sam and Dean for rescuing him, for taking him away from his mother. And now they were heading west, going to the other side of the country to try and start a new life.
Dean pulled over, shooting Sam a questioning glance, which he studiously ignored as he opened the door and jogged up to the house, throwing a hasty ‘wait here’ over his shoulder as he left.
The door opened to reveal a somber man that reeked of whiskey and cheap soap. “Officer Abrams?” Sam said in his best ‘I’m-your-best-friend-please-listen-to-me’ voice. “Can I talk to you about Ryan Hale?”
***
“See, I told you,” Alicia Meyer said, giving her brother the same impressive eye roll she had the day she was taken by the cultists. “It wasn’t your fault.”
Her brother Steven looked doubtfully at Sam. “You’re sure?” he asked, his eyes pleading for Sam to say yes, to tell him it was all okay.
“I’m sure,” Sam said softly, insistently; willing him to believe. He had said the same thing not 20 minutes ago to the tired, broken Officer Abrams; needing him to believe that he wasn’t at fault, that what had happened to Ryan wasn't because of him. He had left the officer’s house, hopeful that the contemplative look in the older man’s eyes had been a good sign.
“There was nothing you could have done,” Sam reassured Steven once more. “They released the sleeping gas into the whole area; you couldn’t have known it was there, let alone fought it. It’s not your fault.”
Steven nodded slowly, still not entirely convinced. But Alicia just gave Sam her biggest grin and grabbed her brother’s hand, dragging him outside, her soccer ball under one arm. Sam bid goodbye to Mr. and Mrs. Meyer, who looked slightly guilty as Sam shut the door behind himself--he could only imagine what they had said to their son when they found out Alicia had been missing--and walked back out to the car.
“You have such a bleeding heart, Sammy,” Dean grumbled as he threw the car into gear and tore off down the road.
Sam glanced into the back seat where Ryan was soundly asleep, still laced up on pain meds, and smiled softly to himself. “Yeah, Dean, I do.”
***
Across town a junior officer knocked on Sheriff Mitchell’s door. “Sir?” the young woman asked as she walked into his office. “Sir, I found something I think you should see.”
The sheriff put away the papers he had been looking at and took the picture from the woman’s hand. He studied it closely, looking at the small, circled mark in the rib bone of one of the charred skeletons. “What am I supposed to be seeing?”
“Umm…” The woman pointed to the circled mark. “See, this here. I think the investigators from Harrisburg missed. It’s a knife wound. See there, in the ribs, just above where the heart would be.”
The sheriff made a non-committal noise and tried to hand the picture back to the woman. “So?”
“Well, see, the police report said that they all died in the fire, but I think this mark means that, at least this one, didn’t.”
The sheriff looked back down at the picture, eyebrows creasing in thought. He shrugged and handed the picture back. “So one of them didn’t want to burn to death. Probably killed himself before they set off the explosion.”
“Well, see, I thought that too, at first. But then I was going over the evidence log, and there weren’t any knives found that could have made a wound like this. There were just the small ones used in the rituals. Nothing that could have penetrated this deeply.” The woman looked at him eagerly, waiting for his response.
Mitchell took the picture back and stared down at the mark in the blackened ribs. For a while he didn’t say anything, just stared at the photo, a thoughtful expression on his face.
“Sir?”
He handed the picture back and picked up the papers he had been looking at earlier. “The knife probably just got lost in the explosion. Leave it alone.”
“But sir-”
Mitchell sighed and stared up at the woman, tired eyes willing her to understand. “Leave it, deputy,” he said quietly.
The woman looked back down at the picture, then up into her commanding officers face. “Okay.”
END
- Meagan