The plotbunnies are breeding under the bed.
So, the trouble with toddlers is the old Disney movies you find yourself watching. And the plotbunnies those spawn.
But really? The Fox and the Hound? Come on, plotbunny - what's so sexy about that that you had to have your wicked fertile way with it?
I don't have room in my plotbunny hutch for one more, and yet, it shoulders its way in...
---
“If it’s not shaped like a human, it’s not human. You got that, boy?”
Dean stared past Bobby’s legs and muffled his mouth with his hand, because big boys didn’t sob.
The horrible thing shuddered and twitched into ghastly stillness on the leaf mould. The too-long face (so beautiful and human five minutes ago) was pallid, white and grey like bone, and its slender fangs were slicing into its lower lip with the grimace of death. Just like Dad had bitten through his lip, when he died.
Dean dug his nails hard into his cheek, and couldn’t find the voice to say “But it was.”
---
The walls encircling their land were covered with paintings. Year after year of them, generations, going back no one knew how long. Whenever the bright colours of one section began to face under the sun and the rain, another scene, another figure, would be painted over the top of it, lines and shadows blurring together into something wilder and stronger than either, something no painter had quite intended.
There were no humans painted on those walls. Instead there were… things. Creatures of thought and horror, maybe of far-away lands or very dark nights. Things like humans, but with two heads or four arms or none. People with only one leg, who hopped like balls. Things with their face set in the centre of their chest or back, things far too large to walk. Things with their heads and arms and legs elongated into grinning, spiderish contortions. Things covered with hair, or crawling on all fours, or with the heads and limbs of beasts, or all human except for something extra, tail or horns or claws or ridges of stone jutting out along their spine.
The walls ran, neat and definite, along the boundaries of the land that everyone knew, the land that everyone understood. It was as old as memory, and it held back the dark. Marked the edges of humanity.
---
Dean was six years old when he first met the boy.
He was down at the end of the farmlands, just inside the wall, where the apple trees and the pears gave way to old grey oaks, so tall and strong. Not many people came there, and Dean liked it because it was kind of gloomy and green, and the trees made dark places (but not too dark) where you could hide from your shadow and pretend you were a great monster hunter.
The boy didn’t look like a great monster hunter, or a heroic lancer of wild boar, or anything like that. He looked kind of scrawny and pale, but he had this big bright grin that always made Dean feel happy, and he had bluer eyes than anything Dean had ever seen before. He also had these soft black wings folded neatly down his back, which was a bit weird, but Dean had thought that all the hair growing out of old Master Jenkins’ nose was weird, and when he’d asked about that all nice and loud (Dad had said he should try to speak clearer, he was just doing what he was told) Dad had glared at him and told him it was rude for little boys to say that sort of thing. So he didn’t.
The boy probably didn’t mean to have wings anyway. Just like Sammy didn’t mean to make a mess in his pants (Dean didn’t make a mess in his pants, but that was because he was a child, and Sammy was a baby).
The boy didn’t talk. But that was okay. Sammy didn’t talk either. Dean was a good big brother, and he knew how to take care of someone even if they couldn’t tell him they were hurting or sad. The wings were kind of handy for that, actually. The boy kept them folded all neat and tidy most of the time, but when he got really happy and excited they shook out around him like the cock in the hen yard when he was showing off to the pullets. And when he was sad, they went sort of quivery and hunched-up, and Dean would pat them until they were better.
The boy sort of reminded Dean of Cassie next door, with his big eyes and solemn expression. So he called him Cas. It made the boy smile, all wide and bright like Sam would sometimes, so Dean kept doing it.
He didn’t tell anyone about the boy, because the boy belonged to the oak grove, and the oak grove was all Dean’s. He drew him in his precious notebook, though, like he drew everything: the weird rock he found in the sheep yard, the tracks of badgers and moles, the way Sammy giggled when you tickled him. The way Cas’ wings settled around them both when they curled up in the big folds of the tree roots at the end of the day. (Cas liked hugs. He also liked sort of nuzzling into Dean’s shoulder and falling asleep there, with all his damp breath and smushed hair. That made sense. Sammy liked those things, and Cas was sort of like Dean’s little brother too, because he didn’t really have a big brother of his own to look after him.)
Cas disappeared at the end of summer. Dean was a bit sad, but it was autumn, so he was busy Helping.
Dean was a good helper. Bobby told him so. He could run around the fields real fast to ask all the grown-ups whether they were thirsty or hungry yet, and he never forgot what each of them wanted. Well, nearly never.
---
And you just know Dean is going to have to help hunt Cas down when they grow up, and he'll have an angry confrontation with him and let him go, and as Cas escapes he does serious damage to either Bobby or Sam (Bobby's legs? the betrayal equivalent of Sam's wall, not that he'd have a wall in this reality?)...