Précis of "The Woods Are Lonely, Dark and Deep"
'Verse Context: Set in a Season Two that didn't happen.
" The Woods Are Lonely, Dark and Deep," begins from the point of view of a little girl who has just found her way out of a forest where she'd gotten lost. Dean tries to help her, but she gets scared off and runs back into the woods.
The story shifts to Sam's POV. He wakes up inside a forest, lost and terrified, and follows Dean's voice out. In this 'verse, Sam has visions, unrelated to the demon, that are followed by progressively worsening bouts of dizziness, dissociation, and uncontrollable empathic abilities. The disorientation is so strong when Sam gets out of the woods that he briefly fears for his sanity.
Dean tells Sam he thinks Sam has just experienced a form of channeling, where Sam's consciousness somehow switched places with that of a child who needs help. At Dean's insistence, Sam tries to find her again by creating a mental psychic room with a door that opens onto her world. He sees the girl standing on the other side of the door; she clearly wants to be rescued, but is also afraid of them. She doesn't speak to Sam, but he discovers that he can show her mental images when he touches her. Sam convinces the girl to trust them by sharing one of his own childhood memories of being lost and found. He lets her into the psychic room so that she can use his body to talk to Dean, but has to take her place in the cold, dark, fear-permeated woods. As Sam and the girl switch back, she shows him her hiding place next to a river, and he shows her his comforting memory once more and promises they'll come for her.
When Sam gets back into his body, he's dizzy again and disoriented by his empathic reception of the fury Dean is feeling as a result of whatever the girl told him. As they drive out to the river, Dean tells Sam a little of what she told him: her age (six), where she lives (in a big white house with her daddy), and that she's afraid of the dark. She wouldn't tell him her name.
They reach a bridge that will be the starting point of their hike up the river. Dean realizes that Sam was channeling a ghost, not a living child, when Sam packs the shovels to bury her. Much angst ensues. Sam tells Dean that the girl's clothes and images she showed him suggest she died about a century ago; Dean tells him that she got lost when she ran into the woods to escape her abusive father, who then abandoned her.
The environment makes Sam increasingly more cold and frightened. Out of necessity he lets Dean use the empathy to help him by touching hands so that he feels Dean's support and protection. Sam lets slip that he saw cracks in the room in his head, suggesting that the visions are making cracks in his psyche too. When Dean promises not to let anything hurt him, Sam says (and Dean understands) that he's afraid relying on his big brother will lead to dependency.
The boys decide to lay her to rest in a cemetery rather than bury her in the woods. Unaware of exactly what Sam encountered on the other side of the door, Dean asks Sam to switch places again when they find the girl so he can talk to her. Though Sam has just realized that communicating with the girl knocked chips out of his memories, he agrees to do it for the comfort it will give to an unloved child who has been alone for a hundred years.
Thus endeth "The Woods Are Lonely, Dark and Deep." The Dean POV continuation is found in " Promises to Keep."