Conversations With The Dead - Prologue
Dean - 12th-13th August 1996, on the road
Dean watched the trees sway in the breeze. They danced slowly, mournfully. It was the darkest hour of night and the moon was hidden behind the clouds. In the distance, there were street lamps. Too far to clear the dark away.
Sitting beside him on the bench, Sam was short for a thirteen-year-old, his toes only just brushed the concrete path below. The wind ruffled the boy's brown hair, pushed it out of his eyes.
Dean couldn't look at him.
"Don't you get tired of Dad bossing you around?" Sam asked. He'd been asking this same question over and over for the past day and Dean still hadn't given him an answer yet.
He didn't give an answer then, either.
He shifted his gaze over to the empty play park. The swings blew to and fro gently, the see-saw knocked up and down to an uneven beat. The park was filled with shadows and quiet. It was like another world without children to play in it.
"You'd be wanting to go on the swing," Dean said. Sam frowned and looked up at him. "You wouldn't say so. You'd say it's lame but I'd be racing you over there because there's no one around to see. You'd have waited for me to suggest it."
"Suggest it, then," Sam said.
Dean didn't answer. He felt Sam's weight shift closer on the bench. He felt the brush of Sam's coat against his hands and he shivered.
"It could be just you and me," Sam said, a whine to his voice.
"You're not very good at this yet," Dean said. "You're too young. Don't your parents teach you this stuff? Do you even have parents?"
Sam frowned. "I'm not sure," he admitted. He sounded sad, quiet. "Are you going to kill me?"
"I guess I have to," Dean replied. His voice was flat; he forced it steady enough to keep it from cracking. "I don't want to."
"Then don't," Sam insisted. He slid closer to Dean. Dean stood up and moved away, his skin crawling. He felt for the gun on his belt. "Please," Sam begged. "You need me."
"I could have killed you when I first saw you but I didn't," Dean said. "I didn't want to. I wanted to… just see his face. Even if it wasn't his. It's been two months."
"I got the shape right," Sam said, half-disappointed. "Where did I go wrong?"
"You look like him. That's it. There's nothing else about you that's like him."
Sam stood up. The top of his head only reached the centre of Dean's chest. Dean so desperately wanted to grip him tight, pull him closer, bury his nose in his hair. But none of it would have been real. It wasn't real.
Sam dropped his gaze. "Will you do it quickly?"
Dean was surprised how quickly the thing gave up, but he kept his face stony. "Change your face first," he ordered.
"I don't know how. I can't control it."
Dean nodded. "Alright. I'm sorry, if that means anything."
"It does," Sam said. He smiled a little wistfully. "I'm sorry, too. About your brother."
Dean didn't answer, pretended he didn't hear. Instead, he eyed the boy in front of him for a moment. He watched the steady rise and fall of his chest. He said, "You don't seem scared."
"I am," Sam said. He closed his eyes for a moment. "But it seems fair. I killed that girl and… and I didn't like it. I don't like this. Maybe it'd be easier if a hunter killed me. It would happen one day, eventually."
Dean blew out a breath, it caught onto the air and swirled away like smoke. "Must suck to be a monster."
"Probably about as much as it sucks to be a hunter," Sam said.
Dean nodded and stepped forwards. Gripping the boy's arms tightly, there was little resistance. Sam stayed completely still. When Dean thrust the knife forward, when he felt it dig through skin, flesh and bone, he didn't look down. He held the boy until he stopped moving. It didn't take long.
When he was sure it was dead, he swung it over his shoulder, carried it through the dead, empty park and far enough into the woods that even the stars couldn't watch. He buried it. Later, he'd tell his dad that he killed the monster right away, then salted and burned it. He wouldn't tell his dad who the shifter dressed up as, even if he had his suspicions that his dad already knew.
It was past midnight when he got back to the motel. His hands were caked in mud; it was buried under his nails. It would be a long time before he got the grave dirt off of his skin. John was sitting at the table in the kitchenette. The legs were uneven and it wobbled as he wrote in his journal, hunched over the table top with his eyes trained hard on the paper.
"You're back later than I thought," John said without looking up. Dean let the door fall shut behind him. His eyes roamed aimlessly around the room and found a damp spot behind the fridge. He focused on it as he spoke.
"Went out for a bit after," he said.
John nodded. He still hadn't looked up. "I wanted you to know that I would have done the job with you if it'd been full-grown. You can handle a young one on your own. It's good to learn to do these things on your own."
I won't always be around, was left unsaid. Dean glanced at his dad, traced the dark, thin skin under his eyes, down to the creases around his mouth, up to the grey in his hair. He seemed to have aged ten years in the past two months.
Dean wondered what he must have looked like to his father. Did he look ten years older, too?
Just as John looked up, Dean looked away. He found it hard to look people in the eye sometimes, especially if it was Dad. He didn't want to see the disappointment. He couldn't stand it.
The silence between them was almost suffocating and Dean headed for the bathroom without a word, feeling John's eyes on his back the whole way there.
The door clicked when the lock slid into place and Dean sat down heavily on the closed toilet seat. His fingers felt stiff, dried into position by the mud, as he reached into his pocket and pulled out a lock of hair. It had been something he'd done without thinking, slicing off a few strands right before he lowered the monster's tiny body into the hole.
It wasn't Sam's, but it was as close as Dean would get.
Two months.
Sam had been gone for two months.
They were driving from one state to the next, had been for the past several hours in wordless company, when John got a call from Bobby Singer. Dean was driving and he didn't slow down, didn't even think of pulling over, even when he saw the look on John's face. These days, he felt so numb inside.
John and Bobby had stopped talking right after Sam disappeared. Dean wasn't there to witness it, but he'd gathered that Bobby blamed John for what happened to Sam. He'd been warning John Winchester about letting his kids near monsters for ten years. In the end, he'd been right about it.
Although, it was Dean's fault, not John's. That was where Bobby Singer got it wrong.
"What is it, Singer?" John asked gruffly. Dean couldn't make out what Bobby was saying on the other end of the line. His voice was muffled, almost impossible to understand over the constant hum of the highway, the growl of the Impala's engine.
Dean focused on listening.
John hadn't said another word. Bobby's voice was streaming from the speaker with no indication of stopping. Horror pulled at John's face, colour draining from it like a gutted fish. He hung up without saying anything, slammed his fist on the dashboard and yelled for Dean to stop the car.
Even then, as he clamped his foot over the break, Dean didn't look John in the eye.
"Sam," his dad said. One word and it meant everything. One word and Dean knew: Sam's been found. That had to be it. Someone had found Sam.
"That was, uh, Bobby Singer on the phone," John said. Dean already knew this; John knew that Dean knew this. Dean had never seen his father struggle to find words. After a moment John continued, "a hunter he knows caught a demon. The guy was interrogating it and the thing mentioned Sam's name."
There was silence again. Nothing but the sound of cars zooming past them. It didn't seem like John was going to say anything else so Dean asked, "What did it say?"
"The thing said we left one of our own in Georgia. It said Sammy's still in that house."
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