Gather the Flies (Gen, R)
Title: Gather the Flies
Rating: R for language and subject matter (see warnings)
Category: Gen oneshot
Word Count: 5897
Characters: Dean, John, and OCs
Spoilers: None
Summary: Dean is kidnapped. John is a father.
Warnings: This story includes-to varying degrees of explicitness-the following topics: pedophilia, child abuse, cannibalism, torture, and murder. On a whole, the main character and his actions are-again, to varying degrees-based on serial killer, Jeffrey Dahmer.
Author’s Notes: Written for prompt 9: Sociopath for the
psych_30 challenge. Heaps of thanks goes to
why_me_why_not who was kind enough to read this over and give much needed thoughts, my other beta who helped to rip apart and rebuild, and to my flist who gave me the encouragement to just write and not look back.
Disclaimer: The following characters and situations are used without permission of the creators, owners, and further affiliates of the television show, Supernatural, to whom they rightly belong. I claim only what is mine, and I make no money off what is theirs.
- - - - -
Sociopath-an individual with antisocial personality disorder (antisocial personality disorder: A type of personality disorder characterized by disregard of the …safety, wishes, rights, and feelings of others.)
- - - - -
The man had been watching him for a long time.
The man knew what time the school bell rang and the route to daycare he took when school had ended. The man knew the way his hair was cut and the color of his backpack, the name of his teacher and his lack of friends. The man knew everything about him.
The man had been waiting for him for a long time, and on a quiet autumn afternoon, the man stopped waiting.
When the man stopped waiting, Dean Winchester, a soft-spoken little boy who was too shy by the standards of his bustling, elementary school classmates, never arrived at his after school daycare.
When Dean didn’t arrive at daycare, his principal was the person who eventually made the phone call to his father at the garage where he was working. John swore in a low growl without an apology and snapped that he was leaving work right then to see if the babysitter could stay longer with his other son.
He would come to the school, and he would find out who took his oldest boy. He would come. He would come as fast as he could, but it would be too late because the man would already be gone.
And so would Dean.
- - - - -
Dean smelled something rotten in the air when he awoke, and he tasted blood on the swell of his tongue. When he went to lift his hands, he discovered that they were bound in front of him. He was facing toward a sagging sofa on cheap, green carpeting that was scratchy against the side of his face; his wrists and ankles were looped with black electrical tape that was also plastered over his mouth.
Although he tried to move his head to better see his surroundings, his neck was too sore to move properly. The only thing he was able to see as he peered beneath the couch was a pair of boy’s Velcro strap shoes on a black shoe mat on the other side.
His young mind tried desperately to process what was happening, and the information reached him in unintelligent, staccato spurts. He left school, just like always, and it had been warm that day, so he put his coat into his backpack. While he walked, he had read his science book because they were learning about where animals lived, and Dean liked that.
A man came up to him while he was reading. The man had said something about…Dean struggled to remember what the man had actually said, but all he knew was that the man had gotten angry when Dean didn’t want to talk to him. Then, like Dad had taught him, Dean began to run away from the angry man. Then…then Dean must have fallen asleep because everything went black.
A shrill ring of the phone sliced into Dean’s mind, scattering his thoughts, and there was the sound of heavy footsteps from somewhere in the house. They sounded like Dad’s, but Dean knew it wasn’t Dad because this wasn’t their house, and Sam wasn’t here, and this wasn’t their life. A surge of anger welled up inside him that he had been taken away from all that he knew.
As the footsteps came closer, Dean instinctively stiffened, and he held his breath as the rings continued. Then there was a soft click as the person picked up the phone and answered, “Hello? Yeah? Yeah. What? No. Not interested. Yeah. ‘K. Bye.”
The footsteps began to move away again, and Dean began to relax, feeling his muscles slide away from their tightened positions against his skin. Suddenly, the steps stopped, changed direction with a squeak against a tiled floor, and came toward Dean.
Trying to get to anywhere else he could, Dean squirmed on the carpeting. When he looked up, there was a man bending down above him with a fascinated look on his face like Dad got when he was writing something in his journal. “Hello there, Dean,” the man leered, and when he smiled, Dean felt a hot flash of fury whip up from his abdomen. “You’re probably wondering how I know your name, huh? Well, Dean, I know quite a bit about you. Yes, I do.”
Sighing, the man sat down on the couch to put his feet at Dean’s eyelevel. Then, the man leaned down and picked Dean up and set him on the squeaking couch next to him. Above the band of tape across his mouth, Dean glared at the man, enraged that this had been done to him and hating the man because he had been the one to do it.
The man raised his hand and began to stroke Dean’s cheek with the backs of his fingers, while his eyes skimmed over Dean’s small body. The man’s fingers felt clammy and cool. “Such a pretty boy, aren’t you?”
Dean automatically jerked, trying to get away from the touch.
“Oh no, no, no,” the man whispered, grabbing Dean’s forearms and pulling him closer. “A pretty little boy like you? I can’t let you go so easily. Oh no.” The man snickered at a personal joke Dean didn’t understand. He let his fingers run across Dean’s collarbone and then settle in a dangerous curl beneath his throat to tilt Dean’s head up. “Ah, yes…”
Dean swallowed something painful in his throat.
The man picked up Dean, throwing him over his shoulder so that Dean’s head faced forward, and he rose to his feet with Dean thrashing in his grasp. Behind the tape, the sound of Dean’s scream was muffled, but its meaning clear.
“Come now, don’t fight me,” the man chuckled. “It will be so much easier if you don’t. Yes, yes, so easy. We don’t have to make this all bad.”
As he was carried through the house, Dean tried to fight against the man by twisting and squirming. But, the man was not affected and continued to carry Dean until they reached the top of a descending staircase. Dean’s scream had turned into a high-pitched, muted shriek, and he thought of every bad word he had ever heard Dad say, and he wished the tape was off his mouth so he could yell it at this man.
In the basement, the air was cold and thick, and in the sudden darkness, he was unable to see. There was the sound of a door opening, and then the man set Dean on the ground. He grabbed Dean’s hair in one hand to rip his head back in a spark of pain. Instantly, tears sprung to his eyes, and Dean choked down a cry.
The man used his free hand to rip the tape from Dean’s hands and feet. Then, he lifted Dean off the ground and grabbed his wrist. With a sharp twist, he sent Dean flying onto a ground of hard packed dirt inside what Dean assumed to be another room. Still unable to see anything, Dean lifted his head in the direction he thought he had come from as the man whispered, “Good night, my pretty.”
Metal scratched against metal-a lock turning into place-and Dean was trapped.
- - - - -
“Where did he take my son?”
From the opposite side of the desk, the school principal lifted her eyes as John Winchester entered her office. In the already crowded room of Dean’s teacher, the daycare assistant, and the principal’s belongings, John was a looming figure that seemed larger than the rest, consuming all the air and emotion among them.
The principal, having realized what kind of man John was after their brief phone call, pursed her lips as he entered to calm herself into a rational manner. “Sir, we don’t know for certain that anyone took Dean-”
“Bullshit,” John snarled, and the others flinched at such a foreign word in the elementary setting. He tossed a week old newspaper, creased opened to a page highlighting the disappearance of another young boy wearing a soccer jersey, onto the desk. Black fingerprints dotted the pages where John had quickly grabbed the paper from the break room at the shop.
At the sight of the missing boy’s face, the daycare assistant whispered a protective prayer, the teacher raised a hand to her mouth, and the principal shook her head.
“Whoever took this boy, took my son,” John snapped. There was sweat forming in beads on his face, and his deeply tanned skin was smeared in dust and grime from the shop. Although out of place in the midst of his cleanly uniformed peers, he remained the most powerful one amongst them.
“But we never saw anyone take him-” the principal stated, reverting to the same phrase she had been holding since her initial call to Mr. Winchester. “Dean did not make it to daycare. The lady there called me. It may be too early to make such drastic assumptions-”
“So, what’re we doing? Standing around with our heads up our asses while my boy is out there with god knows what?”
“I’ve talked to the police. They say it’s too early to develop an official case,” the teacher said. “It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours. They say he may have just wandered off on his own or with friends-”
“He knows better than that. You’re treating my son as if he’s completely clueless!”
“More often in cases like this…”
“No. No, Dean is not ‘just a case.’ He’s my goddamned son, and if you aren’t going to do anything, then I will.”
“I would advise that you stay-”
“Advise all you want, lady, but I’m getting my son back,” John shot, and having said that, he turned and stormed out of the office.
Later, hunched over the opened trunk of the Impala, John attempted to gather his frantically spinning thoughts. Although he was still considered to be fairly inexperienced when it came to supernatural hunting, he had seen enough in his limited time so far to realize that he was not pitted against anything that required silver bullets or holy water. While he may have had an arsenal in his trunk that was slowly growing large enough to fight off Hell itself, he had no plan as to how to get his son back.
To occupy his trembling hands, John picked up one of the new handguns he had recently acquired within the past year. As he loaded it with bullets, a flighty plan began to formulate in the back of his mind. It was risky and likely to fail, but he had no other options. When he had finished loading the pair of guns, John slammed the trunk shut and the sound seemed to burst through the cheerfully colored autumn leaves.
He was going big game hunting that night.
- - - - -
After a longer time than Dean could guess, his eyes had adjusted well enough to the pressing darkness that he was able to see jumbled shapes in the corners of the small room. He crawled, too afraid that he might trip in the shadows, and when he reached the soft pile, he lifted what felt like a pair of blue jeans. Something small, like a spider, crawled across the back of his hand, and Dean retracted his hand and his heart raced up his throat. Quickly, he returned back to his original place on the opposite side of the room and pressed his back against the cold wall. As he brought his knees to his chest, he thought he heard the soft squeaking of a rat; he would never be able to see a rat again without thinking of this experience.
He knew he was in danger, and he knew that the man was not to be trusted. But, his young mind was unable to fit together his fractured pieces and see that his conclusions were all severe understatements to how truly horrific of a situation he had been placed in.
If he had been old enough to be an avid reader of the newspaper, he might have been able to recognize the sports jersey in the corner belonging to the small boy from the very article John Winchester had thrown on a desk. If he had been tall enough, he might have stood and ran his hands over the walls to feel the mounted knives, strips of skin drying on metal racks, and the small skulls lined on wooden shelves as grisly trophies. And if he had been older, with more worldly experience, he might have recognized the putrid scent of decay and formaldehyde lingering in the basement’s air.
But, Dean Winchester, childish boy whose mother had not even been dead three years, was not tall, old or well educated. He could not see what awaited him if he was not saved soon.
So, he merely curled himself into a small ball and pressed his face into the dirt. And when he cried it wasn’t because he was in the prison of a serial killer who preyed upon the flesh and souls of young boys, it was simply because he was afraid of the dark.
- - - - -
With the late afternoon wind cooling to a gentle chill, John searched the route that Dean normally took on his way to daycare. He parked the Impala, and he walked down the cracked sidewalks, scanning the area for the slightest trace of his son or the man who took him. Although not a patient person, John knew that he needed to see if there was any trace of his son dropped somewhere along the path.
John had nearly abandoned hope of finding anything when a piece of paper fluttering amongst a web of bare tree branches caught his eye. He hurried over to it, and lifting the paper, John saw that the name scrawled in childish loops read, “Dean Winchester.” Something acidic caught in the back of his throat, and John walked through the group of trees to see a book lying opened on an abandoned house’s overgrown lawn.
The book’s pages waved slowly in the wind, and a cluster of papers were scattered among the area in bushes and muddy puddles. Hesitantly, John walked lightly to the book and picked it up from it lay on the ground. The bright blue cover was smeared with mud, and water dribbled from the book’s spine when John righted it in his hands and flipped to the inside cover. As suspected, the most recent owner wore his son’s name.
John’s head spun and he tried to calm himself, to tell himself that Dean needed him, but the only thing John could focus on was the idea of breaking the jaw of the man who had taken his son. Dazed, he gathered the papers, all of which had Dean’s name written awkwardly in thick, unsharpened pencil at the top. Red smiley faces exclaimed, “Good job!” in big bubble letters. Where it had gotten wet, the ink ran down the papers in thin, red claws.
When he picked up the last paper, John saw a large footprint on its surface. A footprint that was clearly not his son’s, but belonging to another man. A large man. A man that had, in all frightening possibility, taken Dean.
John hissed an obscene curse and with all the worksheets now collected, he returned to the waiting Impala. The crumpled papers watched him from the passenger seat as he brought his fingers to the bridge of his nose and pinched hard. Biting back a sigh, he shook his head, ground his keys in the ignition, and sped to the police station.
- - - - -
In his corner, Dean had stopped crying. His tears had turned the dirt into mud, which was now smeared into dried streaks on his face, and his nose hurt where he had rubbed it. Suddenly, there was a loud thud on the floor above him, as if something heavy had been dropped. Dean lifted his head in the darkness, caught between wanting to hear closer and wanting ignore the worrisome sound completely.
Then, a little boy, another captive of this man, began screaming in a mad jumble of words that were muffled from their upstairs location.
“No, please don’t, please don’t. No, no, no…”
There was the sound of heavy footsteps coming down the stairs that Dean, too, had been taken down, and the screams grew louder as if they were in the room right next to him. Shriller. “No! No!” Soon, the words melded together in a screeching wail of terror.
Dean scrambled to his feet and pressed his back against the wall.
There was a high-pitched buzz that reminded Dean of a power tool from Dad’s work; the wail grew completely incoherent. Dean slapped his hands to his ears and pressed his head between his knees, as the hair on his arms prickled, and he struggled to hold back his own rising scream. If he was heard, then whatever was happening to this other boy might happen to him, too.
Finally, blessedly, thankfully, the screams and the mechanical buzz stopped. The silence was punctuated by plopping sounds of a thick, wet object, and the door to Dean’s small room opened.
Framed by the light coming down the stairs, the man stood as a black silhouette in the doorway. Something wet running down the man’s clothes glistened in the pale light, and Dean shrank against the wall. The man, amused by Dean’s childish fear, smirked and said, “C’mon, meet your new friend.”
He lifted his hand, and when the backlight hit the object, Dean was just barely able to make out the grotesque face of a boy on a severed head before he completely gave way to the rising terror inside him.
He screamed until his ears rang, and the man could only laugh.
- - - - -
At the police station, John skipped the usual sweet-talking of the pretty, young secretary and asked instead to speak directly to the officers. While he tried to keep his words direct, he eventually told them a story that, because of his panicking mind, didn’t end where it started. Nevertheless, the officers allowed him into the filing room and left him to his own. When the door finally closed behind him, John sighed heavily, ran a hand through his hair, and began to search through the files, even though he was unsure of where to begin.
While he had a rough idea of what he wanted, he was unfamiliar with the organization of the thousands of papers; he felt lost. Using the footprint on Dean’s worksheet as a guide, John had a vague idea of the size of the man who had taken his son. If he was able to find a person with some sort molestation, kidnapping, or even assault charges on his record, John would possibly be finding the exact man he wanted. The chances remained perilously slim. However, John had no other options to find Dean that didn’t involve buying a pair of tracking dogs and burning down the entire city.
At last, he discovered a grouping of files on men who appeared to fit the basic profile he was looking for. Flipping through the dog-eared papers, John saw that one of the men was dead; he was garroted in his jail cell while serving his term for assault and battery of his daughter. Another man was still in prison, and there were a few more who had been released on probation with notes of “good behavior” and “positive responses to therapy.”
While these were all possibilities, none of them grabbed John and said that it was the man until he reached the last file. This man had been arrested on child molestation charges and attempted murder when he was brought into court. Yet on the day of his trial, the leading officer failed to produce the needed evidence for conviction. The criminal walked out of the courthouse a free man.
John flipped the record over, scanning for an address, but he found nothing of the man’s location. He stared for longer than necessary at the mug shot of this man, looking into his eyes and wondering what was so deeply cracked inside a person to cause him to do something that terrible to a child. Finally, John folded the record into a tight square, shoved it in his pocket, and exited the room.
He smiled faintly at the pretty secretary and thanked her for her time, but the smile quickly dropped off his face as soon as he left the building. There was another person he needed to see before he could find Dean. If anyone would know where the criminal was living, it would be the officer in charge of the case.
- - - - -
In one hand, the man carried the severed head of the boy by its hair, and in the other, he dragged a screaming Dean up the stairs. “Pretty, pretty boy,” the man laughed, and when he opened his mouth, blood oozed out from the corners and splattered onto the front of Dean’s shirt below. “He’s a pretty boy, too, y’know. That’s why I decided to keep him. I’ll keep you too, because you’re so, so pretty.”
Dean cried out his protests, kicking his short legs in dirty blue jeans madly and attempting to hit the man as best he could. But, he was still much too small and the man much too big, and Dean only succeeded in kicking the air.
“Oh, you pretty boys,” the man snickered. After they entered the main floor of the house and climbed another flight of stairs, the man opened a bedroom door. He threw Dean onto a bed and then placed the severed head on a bedside table. “I can make you feel so good. I can show you what is good for us. Let me…oh, just let me…” the man mumbled with foggy eyes above his blood smeared mouth.
The man came closer, his hands outstretched to take Dean’s innocence and then feast upon his flesh.
Frantically, Dean’s eyes darted around the room, searching for something he could throw at the man. Then, his eyes stopped their frantic search. Because even though he was still young, he was also John Winchester’s son, and at that moment, it was his heritage-not his age-that propelled him to grab the hair of the murdered boy’s head. In a wavering scream, he told the man to stay away from him, and he threw the wet head. The head crashed into the man’s face with an explosion of blood before it tumbled to the floor, and the man swore and clutched his nose.
“You bastard! You little fucking bastard!”
In a great stride, the man crossed the room and backhanded Dean so hard across the face, his head slammed into the wall against the bed. He wailed in pain as the man continued to beat him until his eyes were swollen, and he tasted his own blood. At last man turned and slammed the door to leave Dean laying face first on the bed with his breath hissing through cracked lips.
So hurt and broken now, his angry resolve against the man was slowly eroding away under the mounting weight of fear. The terror had leaked into his blood, weakening and, ultimately, paralyzing him.
And although Dean was alone once again, he knew enough to understand that his time was running out.
- - - - -
“I’m looking for this man,” John said, holding up the mug shot, when he reached the officer’s house. “You were in charge of his case, and I wanted to know if you could answer a few of my questions.”
The man in the doorway squinted into the setting sun behind John. His face was drawn and tired, prickled with silver evening stubble. “Look, boy, I don’t know who sent you, but I’m retired. I don’t do that stuff anymore. Go talk to somebody else.” He began to close the door before John grabbed it and stopped him.
“Sir, I think he has my son.”
“He has your son?” the officer echoed. “Are you sure?”
“Yes sir,” John said quickly.
The man sighed, then opened his door fully and stood back to let John inside. “Come on in.” The interior of the house was illuminated only in scattered golden streaks from the outside sun; the floors and walls were gray where the sunlight did not reach. John smelled soap and old fabric, scents that were comforting and trusting in spite of it all.
“Can I get you something to drink?” the officer asked.
“No, sir,” John replied, following the man into a small kitchen with a beige refrigerator and rooster salt and pepper holders. He remained standing while the officer eased himself into a chair.
“Go on, sit down. Might as well.”
Uneasily, John pulled out a chair from the table and sat down lightly, remaining perched on the edge and waiting for the answer to save his son. “Can you help me find Dean? My boy?” he asked.
The officer’s eyes flickered up from the tabletop to John, before coming to rest on the far wall where a faded photograph of a young boy was mounted against yellow daisy wallpaper. “You ever do something that you knew was wrong just to get what you wanted in the end?” Slowly, his eyes came back to John again. “I released that man back into the world. If he has your son, it’s my fault.”
“What?”
“You heard me. If anything happens to your boy, it’s because of me.”
“Then why did you do it?” John asked.
“When I brought him, the man you’re looking for, in off the streets, he had already taken my boy. He said that if I convicted him, put him in prison-which I could have so easily done-my boy would die. He had my boy somewhere, and he was the only one who knew where. My son would die from starvation…or dehydration or anything else if I didn’t let this man go free.”
“So you lost the evidence on purpose.”
The officer bowed his head and laced his fingers together on the table. “Yes.”
“He walked. And you got your son.”
There was a long pause, and when the officer answered, his word was a mere slur of air that surrounded his, “Yes.”
“I have to know where I can find him.” The officer lifted his watery eyes, and when he didn’t answer, John repeated, “Please tell me where I can find him.” The minutes were slipping through his fingers too quickly, and every minute passed was a minute lost.
John leaned forward close enough to see the wear in the other man’s eyes when he whispered viciously, “Tell me.”
- - - - -
Dean lay on the bed and watched the sun sink and the world darken through the dusty window. The dead boy’s face stared at him from the opposite corner of the room, and dead flies gathered in black, brittle piles on the window ledge. Although sore, he had already tried to escape through the door, but it was locked and so was the window. Not knowing how to pick a lock, he had no choice but to remain on the bed with one hand curled beneath his bruised face and to stare at the dying sun.
He had eaten nothing since lunch at school, and he was so hungry he felt as though he was going to be sick. His insides throbbed, and he had to use the bathroom, but he knew well enough by now not to ask the man roaming the house for permission. When Dean’s stomach growled, he wrapped his other arm around his stomach and moaned softly.
Hot, fat tears gathered on his eyelashes and plopped down his cheeks when he closed his eyes for a moment. Dad had always taught him not to cry, but Dad wasn’t here now, and Dean didn’t know if he would ever see Dad or Sammy ever again. With the thought of his younger brother, Dean began to worry even more, although not about himself. If he didn’t make it back, there was no one to feed Sam his breakfast tomorrow because Dad was at work and the baby-sitter wouldn’t be there yet. Who would help Sam get dressed? Read him a book tonight? Tuck him into bed?
Muscles raw with pain, Dean moved unsteadily to a seated position. Somehow, he had to get out of this place. If not for himself, then for Dad and Sammy. The blood that was crusted dry on the front of his shirt scared him in its amount, and he wondered if Dad was going to be mad that he stained a new shirt. But, he concentrated on escaping, and he pushed himself off the bed to make his uneasy way to the door for another try.
His vision swirled, and he teetered, occasionally reaching out a hand to steady himself on the nearest object. He had just reached the door, grabbing the handle and sagging against the wood frame when he heard the approaching footsteps.
- - - - -
John’s first thought when he pulled up to the house was that this was not the home of a psychopath. The shutters were faded, but neatly painted, and the garden was dry, but carefully weeded. Nevertheless, this was the address he had been given by the officer, and he hoped this was the address where he would find his son.
From a bag in the passenger seat of the Impala, he produced the newly purchased pair of handguns. Easing himself out of the car, he slipped one of the guns down the side of his pants, and the other, he held tightly in his hand, which he covered with the flap of his coat.
He moved in a determined fashion, and when he reached the door, he knocked three times. Part of him expected to hear his son’s screams respond to the knock, but the only response was a quiet, “Just a minute” from a male voice inside the house. John tightened his fingers on the gun and waited with his heartbeat in his ears and acid in his muscles.
Then the door opened, and John raised the gun to the man’s forehead. “You have my son.”
The man did not run. As if expecting John, he remained standing in the entranceway, slightly staring ever so calmly.
“What do you mean?”
John repeated the phrase, only this time with greater anger and greater force in the baritone timbre of his voice. “You have my son.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You have my son.” The man opened his mouth to refute the accusation once again, when the gun clicked into place and John said, “And I want him back.”
The man paused, and seeing that John was unrelenting, he pulled back his upper lip. “You’re not going to get him if you kill me,” he sneered.
John forced his way into the house, throwing the door closed behind him and pushing the man up against a wall with a hand pressed to his throat and the gun shoved painfully underneath his ribs. “If you tell me he’s dead, I’ll hurt you until you beg for death. I’ll make sure the only thing you want after I’m through with you is death. Do you understand me?”
The man snickered. “He begged, too. Your son. Your pretty little boy. Your Dean.”
“You fucker,” John hissed. Without waiting for the man’s reply, he clenched his hand tighter around the man’s neck and then slammed his head fiercely against the wall. The man’s eyes rolled up into his head in a sweep of unconsciousness before his body slumped to the ground.
John gave a heavy sigh and wiped the growing perspiration off his forehead. With the gun still held tightly in his hand, he began to walk through the house in swift, quiet movements. He passed by a sagging couch and little boy’s Velcro shoes on a cracked boot mat. Moving through the rooms, he swallowed something tight and thick in his throat and tried to concentrate, but the gun wavered in his hands no matter how much he wished otherwise.
In the bathroom, he found only a clean sink and bathtub with speckles of soap scum. In a storage room, he smelled old, rotted flesh, and when he opened a closet door, a decomposed young boy, who had lost his hands, tumbled out onto John’s feet. He gagged and wished he didn’t feel so much relief that this was not his son, but someone else’s.
He crept down the hallway, opening doors and unclenching his heart every time he did not find Dean. After searching the main floor, he climbed the stairs that led up to another closed door.
Stiffening upon hearing movements inside the room, he reached for the door handle. He gave a sharp twist and then backed away, preparing for the worst.
In the doorway, only a small boy with a bloodied shirt and puffy face stood. He had watery eyes and darkened blotches. The little boy looked up at John. “Dad?”
John rushed forward, collapsed to his knees, and gathered Dean in his arms. Tightly. Fiercely. “Oh, Dean, oh God, oh Dean.” He cupped the back of his son’s head in a large hand and pulled him close to his chest.
Immediately, Dean began crying upon being held by his father. His small hands clutched John’s leather jacket in fat bunches, and through his sniffling and crying, he whispered, “Dad…I thought I’d never see you again.”
- - - - -
John carried Dean down the stairs where the man was beginning to rise unsteadily to his feet. “You found him. How touching,” the man said in his wavering, yet slithering, voice. Dean stiffened in his father’s arms.
“Dean,” John whispered in his deep voice, pressing his lips close to his son’s ear, “close your eyes.”
Dean did as he was told and buried his face into John’s neck.
Then John raised his gun and fired once to kill.
And when he shot four more times, it was not because he believed the man was still alive.
When the bullet-ridden body slid to the floor, there was a fat smear of blood on the wall. While the blood pooled on the hard tile floor around shattered bone and discarded gray matter, John stepped over the body indifferently. And with his son held tightly in his arms, he closed the door behind him.
- - - - -
John laid Dean in the passenger seat of the Impala and wrapped him in a thick blanket stored in the backseat. Dean was whispering something, but his words were slurred with exhaustion. John folded his leather jacket into a soft bundle and placed it beneath Dean’s nodding head for a makeshift pillow; he bit his lower lip and wondered if could call the feeling guilt that was unfurling inside him.
John drove slowly, ever so careful not to awake Dean as he slept on the ride home. From the edge of the sky, a pale sliver of moonlight peered through the window and illuminated the side of Dean’s face. His eye was blackened and his lips dried with blood. His body was broken, and possibly, his spirit.
John looked over at his son. A small sob caught in the back of his throat, and he wondered if his boy, his Dean, would ever be the same again.
End