Arms Wide Open. Part One.
Part 1/13
Empty Spaces. [August 25th, 1998]
Dean.
A strong, hot breeze ruffles the leaves that are starting to turn brown under the latest hot spell and its lack of rain. The stifling air of the day builds up pressure until the trees and the buildings and the world itself seem to bow under it, groaning and sweating and suffering. Slowly dying, Dean thinks, and he wouldn’t be surprised if the trees lining the parking lot decided to spontaneously combust, simply giving in to exhaustion and to the scorching winds that are picking up speed as he watches.
It would make a pretty sight, all the sparks from the dry wood glinting like stars in front of the heavy, dark clouds. But with all the heat and the dryness, who knows what else would catch fire? They already have to pay special attention when salting and burning to make sure they don’t cause a national catastrophe by accidentally leaving a smoldering ulna behind. It’s a miracle as it is that the western wildfires haven’t spread to inhabited regions yet.
Dean stands at the open window of his motel room, where even the ugly-ass curtain is hot to the touch. He mops up the sweat dripping from his brow with the sleeve of his shirt and looks up at the swirling clouds. It’s not even six pm yet, not nearly late enough for dusk, but a thick mass of grey is blocking the unforgiving summer sky and painting everything in a sickly yellow. It looks unreal, as if a camera filter obliterates all the blues and reds, but maybe tonight, finally, it will rain, so who cares about proper coloring. The young hunter leans into the breeze, but it doesn’t soothe much and he only gets dust clinging to the layer of sweat coating his skin. He glances at the parking lot - again - and frowns.
He is half-hidden in shadows because he didn’t bother turning on the light when the world decided to wear shades of sulfur. Less of a target, his hunter brain supplies, although he knows full well that there are plenty of creepy crawlies out there that don’t need light to rip you apart. The walls of the dingy motel room flicker in sync with the images on the muted TV - some documentary about the mating habits of hummingbirds or whatever. Dean doesn’t really care because Dad’s truck is still missing.
The parking lot currently houses two other cars besides the Impala, a small blue Nissan and a rusty brown Chevy. Neither of them is big enough for the black monster of a car to hide behind. No way would Dean have missed the familiar growl of its engine. Right now, there's no noise outside, no cars on the road, no people milling about, not even birds chirping or whatever the fuck else they do. It’s as if all living things decided to hold their breath to hide from some unknown evil. No reason to sing when the world is withering away around you.
Dean snorts at his thoughts and shuts the window, makes sure the salt on the windowsill is still undisturbed, and flops back onto his bed. He knows there's no reason to worry yet, but he can’t shake the familiar undercurrent of concern whenever he and Dad split up, no matter how hard he fights it. He scrunches up his nose and stares at the tacky wallpaper starting to peel off in the corner next to the small table. Usually he keeps himself busy with booze, hustling pool, and girls when he finds himself waiting like this, although not necessarily in that order. But the aftereffects of the last hunt - including a badly sprained wrist, the mother of all headaches thanks to yet another concussion and a couple of bruised ribs - still linger with him, so he’s not up for a night in one of the local dives.
They parted ways two-and-a-half weeks ago. Dean followed a lead south to take care of a ghost in Caspar, California of all places, and Dad went off to help with some water spirit that gave Caleb a run for his money up in the national forests of northern Washington. Dean only got back to Bend, Oregon the day before yesterday, so thankfully his unease hasn’t gotten to the point where it needs the nights out as a distractive counter measure. Which is good, considering that water spirits are nasty little things and he might be in for a longer wait. Even with the combined powers of Caleb and Dad, getting rid of it could take a while. Besides, Dad’s orders were clear: take care of the hunt, don’t screw up, and meet up about halfway between Caspar and Ross Lake. So for now Bend it is, at least until Dad finally arrives or the next hunt calls, whichever happens first.
Dean hasn’t been able to reach the two-man hunting party by phone, but that’s not unusual in the middle of a hunt, not when the single-minded force of John Winchester is dictating the pace. There’s no reason to wonder about the radio silence yet. Caleb and Dad can handle themselves. What is keeping Dean up is not so much worry as it is a feeling of vague discomfort, if he's being honest, which he admittedly doesn’t much care for, not even with himself. The thing is: Dean doesn’t like being alone. As long as there’s a hunt occupying his mind, he’s good, but when his thoughts are free to roam things tend to creep up on him. Nasty, unwanted memories that he could perfectly well do without.
Dean sighs, already sick of this newest addition to a long line of generic motel rooms all across the country. He closes his eyes and tries to ignore the damp smell wafting over from the bathroom and the clanking that accompanies the small AC on its quest to fight the stranglehold of the heat. But as much as he forces himself to focus on the mental image of his baby on the road, the horizon whispering of the next hunt - with no obligations to stay cooped up in, oh, say, Bend, Oregon for instance - it doesn’t change a thing. His mind circles back to February 12, 1990. Of course it does.
Dean shakes his head and brushes his hand over his face, eyes stinging with the lack of sleep and the constant throbbing that accompanies his latest concussion. “So what are the chances of Dad arriving tonight, huh, Sammy?”
The fact that the room stays silent doesn’t seem to faze Dean and a few moments later a small grunt escapes his lips, followed by, “Yeah, me neither.” Dean turns his head again and stares at the ceiling, the scowl on his face a perfect match for the sickly colored shadows of the empty room.
Dean might have been a tad biased, but to him Sammy had always been as sweet as a kid could get, all bubbly and playful and kindhearted despite their nomadic existence and their antisocial role model by the name of John Winchester. Their youngest had been a never ending source of questions during the day and of warmth during the night, cuddling up to his big brother since the moment Dad had given Sammy to Dean. Neither brother had ever slept as deeply or as restfully as when they resembled a chaotic mess of limbs underneath the covers.
Sammy had been almost seven when they had come for him; six years, nine months and ten days to be exact. Dean knows that down to the day, hell, to the minute, because that had been the precise amount of time he’d had a purpose in life: watching out for the little brother by his side. For a glorious total of 2,478 days Dean’s world had consisted of dimpled smiles and huge eyes filled with unwavering trust- first a golden brown, so unusual for a baby that everybody was stunned seeing them, and later shades of hazel. Those eyes, they only had ever known a single direction in which to look and that had been adoringly up to Dean, the protector and provider of their little family. And Dean had loved it, had craved every single moment of it: the shared blankets and backseats, the precious baby smell and little arms reaching out just for him. There had been tickle wars, reading lessons and whispered secrets only meant for big brothers to know. Nothing had ever come close to the happiness of those early years. Sammy had been his life, his heart, his everything - until the day the last bits of safety and family that Dean had held onto for Sammy’s sake had vanished right along with his kid.
Whenever the memories of his brother lose color, Dean’s grasp on reality diminishes with them and by now, sadly enough, he is used to balancing on the edge of sanity. Dean still talks to Sammy, of course. Every single day, he talks to him and answers his many questions, which, ok, he doesn’t actually ask. Dean gets that. But he raised the boy for god’s sake and he knows his brother better than anyone, and even if he answers imaginary questions it’s not as crazy as it sounds. It’s not.
Anyway, answering them helps Dean clear his head and get through the day, and he wouldn’t have been able to solve many of the more complicated cases without hashing things out with his imaginary little Sammyshadow. As much comfort as he draws from those everyday talks, however, they never get close enough to the real thing; never let Dean forget that his brother is still lost.
Most of the time Dean feels aimless, adrift as if all his ties to rhyme and reason in his world are cut. Sure, he's going through the motions, he hunts and gets to shoot evil things or to stab or behead them. So they all burn in the end and that’s a good thing and it should be enough, he knows that, but really, it’s not.
He also hooks up with the occasional cute little thing that catches his eye; waitresses, college girls, lonely women looking for adventures or company. He’s not picky. But he also doesn’t really care for any of them. The one thing left that he burns for, his sole source of motivation, is finding Sammy. Leads long gone cold and years gone by be damned. If not for that hope, however feeble, he probably would have given up a long time ago and simply eaten his gun. But he hasn’t and he won’t. No, what he will do is get to his little brother and if all other things pale in comparison to that one goal Dean still has, then that’s just the way things are. Life is as good as it gets and Dean knows better than to complain.
Dean’s memories of Sammy are most vivid when he's asleep. Some nights there will be good dreams, snippets of pancake breakfast in various diners along the road or the steady rumble of the Impala easing them to sleep at night. But most nights there's nothing good waiting for Dean, nothing peaceful, just the stench of fear and sweat and guilt or a dizzying panic that lingers with him when he wakes. His nightmares usually feature one of three scenarios.
It could be the day Dean nearly lost his brother to the attack of a shtriga, an incident that will haunt him until he dies. That time he nearly lost his brother and it was entirely Dean’s fault. In those dreams a nine-year-old version of himself clutches a shotgun in shaky hands and stares at the monster that’s feeding on his brother. The seconds tick away and Sammy is dying but Dean doesn’t shoot. The horror of the sight and the fear cursing through his veins have him literally frozen to the spot. The real incident ended with Dad swooping in and saving the day - saving Sammy - but in his nightmares the seconds turn to hours of little Sammy’s suffering and Dean can do nothing but watch until it's too late.
Or, alternatively, Dean could dream about the night he lost a mother and got his kid, all in a matter of seconds. The bitter sting of tears fresh in his throat, his arms trembling with the precious new responsibility, and his heart numbed by unspeakable, incomprehensible loss: the night the demon came for their mother and Dad gave Sammy to Dean.
“Take your brother outside as fast as you can,” Dad had shouted in an attempt to drown out the roaring fire, “don’t look back!” And Dean had held on to Sammy ever since, had tried to keep him safe to the best of his abilities. The fact that that wasn’t enough, that Dean wasn’t enough to get the job done is a whole other story. Those nightmares often have him jerking awake, but the aftermath is not all bad since they leave Dean with refreshed memories of a pale blue blanket wrapped around small baby limbs and big brown eyes expressing a level of trust unrivaled to this day.
And then there are the nights when Dean is plagued by dreams of the day he truly lost his brother, to something they can’t even name yet. Those dreams he tries to ignore. Unsuccessfully, because apparently his life isn't fucked up enough as it is. Dean's no shrink, but he knows that it’s not healthy to still talk to a long-lost brother as if he were present. But he can’t resist that urge, never even contemplated letting go of that habit, so he still shares his thoughts and experiences with the Sammyshadow, and it’s almost like it was, before.
He talks about the next time he will have to stop to gas up the Impala, about the hunt they are currently on, and about clues that don’t add up. He talks about the taste of the pie he had for dessert and the diners that served a better one. He recaps the evenings spent hustling pool as well as the ones spent fooling around, although he doesn’t go into details about the latter. Not much, anyway. The brother in his mind still resembles his six-year-old kid, excited about doing his homework or playing Cowboys and Indians and although Dean might be a pig and familiar with more kinks than he cares to count, he's no pervert. Some standards he just won’t budge on and keeping Sammy safe is included, even if it’s just from age-inappropriate stories about the joys of his latest hookup.
At first, Dean talked to the kid out loud, but the glances Dad cast his way spoke so clearly first of grief and later of unveiled anxiety that Dean took to conversing in silence when people were around. That habit might help Dean to stay connected to Sammy, but it still can’t change the fact that it’s been a long eight years since he last saw him. So sometimes it gets really hard to remember the sound of his little brother's laugh or the way his eyes lit up with excitement. That is normal, apparently, and as sad as it is, it shouldn’t be a reason for concern. Truth is though: it horrifies Dean. He knows that if his foggy mind were to lose his brother to oblivion, that would be it. If he lost Sam for good, this time he’d follow suit and there’d be nothing left of the Winchester family but a father burning his oldest while still grieving his youngest. Most probably it would only be a matter of time then before Dad would end up on a pyre of his own and finally all of the Winchester family would be scattered by the winds.
That’s why Dean is thankful for the picture of the four of them - Mom, Dad, Sammy and Dean - that made it out of the fire. It’s tucked away safe in his wallet and it’s a little worse for the wear by now, colors slightly faded and small creases at the bottom, but baby Sammy still grins happily at the camera. Or maybe he smiles at the two white fangs looming above his eyes where they dangle from the edge of a green cap, a color matching the costume he is wearing. It's hard to tell.
Sam’s foot rests on Dean’s shoulder, the baby boy being held by Mom but still seeking contact with his big brother. Dean’s younger self’s eyes dart to the left, where Mom and Sammy are standing half behind him, and a small smile lights up his face. Mom and Dad add a nice counterpart to the green and blue of the kids' costumes with their dark and light brown ones. All of them are wearing matching caps with the same pointy front teeth and huge round eyes on their foreheads. It’s Halloween 1983, Sammy’s first. Since he loved nothing more than to cuddle with a stuffed green dinosaur whenever Dean was not available, Mom had sewed matching dinosaur costumes for the four of them, a happy little family of long-dead creatures. Dean can almost appreciate the irony.
He looks at the picture every other day to remind himself of the way Sammy’s cheeks dimpled and how he cocked his head and raised those tiny eyebrows when he was curious. The young hunter feels a little stab of guilt when he needs the photograph to help him remember, but he prefers that to the panic that sets in when the memories start to fade. Nobody knows about the picture, not even Dad - although that’s probably not true, Dad knows everything. Even so, neither of them ever mention it.
A sudden staccato flickering of the TV disrupts his thoughts and he glances to the screen where some third-class action movie does its best to catch his attention. Dean sighs and doesn’t even bother with the clock on the nightstand - it’s still dark and there’s no sleep in sight, not while he hasn't heard the low grumble of Dad's truck, and he checks the parking lot once more. He wills the car into existence right in front of him and scowls at the still-empty lot. At least the air has cooled down some and the winds are still going strong. The world is no longer yellowish but a blue so deep it's almost black, and the faint glow of the street lamps doesn’t reach far through the first tendrils of night.
I’d gladly take a week more of heat and drought if only the damned truck would turn the corner. Dean almost has to stifle a laugh when the first drops of rain start falling as soon as he finishes the thought. And sure enough, half a minute later, the floodgates open and release what looks like a solid wall of water. Lightning flashes across the sky, so bright and so close that Dean ponders for a moment whether he still has time to break into some empty garage to protect his baby from the worst or not. But then thunder drowns out every thought of leaving. Dean is no coward, enough dead spooks can attest to that - well, they could, had they not already been salted and burned. Anyway, he doesn’t scare easy, but natural elements are waging a war right in front of him and he settles for keeping an eye on the Impala from inside the room. This is going to be a long night.
The Box. [The Lost Years]
Sam.
He was young when they came for him. He doesn’t know his age, neither now nor then, but he can tell that a lot of time has gone by since it happened - hundreds of books have passed through his hands by now, and he has read them all.
The guards keep him in a Box, always have and always will, they told him. He is fairly sure it’s been the same one since as far back as he can recall, although he doesn’t even remember the beginning of this shadowy life. His grip on Before is all but gone, leaving him with a vague sense of lacking and wrongness and not much else.
It’s not as if all his memories vanished right the instant he woke up in the dark for the first time. Back then, impressions of a different life still lingered, but he has lived like this for too long to remember them clearly. If he still knows anything from those initial periods of isolation, it is how miserable and scared he felt. That first time was truly terrible, and his conviction that being alone wasn't the natural order of things hadn't helped matters any. Thankfully, those memories have long been reduced to muted hints of fear and blackness that haunt his nights instead of his conscious mind. He comes up blank when he concentrates on even earlier events; his Before is lost. Whenever he allows himself to dwell on it, that loss causes his throat to tighten and his stomach to feel terribly hollow. All he sometimes can conjure up are vague impressions, like a long forgotten dream: A blur of faded senses and the illusion of a different kind of black, either hard and shiny or smooth and soft, underneath his fingertips.
The dwelling doesn’t happen often, though, because the tall guard is quite attuned to the moods he cultivates in the dark and the mean guard is only too happy to repeat the lesson that self-pity is one of the many paths to sin. Sinning equals Pain and so he tries his best not to think of anything prior to the first book Sara brought him - his first happy memory - and to ignore the sting of those gloomy, eerily silent weeks (or even months; who knows).
That first book was followed by a second and a third, and by now there have been hundreds of them. And although he still is mostly certain that there must have been a Before, something other than this Box and the omnipresent shades of the dark, it truly feels as if this has always been his life. But he tries not to worry about all that. There's no way for him to know for sure, anyway. Questions are always followed by Pain, and nothing his forsaken mind pretends to hold on to can be relied on anyway. Neither his twisted thoughts nor his dark soul can be trusted. The bald man with the smile that’s not really a smile says so.
What he can rely on is his Box. He knows that he is lucky to have it as well as all his prized possessions inside: a mat to lie upon and two blankets; one of them really thick, the other one not so much. A pillow that has seen fluffier days, a tin bowl for water, a plate for food, a small cup for the occasional meal of broth, one towel and, most of the time, another bowl for when he needs to go. He has no spare clothes with him, but whenever he is allowed to take a shower in the Box-for-Pain his second pair of sweats and pants are waiting for him on one of the hooks on the wall. In addition he owns a huge blue plastic bag that he has to put all his belongings in before he is permitted outside. When it gets really cold the bag can be used as an added layer of insulation as well, which is a good thing. It’s really difficult to try to sleep while shivering too hard.
He draws comfort from the fact that his surroundings never change. His Box always provides him with the same four corners connecting his four walls, two of them short and two of them long. No one ever enters here when he is inside. This space is all his own, and for that he is thankful.
He has read about measurements and he knows the theory behind using measuring instruments and different kinds of systems like the metric one or that of the customary units. But since he doesn’t own a scale for comparison, he is still a little clueless about the actual length of one foot or the width of one meter. He asked Sara for a folding yardstick once, when questions were still allowed. She is his favorite person in the world; she never resorts to Pain, she always brings books, and she patches him up after lessons. She’s more friendly to him than he deserves. But she still had declined his request. He should have known; taking things that aren’t already in the blue bag into his Box is forbidden.
But Sara doesn’t call him ‘her smart one’ in vain, so he came up with his very own form of gauging distances and space. That is how he knows that these days it takes him 40 steps to walk the complete circumference of the walls surrounding him, 17 steps from the corner next to his door to his bedside, 3 careful but wide steps along his blankets, another 17 back along the second long wall and a final 3 steps to end up next to his door again. Keeping track of his steps tells him that he has lived in his Box for a very long time, too - it used to take 96 of his steps to walk all around it, 40 for each long wall and almost 8 for the short ones. His floor spanned over 360 square steps then, while now it’s only 51 square steps. He has lived in his Box long enough to grow up.
Sometimes he feels the need to run, to fly and fly and never stop, and then it takes him only nine-and-a-half long strides from the short wall with the door to the other short one where his blankets lie. The urge to move doesn't hit as often as it used to, but still he doesn’t always act on it. Even if he stretches his limbs and takes deep breaths of the metal tinged air, he can’t give it everything he has because there’s just not enough space. He doesn’t even bother with the short walls, just takes the long ones over and over until sweat pours from him, trickling from his nose and soaking through the elastic band of his trousers. But an itch will linger, the craving for movement never completely satisfied. He is sure that if he ever gets the chance to repent for his sins and therefore end up in heaven, there will be no obstacles in his way, walls or otherwise. He will be able to run and run without ever needing to stop or turn around.
What he likes best about his Box are the 24 small, circular holes high on his walls. There are four groups of six of them, one group next to every corner, running parallel to the horizon like beads on a thread. When he was little and couldn’t jump high enough to look outside, he used to wish for them to be bigger. But now, he is content with pressing his face to the walls to enjoy their limited view, nose squished against the cool metal. He still has to stand on his toes to reach them. When his door is locked, which it always is except when he’s with Sara or in the Box-for-Pain or during the occasional visit from the bald man, those holes are his only source of light and air. He loves them. They always seem so small and fragile, not even the size of half his hand, but they ground him better than anything else. Through their steady presence he can make sure that the outside is still there, even when he feels himself floating away into gray nothingness. He christened them "unbudgeables" a long time ago.
If the days are bright and sunny, enough light filters through so that he can make out the patterns on the floor and the ceiling, faint lines etched into the otherwise homogenously gray surface. There are so many of them, one right next to the other spinning away above his head. Smaller symbols squeeze in the corners and slightly bigger patterns surround several really huge ones in the middle, on floor and ceiling both, and all of them are different. If it is cloudy or during the nights they are very hard to detect, but he often traced them with his fingertips so he knows they are still there, even when not illuminated. That thought always gives him an odd sense of comfort, almost as if he has something benign watching over him. In truth, he doesn’t know what most of them are for, though. Just a few contain the alphabet he knows, in most of them he can’t even make out single letters. There are squiggled loops clasping around twisting meanders without discernible aim and five, six or seven pointed stars next to circles containing wavy, crisscrossing lines. Most of them he can’t look at very long without getting cross-eyed.
The only exception is the pattern in the rear left corner of the floor, exactly where he rests his head at night. This one is called mesocosmos. He knows that from one of the earlier books, way before his education started. It was about alchemy and symbols and he was more than a little surprised to stumble upon the familiar sight.
His hands halted on the page and he stared at the symbol covering two thirds of the page in front of him. He had little doubt about this being the same pattern as the one under his pillow, but the book revealed some details the meager lightning in his Box concealed. The whole structure consisted of a circle inside of a triangle embedded in a square, the corners of which were made of four smaller circles assigned to the elements fire, earth, air, and water. The square, on the other hand, was surrounded by an octagon which itself was encased in a final double circle. Whoever came up with the design sure loved his geometry.
Several Latin inscriptions along edges and angles completed the elaborate composition. He tried to translate the phrases, but his language skills were still too poor. He wrinkled his brow and instead went for the text accompanying the symbol. It said the pattern was supposed to show the position of the human being in relation to creation itself. Sara had noticed his fascination by then and leaned over his shoulder to get a better look at the page he was so intrigued by.
“Ah. I know this one. Did you know that it was originally meant to protect those who were able to detect its true relevance? Allegedly even from the darkest forces of evil?” He shook his head at that and quickly finished reading the paragraph in front of him. It didn’t mention protective qualities or dark forces at all. He looked at her questioningly and she winked at him. This was before his education in the Box-for-Pain started, so she didn’t hesitate to poke him in the ribs, which made him giggle at her.
“I myself have dealt with the attraction to alchemy in earlier times. They are called the dark ages for a reason, little cub. Back then, even ordinary people knew of magic and the miraculous. Most people were after secret formulas, and you could not avoid getting in contact with sorcery or spellwork, even if you were no member of an alchemic guild. This was state-of-the-art natural science.” He pictured her then, all eager and inexperienced, hunched over one of the precious books of the time, studying this exact symbol in the gleam of candlelight. It must have been fascinating living back then. Misinterpreting his lingering stare, she looked back at the page in front of him and circled her finger around the mesocosmos. “I never found out what its true meaning was though.” She almost sounded sad about it.
Thinking about the background behind the secret of the patterns quickly became one of his favorite activities after that. He still spends entire nights spinning stories about who came up with their designs and what their true purposes might have been. Kings and warlocks feature in his stories just as often as common people, god-fearing ones as well as doomed souls like himself; everybody out for protection spells, hidden treasures or truths.
As familiar and sheltering as it may be, he doesn’t call his Box home. It’s not even something he has to convince himself to avoid; the thought just never occurred to him. Home is a confusing concept altogether. He isn't sure about its actual meaning, but he can’t shake the feeling that safety, warmth and laughter are part of it. He thinks he might have had a home once; knows that this, his small space of 51 square steps, is not it. His Box still is lacking something. Something vital. He can’t remember what, but sometimes he can almost grasp what is missing - mostly when he is being moved and certain noises outside mutedly echo their way to him. But they are never enough to trigger his mind into awareness.
Memories. [August 25th, 1998]
Dean.
Dean is gripping the curtain tight enough to feel his knuckles crack. Against his better judgment he had tried to get some more sleep and naturally his dreams had been particularly nasty and his rest on the motel bed short-lived. As soon as the next rounds of thunder penetrated his sleep-hazed mind, he was glad to untangle himself from the tendrils of nightmares. Now he's left with the feeling of loss and dread but he’ll be damned if he tries for sleep again. The damn shtriga incident still fresh on his mind, back to his outpost at the window it is. And although he tries not to think about it, of course his mind circles back to 1990 again.
It was a particularly cold February. Dean had just turned eleven and was going crazy with worry because six-year-old Sammy couldn’t shake a nasty cold or flu or some killer virus for all that Dean was concerned. They were supposed to go from Georgia all the way up to Maine, following the latest rumors of demonic activity, but they had to make a stop in Covington, Virginia when Sammy kept getting worse.
The motel they stayed at barely hit their usual low standards, but at least the beds were comfortable. The fact that the hospital was just seven minutes away - not to be underestimated with Sammy’s disposition for spiking fevers at the most unexpected times - had given Dean a little peace of mind. Not much of it though, because Sammy still was really sick, pale little face flushed with fever and whole body trembling with exhaustion, and Dean hated to see his baby brother suffer.
The older boy stayed home with the coughing, sweating, and downright miserable kid while Dad left to get food and meds. Pure Marine that he was, Dad had ordered Dean to get Sammy’s fever down before he left and a huge chunk out of the motel’s ice stash was soaking through the towels and the spare bed sheets piled around the shivering kid in order to see that order through.
When Sammy finally seemed to cool down a bit and slipped into an exhausted slumber as the fever released its hold, Dean seized upon the opportunity and made for the ice machine down the corridor. They hadn’t been on a hunt, but leaving Sammy alone was always a risk, so Dean still checked the salt lines before locking the door behind him.
The first cubes of ice just clunked hollowly in the bucket when he heard the Impala pull into the parking lot. Sick Sammy always had Dean on edge and he was glad to hear the familiar rumble. Back-up had arrived, thank god. He was back at their door first, Dad hot on his heels, and while the promising smell of grease and onions wafting from the brown paper bags under Dad’s right arm usually would have reduced Dean to the drooling, bottomless pit he was, right then he couldn’t care less about food. Instead his gaze focused on the plastic bag that bore the name of a pharmacy in bold green letters. “Got the kiddy Tylenol, too?”
Dad looked at him with that half-amused, half-astonished expression that Dean had seen more and more often during the last few months, and he'd probably said something, too. Dean didn’t register anything outside of the motel room anymore because when he stepped over the threshold he found himself in his worst possible nightmare.
Dean never remembered much of the first few minutes after opening the door besides grasping the brown plastic bucket with the faded logo of the motel close to his chest and the nip of condensed water soaking through the front of his shirt. Then, the bucket was replaced by his colt and ice crunching under his shoes. He scanned the room from left to right, eyes following the barrel of the gun he’d gotten for his birthday barely three weeks ago, the weight not yet a familiar extension of his arm. He noticed with a weird sense of clarity, that the violent chill seeping into his bones had had nothing to do with the smooth metal in his hands or the icy water on his skin.
There was nothing to shoot at; the motel room was empty. Dean was sure he’d locked the door behind him and there’d been no sound of the door opening during the approximately 40 seconds it took him to fill a fucking plastic bucket with ice. Still, when he unlocked the door the room was deserted. There was no sign of a struggle, Sammy’s bed cover wasn’t pulled down; it wasn’t even ruffled. All their bags still were where he left them, and the small knife that Dad had gotten for Sammy after the shtriga incident still lay on the bedside table. The kid’s shoes still stood next to one of the chairs, half-hidden under the table, and his jacket had still hung over the back of the other chair. Everything was where it should have been. Everything, except for Sammy.
To this day, Dean can’t get takeout if it comes in brown paper bags, the urge to puke at the mere sight spiking with every swallow. The panic too; he never can shake that when the memories bubble up, no matter how hard he wishes he could. Dean might be fuzzy about the general picture; might not recall standing frozen in the door before stepping onto the stained motel room carpet, but he had heard his Dad tell the story so often that his mind draws on that voice by default to fill the blanks whenever he thinks about the worst day in forever.
But as accurate as Dad’s description might have been, it never did the real thing justice. It didn’t capture the deafening silence that greeted Dean after unlocking the door or the way his heart lurched in his chest when no fever-cracking cough answered his frantic calls. His Dad’s voice didn’t translate the urge to run or scream or to just go crazy with worry during the first couple of hours. It completely ignored the fucking mantra of This is impossible. This is not happening. This can’t be happening, which was all Dean’s mind was capable of at first; and a whole lot of good that did, too. The impossibility of what had happened swirled around them, robbing them of common sense and deductive skills, and spit them out half-drowned in worry and mad with helplessness. So Dad had reverted to shouting at his phone and Dean to throwing up in varying intervals, no matter how many disappointed glances were thrown his way, but of course neither course of action produced any solid leads.
The thing is: nothing just comes and goes without leaving clues behind, however inconspicuous to the untrained eye. But even back then they were hunters, so they knew what to look for - or at least Dad did at the time - yet still the EMF stayed silent; there were no traces of ectoplasm, no sulfur, no smell of ozone, not even a single cold spot, no matter how often Dean would get goose bumps when he saw the accusingly empty bed. The bed that held residual warmth like a bad joke, with blankets under which his baby brother had been sleeping an exhausted slumber just a blink ago; the bed that grew colder every minute and took Dean’s insides along for the ride. In the following days they checked the history of the hotel, current and previous owners, the staff, the street and even the whole freaking town. When that got no results, they extended the research to the human kind of evil and checked suppliers of furniture and handymen, electricity and water suppliers. They did background checks on every single guest that ever stayed in the motel.
They got other hunters up to speed, and with their combined effort the word was spread that a Winchester boy had been snatched. At some point it seemed that every single able-bodied hunter in the continental US was in on the search. All to no avail, though. Sam stayed gone.
And he still is gone; that’s the worst of it. Dean has scoured the whole country for clues at least a dozen times, has followed every lead presented to him, even if they were paper-thin to begin with. But of course, the general consensus was that vanishing without leaving anything behind, not even blood - and boy, was Dean glad about that fact - was an impossible thing to do. Most things kill, maim, feed or torture; they don’t just kidnap and hide. And even if something did, it wouldn't just stop after one kid. It’s just not how those twisted minds work. There's always at least a trail to follow. Always.
Even today the strange story of the missing Winchester kid is common knowledge among hunters and although at first an uproar went through the community, with resources piled and oaths taken to reclaim the boy, today most hunters think that Sammy is dead and probably has been for a long time. Or that indeed a human mastermind had slipped through the Winchesters’ grasp, snatching the kid from under their noses - out of a single motel room with no back window and a locked front door, yeah, sure. Most hunters are an incompetent bunch of wannabe badasses - 'most hunters', who's Dean kidding; all of them are - and enough broken noses resulted from the pitying looks his inquiries were met with that the only one he still talks to about his search is Bobby. Even Dad, the mighty John Winchester himself, has left Sammy for dead. They never talked about it, but Dean could tell when the older hunter gave up hope. It’s a miracle as it is that Dad survived the combination of hunting and alcohol that followed, but alas, who needs to grieve when the joys of repression can take care of things the Winchester way.
But even though Dean still tries his best and feels like damned Don Quixote reincarnated, he can’t help the truth: he let his kid down. Yes, his kid, for no one spent as much time with Sammy as Dean did. And not just playing with the boy, but teaching him things, reading to him, watching over him, listening to his worries, and calming his nightmares. Ever since the fire it was Dean’s job to make sure baby Sammy slept and ate and burped; that he was warm and happy. Dad had other things on his mind, and no one took care of bathing or dressing the boy but Dean. As Sammy grew older, their activities changed but the responsibility stayed with Dean. When Dad gave baby Sam away, he did so completely and irrevocably and Dean took the kid for his own, with open arms and an open heart, and both brothers excelled in their newfound roles.
With a low groan Dean finally shakes his head as if to clear away the tangled thoughts he always ends up in. Not hunting doesn’t do him any good, so where the hell is Dad? He glances at his watch and stifles a yawn. 5:30. Just in case, he checks the parking lot through the faded curtains before going for his phone again. No black truck outside, just the mist of predawn summer rain. His phone reveals no missed calls, no new messages, not even coordinates. No Dad.
Masterpost || continue (part two)