Fledgling for Tammyrenh
Title: Fledgling
Recipient: Tammyrenh
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 7,700
Warnings: Child abuse and neglect, drug abuse
Summary: When four-year-old Emma arrives the Bunker, Sam wonders exactly what it is that Cas brought him-what he made without his soul.
Emma was not like other four-year-olds. Indeed, she knew that she was not like anyone else at all. She was too pale, too smart, too tall for her age, and far too strange, even if she did not understand what made her so. She knew it because her short, freckled, thin, angry mother didn’t trust her.
She instantly knew, when she saw the man who wore a long coat even though it was summertime, that he was not like other people either. That was why she spoke to him, even though one of the few things her mother had ever told her, as regarded her safety, was not to talk to strangers.
She walked up to the chain link fence in the yard of dirt, spiky weeds, and half-buried gravel where she was playing, making a necklace of flowers. There hadn’t been any flowers here yesterday; bored, she had wished for some. She imagined them growing to cover the ugly bottom border of the fence, which acted as a net for the trash that blew into their yard from the highway that ran past it, and where broken bottles sprouted from the little border of dirt between the sidewalk outside it and the gravel inside it. She had wished for flowers, and today here they were, a dark vine fluttering against discarded plastic bags, gleaming with pink and purple stars that rested against bleached-white yogurt cups and Dr. Pepper cans.
The man was looking over the fence at her. “Hello,” he said.
“Hello,” she said, and offered him the flower-chain.
He took it, frowning gently at her. “Thank you,” he said solemnly. “Don’t you want to keep your necklace?”
“No, my mama will be mad if she sees it.”
“Why would your mother be angry about a chain of flowers?”
Emma shrugged. The words didn't always come, and no one liked it when they did, especially Mama. Inside her mind she was articulate; she understood everything. Remembered everything, too, from the darkness of the womb to waking in the cradle to her mother’s angry face, which did not look as it had in her mind, and all the hurt and sadness in between, until now, until the fence and the flowers and the man in the long coat.
Finally she just said, “She gets angry about everything.”
The man nodded. “I know someone like that. Do you like it here?”
“No. This is a bad place.”
She wasn’t supposed to say that. When asked this sort of question she was always supposed to lie, but lying was hard for her-very hard, like lifting something that was bigger than she was. Whereas the truth wormed out of her grip like a balloon with a slippery string, floating up beyond her reach where she could never get it back. She would get in big trouble if her mother heard, but her mother would be asleep for some hours yet, she was sure, deep in the sleep she couldn’t be woken from no matter how Emma shouted.
The man nodded again. "It looks bad."
There was a silence while the man studied the yard and Emma picked more flowers. She knew she shouldn't keep them, but she might put them in the shoebox under her bed where her mother wouldn't see them. It would be good to have something alive in the house that felt all the time like dying to her.
She had a lot of questions she wanted to ask the man, but it had never gone well to ask questions of grown-ups. She didn't know why she thought this man could answer if she asked him, instead of "What are you doing here?", "What am I doing here?"
That was what she had always wanted to know.
* * *
"What the hell, Cas?"
"Keep your voice down, Dean. You'll wake her."
"What is she doing here, Cas? This is no place for a kid! What, are you into kidnapping now?"
"It's not kidnapping. Unless it's... kidnapping back. She didn't belong where she was."
"Well, she sure as hell doesn’t belong here!"
"Actually..." Cas stopped speaking. He was eyeing Sam, who had not yet uttered a sound, and was staring at nothing with the look of someone who has just been shot, in the moment before he realizes he should fall down.
Perhaps, Cas reflected, he should have said more earlier.
* * *
"Sam."
Sam pulled himself to consciousness and looked up. Cas stood in the doorway of the Bunker's library where Sam had fallen asleep on the lid of his laptop.
"Hey, Cas." Sam stretched and looked around himself. Dean had gone to bed, which meant it must be really late. Neither of them had slept much lately, with the Darkness loose in the world. "Everything OK?"
Cas stared at him a moment. "No, Sam. Everything is not OK. But there's no immediate danger." Cas came and sat at the table with him. "I'm afraid I must ask you something of a personal nature."
Sam was caught between a frown and a huff of laughter. What personal secrets could he have from Cas? He arched an eyebrow at Cas. "Uh... OK. What?"
"When you were..." Cas frowned down at his hands. His expression was twisted with something Sam recognized all too well: deep, unresolved guilt. Though there were a few things Cas might feel that way about, there was only one way that sentence was likely to end.
"Soulless?" Sam finished for him.
Cas met his eyes briefly and nodded. His guilt looked somewhat eased, but he seemed if anything even more uncomfortable.
There was a short silence. Finally, Cas said, "You had relations with many women."
To his surprise, Sam found there was something he'd prefer not share with Cas, even now. His face heated as he replied, "Uh, that's not something I like to talk about too much."
"But you remember it now, don't you?"
"Yeah. Things get fuzzy, sometimes, because I wasn't... myself. It’s always like remembering something someone else did. But I have most of the... information."
"Do you remember all the women?"
Sam cleared his throat and shifted in his chair. "Cas, um... is this going somewhere? We've kind of got a lot on our plate right now..."
"Yes, I do have an objective in mind, but I'm not yet certain enough to share it." Cas met his eyes in a way that Sam had come to dread without really understanding why. "Did you have relations with anyone who was not human?"
"What? No!" Sam was indignant, but he softened, wincing, as Ruby’s face flashed behind his eyes. He rubbed his neck. He really should stop falling asleep at the table; his neck ached.
“No, not then,” he said, frowning down at an empty coffee cup on the table. “There was no one who… they were just… regular women. They didn’t even know about hunting or monsters, any of that stuff. I don’t think.”
Cas nodded. He was still gazing at Sam, and when Sam finally looked up questioningly, Cas abruptly turned away, walking toward the door.
“Will that be all, Cas?” Sam asked drily.
“Yes. I have an errand to run. I’ll most likely return tomorrow.”
* * *
Emma knew that she should not want to leave her mother, and part of her didn’t. Mama was nice sometimes. Sometimes, not all the time, she hugged Emma when Emma cried, and Mama cried a lot, too, and she would let Emma sit on her lap while she did. She bought popsicles because Emma loved them, even though they were expensive and Mama didn’t eat them. If Mama didn’t wake up to make lunch, Emma could have a popsicle. She liked the green ones best.
Emma looked at her, sprawled on her face on the couch among a tangle of clothes, drooling over the edge of the cushion. Mama was also not nice sometimes. Not nice at all, and neither were the men who visited her. If they came over and Mama hadn’t invited them, Mama made her hide under the bed, and if any of the men knew to ask where Emma was, Mama lied and said she was with her father.
Emma had never met her father. None of the men were him, Mama told her, and once she slapped her for asking and told her to shut up about it.
Emma didn’t want to leave because of the slaps, though, or because a lot of the time Mama slept instead of taking care of her, or because she was hungry often. It wasn't because Mama wanted her to lie and was always mad when she couldn't; it wasn't even because of the men. She would want to stay despite all of that, if it weren’t that her mother didn’t want her.
She just didn’t. Sometimes when she got drunk, or when she was in that strange half-dreaming state Emma had no word for, she said so. She was sorry about it. Mama had said just last night, “I don’t feel like a mama should when I look at you, Emma. There’s something wrong with me. I’m supposed to love you.”
Emma’s chest hurt. She put her hand in Mama’s tangled hair. She petted it for a minute, waiting, but nothing happened. Nothing inside her, except the ache got a little worse, and nothing with Mama, who didn’t stir.
She went to the kitchen. The man was waiting in the doorway as Emma opened the fridge. “Want a popsicle?” she asked.
* * *
Sam was hiding.
There was no other word for it, he finally told himself. He’d faced death and torment more times than he could count, in hell and on earth and at the hands of the devil himself, but he couldn’t face the little girl in the kitchen of the Bunker, swinging her legs on a barstool while Dean made pancakes.
“Well, I guess first thing we do is feed her,” Dean had said, after he finished shouting at Cas for bringing a child to the Bunker. “She looks too skinny.”
“There was no food in the house,” said Cas.
“There were popsicles!” Emma spoke for the first time, in a sweet little chiming voice. Cas had told them her name, and that he had taken her from a bad situation, and that they must help her. She had woken halfway through the conversation and slid out of Cas’s arms. She stood half-hiding behind him, holding his leg, watching wide-eyed while they talked about her, but now she brightened and took the tattered old backpack that Cas held and dug in it. “I ate the last green one,” she said, “but I gave Castiel a red one, and he said there were two brothers where we were going, so I brought another red one and an orange one…”
Sam’s heart pinched as an absolutely tragic look came over her face. He, Dean, and Cas peered into the backpack and saw two flattened popsicle wrappers and sticks, and a sticky mass of syrup stuck to the front of an old, battered coloring book, spilling onto the clothes beneath.
There was a frozen moment. No one spoke. Sam held his breath, and for a moment he hoped everything would be OK, and the hope was shattered by a wail from Emma. It was the most heartrending sound Sam had ever heard. He wasn’t sure he could survive it.
Emma plopped onto her butt in a fountain of tears, hiding her face. Cas and Sam exchanged a hapless glance. Dean glared at each of them in turn, shook his head at Sam, and finally bent to pick Emma up.
“Hey… hey, it’s OK. Who wants popsicles when you can have pancakes? You like pancakes?”
Emma stopped crying and went eerily silent when Dean picked her up. She stared at him; Dean looked uncomfortable in the sudden silence. “I don’t know,” she said. “Is it like cake you make in a pan?”
“Kinda, yeah,” said Dean, relaxing a little and carrying her toward the kitchen. He gave Sam a perfectly clear “follow or I’ll kick your ass” look over Emma’s head.
Sam didn’t follow, though. He waited until Cas wasn’t looking and fled to his room.
He knew Emma was his daughter. Dean probably knew it, too. Cas had given Sam a pointed look when he had said, with what he probably thought was subtle emphasis, “We are…obligated... to help her.”
Sam paced the room, hugging his arms and fighting a sudden, strong urge to take a shower. He thought he probably should before he saw the girl again. Her sweet face and her innocent tears filled him with a feeling he had no name for-filled him so that he felt about to burst, his skin barely holding it all in… it crawled as his mind flashed through all the… encounters that could have led to Emma’s conception. What if she was the result of that time in the gas station bathroom, with a woman whose name he didn’t even know? Really, no matter which liaison she’d come from, it wouldn’t be much better…
Sam stopped his pacing abruptly, and a new dread sank his stomach through his feet. Why had Cas asked if any of the women he’d slept with were not human? What had he brought to them? What had Sam created? He wracked his brain and could remember no one who wasn’t an ordinary human woman… but had he checked each time? He sure hadn’t bothered with holy water at the gas station…
He jumped when there was a knock at his door. He cracked it open nervously.
“Cas?” He peered into the hallway past the angel.
“It’s just me.”
Sam stood back to let him in. “Where’s…” He couldn’t bring himself to say Emma’s name.
“Emma is with Dean in the library. She was upset that her coloring book was ruined by the melted popsicles. It was the only toy she had. So Dean is letting her color some of the Men of Letter’s sketches of monsters from the archives.”
There were several things about Cas’s reply that troubled Sam deeply, but he set them all aside and said, “Cas, who is Emma’s mother? Why did you feel you had to take her from her?”
“I don’t know who her mother is. The woman she was living with seems to believe Emma is her child, but I am sure she is not. This is her. Do you recognize her?”
He showed Sam three pictures on his phone. In one, the woman appeared to be shouting from a cracked porch in a trash-strewn yard, in the other two, she was passed out on a threadbare couch. She looked gaunt, grayish-skinned, grubby and unhealthy. Sam recognized all the physical traits of a junkie and an alcoholic. There was nothing attractive about her, but then, Sam had hardly been particular when he was soulless. He tried to imagine her healthier, but to his relief, her face sparked no recognition at all.
“No,” he answered slowly. “I’m pretty sure I never met her… how did you find Emma? Why…” He cleared his throat and forced himself to finish, “Why do you think I’m her father?”
“All I knew, at first, is that I am fairly certain Emma is a changeling, and not wholly human,” Cas answered. “I felt the usage of power, and I traced it to her home. She made flowers grow out of gravel, and I do not recognize them. I believe they are flowers of Faerie.” He drew something out of the collar of his trench coat. “Look at them,” he said. “She picked them yesterday and made this necklace.”
Sam looked at the chain of flowers blankly for a moment, taking it from Cas. The flowers were fresh, glossy-leaved, and gave off a faint, sweet scent.
“They are not withered at all,” Cas said, speaking Sam’s thought aloud. “They are not normal earthly flowers.”
“So you think her mother is a fairy,” said Sam, “and that’s why you wondered if I slept with anyone not human. But why me? Why do you think I’m her father?”
“I know that you are. You may find this uncomfortable to speak of, but when I… reached inside you to see if your soul was there, and later when I extracted Gadreel’s grace from you, I became… intimately acquainted with the metaphysical structure of you. Your essence, beyond the soul. Between that, and homing in on Dean when I brought him out of hell, I have come to recognize the Winchester color of things better than anything else on Earth.”
“Couldn’t she be Dean’s, then?” Sam asked with a too-brief flare of hope.
“I wondered at first, but no. She is yours, without question. I was sure of it before I even touched her, but after I picked her up to put her in the car, there was no doubt. She has… she is… of you.”
“And not of the woman she was living with. Does she know?”
“That Emma is not hers? Yes, and no. As I said, Emma is a changeling. The parents of these often feel that something is wrong and are unable to bond appropriately with the fairy child who replaced their own offspring. Her mother feels it, but does not know what it is she feels.”
Sam sat down on the bed and put his head in his hands. He said nothing for a long moment. Cas stood silent, waiting.
“It sounds like… she’s not a great mom, anyway,” he said finally.
“She is no kind of mother at all, but even if she were, she is dying.”
* * *
Sam had not yet been able to speak to Emma directly. Forcing himself to face the situation, he had gone to the library and watched her for a moment. Dean had dug up a 50-year-old set of colored pencils to supplement Emma’s sad, half-empty, popsicle-sticky box of crayons, and the girl was coloring monsters contentedly. She was, Sam thought, too good at it for a four-year old.
“She doesn’t talk like a four-year old,” said Dean, echoing Sam’s thought as they walked into the kitchen. Cas had pointedly told them he would stay with Emma so they could talk. “A couple times she whispered something that didn’t sound like English. I asked her what she was saying and she just looked at me with those big green eyes and said, ‘My mama never understood me either.’ Your kid’s kinda creepy, Sam.”
“Cas thinks she’s half-fairy,” Sam said gloomily.
Dean just nodded. “Green eyes run in the family,” he said, pointing at his own, “and her face is kind of shaped like yours, but pointier. But nobody’s eyes are that green. We’ve got blonde genes, too, and I was a tow-headed kid, but her hair is like, white.”
Sam nodded. “Fairy makes sense, I guess.” He relayed all that Cas had told him. “But the only time we ever even met any fairies, they were all either male, or six inches tall. And no,” he said sharply when Dean smirked, “I didn’t sleep with any of them.”
“Well, we’d better figure out what to do with her,” said Dean. He was almost obnoxiously cheerful about the whole thing, Sam thought-maybe because it couldn’t possibly be called his fault. He was carrying a great load of guilt about the Darkness. “Why didn’t Cas just leave her where she was?”
“The woman she was with is a junkie, and maybe a prostitute. Cas says she isn’t going to make it. He already healed her once, a few weeks ago-she had AIDS. But he says he can’t heal what makes her keep doing drugs, and he also says she-well. She doesn’t love Emma, that’s for sure.”
Dean was quiet for a minute. “Ours is no kind of life for a kid, Sam,” he said. “As you ought to remember.”
“I do, but-what else can we do? I… she’s my responsibility. And if she’s not human, that’s even more reason not to put her with a regular family-it’s bound to start showing soon. It already is, like you saw. Normal people wouldn’t know what to do with her-”
“You don’t know what to do with her,” Dean pointed out.
“True…” Sam rubbed his temples. His head ached.
“Well, one thing you gotta do sooner than later. Sack up and go talk to her. Waiting isn’t gonna make it any easier.”
* * *
Sam entered the library like he might enter a house where he and Dean had just broken down the door, except there was no gun in his hand. He nearly fled after opening the door and hearing the sound of weeping.
Cas gave him a frantic look, so Sam, frozen in the doorway, gathered his courage and came in. "I was about to come and find you," said Cas. "She is clearly very tired, but she will not lie down to sleep. She also won't let me pick her up or explain why she's crying."
"No!" Emma shouted just then through her tears, and for some reason, Sam felt relieved. For the first time, she sounded like a toddler.
Sam had almost no experience with children, but as his fear faded and he approached, he felt something he could not explain. Somehow, it was easy to sit down next to Emma and pull her into his lap, and she let him. Looking into her tearful eyes, he felt their kinship. He felt what she was, and he knew, as Cas had said, she was of him.
"Hey," he said. "Emma. I'm Sam." He wondered if he should say he was her father.
She took a great shuddering breath, looking up at him, and tried to stop crying. Sam could feel her trying to find words.
He knew what to ask. "Does something... hurt?"
She nodded. "It's not right here," she said. "It's... too far away."
"Too far away from what?" Sam asked. He knew, somehow, that she didn't mean her old home.
"The... the..." Emma struggled, wiping her eyes with her fists. "The sky," she said finally.
Sam almost laughed with relief. "That's no problem. The sky is up there. Want to go see it?"
She nodded, and he stood up with her in his arms. She felt too light, even for a skinny toddler, as if she were hollow-boned like a bird. He carried her out of the Bunker and climbed up the short, steep hill over the entrance, feet slipping a little in the leaves that plastered damp earth. He sat down on the concrete block above the door, his legs dangling next to the railing, and settled her in his lap.
She sighed as the sun fell on them when he opened the door, and he felt her relief as his own, a lightening of his spirit where he hadn't known it was heavy, except that in this dark life he lived, it was always heavy. The pinch of anxious responsibility he had felt since he met Emma eased, and though there was much he needed to know-so much for them to talk about-watching Emma's face as she looked up at the watery blue Kansas sky, he felt no need for words.
Thin clouds scudded by overhead, and birds rustled and cheeped in the brush behind them. The sound of cars on the distant highway was like a pastel-painted backdrop to a scene in a play, a soft brush-off to reality. Sam looked down at Emma, who sat quietly with a listening look on her face. A crow cawed, and she blinked and smiled. Sam wanted to speak then, but could think of nothing to say. His heart ached.
At length Emma broke the silence. "You're my daddy," she said. It was almost a question.
Sam nodded. "Yeah." He thought of mentioning his doubt on that point, but he found he did not have any. The sky was blue, monsters were real, Emma was his daughter. It just was. He thought of explaining why he hadn't known, but could think of not a single word he could say on the subject to a four-year-old. She felt so light on his lap that he felt a strange flutter of fear that she would slip away on the breeze, up into the sky. He hugged her tight.
He thought she might wriggle away, but she didn't. She snuggled closer to him and laid her head on his chest. "I like it better here," she said.
"Better outside, or better than with your mother?"
"Both. I'm glad Castiel brought me. But Mama wasn't my mother."
Sam winced a little. How much had Castiel told her? He struggled to think of how to prompt her to say more, but she continued without his help.
"I remembered when Castiel came. I remember my real mama from before. I wasn't with her for very long after I came out of her."
Sam thought for a moment and asked, gently, "Do you know why not? Why she didn't..." Keep you, he wanted to say, but it felt immeasurably cruel, and he suddenly felt that he must keep Emma at all costs, and he wondered what Dean would say.
"She thought I needed to be in this place, and that Mama's baby needed to be where she was, so she traded," Emma said slowly. "I don't think it was supposed to be forever. But maybe..." Her voice became more childlike suddenly, and she shivered. "Maybe she forgot about me."
Sam pulled his flannel shirt out from between them and tucked it around her, hugging her tighter. It occurred to him that it was strange, how quickly he'd forgotten that he knew nothing about kids, and how easy it seemed to give Emma what she needed. How suddenly, he knew what that was, and it was right there in his heart for the taking.
Emma cried a little, quietly, and he held her. He wanted to say no one could forget about a wonderful little girl like her, that he was sure her mother remembered and wanted her back, but he had no way of knowing that, and no wish to tell her comforting lies. From what little he knew of fairies, he thought it quite possible that Emma's mother had forgotten her.
Presently he thought of what he could say. "Well, I'll never forget about you. I'm sorry I didn't know before, but I'm glad you're here now." Despite his terrible fear for her safety and his worries about how he could possibly care for a child, it was true.
Emma brightened. "Me too," she said. "My real mama might visit. We could call her, if we go somewhere with trees."
Sam blinked. His surprise was quickly followed by trepidation. "Emma-"
"That's not my real name," she said. She turned in his lap to look up at his face. Her eyes were so green they almost glowed, like the lushest possible grass under the sun. He didn't know how they ever could have passed for human. “Mama always called me that. I told her my real name but she didn’t like it. She slapped me and told me not to say it, and the other words she doesn’t know.”
She hunched in on herself then, shrinking away from Sam, who flinched. Incomparable pain washed over him, but he thought only of easing hers. “I will never, ever slap you,” he said. “And no one else will either, not if I can help it.”
She had climbed out of his lap. Instinctively, he did not draw her back, but waited, not looking directly at her. After a minute, she picked up his hand, turning it over in both of hers, examining it. Sam didn’t ask why. He thought he knew.
Eventually, she nodded, and slipped under Sam’s arm. He hugged her against his side.
"What is your real name?" he asked.
"Fèileadh," she said.
* * *
"It makes sense," Cas said. "I have not made much study of fairies, but an oak forest would be the best place to summon them. And Emma would have instinctive memories, especially if she was born in Faerie. She would remember her real name, and know how to call for her mother."
They were in the library of the Bunker. After spending some time under the sky, Emma had been content to come back underground and had allowed Sam to put her to bed in a room next to his, with the door propped open so he could hear her if she called.
"I looked it up, after I figured out how to spell it," said Sam. "There's no information specifically about it in fairy lore, but I found it in a translation in the archives. It's a Gaelic word that means ‘fledgling’.”
“Did anyone think to ask her what her mother’s name is, if she knows?”
“I did,” said Sam. “She said she couldn’t say it. But I think she does know it. Fairy names have a lot of power, so… she wasn’t sure at first if she should tell me hers.” He looked down, fighting the wave of pain and anger as he recalled the other reason Emma- Fèileadh-had hesitated to say her name. “And maybe she can’t tell me her mother’s.” He paused, eyeing his brother. “Look, Dean. I know a kid in our lives doesn’t really make sense, but-”
“I know. She’s family. Don’t worry; we’ll look out for her. She’ll stay as long as it makes sense.” He patted Sam’s back roughly. “Just-no more knocking up fairies, OK? Or anyone else. I mean, even soulless, you should’ve remembered to use condoms.”
Sam flushed. “I did,” he said.
“Well, we all know it’s not a hundred percent,” Dean said. “I’ve sweated it out a time or two myself.” He was grinning, and even if it was at his expense, Sam was glad to see it. He’d barely smiled once since the Darkness had been released.
“But should we call her mother?" Dean continued. "I don't know about you, but my experience with fairies wasn't so great. We can't trust them."
"Gilda was all right," said Sam. "But Emma's mother did abandon her, so-"
"We'll take measures to protect her and ourselves," said Cas. "I am anxious to find out what happened to the human child Emma’s mother took, as well. That may change how we approach this. But fairies don't think of the exchange of changelings as abandonment, precisely. It is somewhat different since Emma is half-human, but a fairy child can look out for itself."
A sharp crack interrupted the end of Cas’s sentence as Dean shoved a clip into his pistol, which he had been loading with silver bullets as they spoke. “Measures,” he said, nodding at the gun. “We’ll remind her that it’s time for a visitation weekend. And maybe, if we don’t like what we learn, Sam sues for full custody.”
* * *
Sam was simply not ready to summon Emma's mother yet, and she didn't mention it again. After gathering weapons and prodding him a few times, Dean, watching Sam's face when Emma came to him to be picked up, stopped saying they should go soon and get this over with.
Everyone still called her Emma, and she never again corrected it. There was too much weight to the name Fèileadh; when Sam said it, once or twice, he felt alarmed at the wild, almost feral glint in the girl’s eyes at the sound.
The more they treated her like a normal human girl, the more she acted like one. Sam found children’s stories online and read her to sleep from his laptop. She loved stories with animals in them, especially birds. Every morning as the sun was coming up, he took her out to the hill over the Bunker and drank his coffee while she drank her juice and enjoyed the sky for an hour or two. That was the only real sign Sam ever saw that she was not human-the Bunker's entrance now had climbing vines of flowers of all colors over its arch, and the hill above was a carpet of something like violets, but more vivid and alive. Emma talked to them sometimes-shifty, anxious whispers at first, until she saw that Sam didn't mind the words he couldn't understand.
Sam was grateful that Dean seemed to be brought out of his heavy-drinking depression by Emma's presence. He came back from town every day with new toys. Emma barely seemed to know what a toy was at first, but when she learned to play with Dean, who chased her with squirt guns and taught her to use a Nerf grenade-launcher, she was a picture of joy such as Sam had never seen. A church-bell orchestra of child laughter alarmed the stuffy silence of the Bunker. Emma's joy cut into Sam's heart almost as deeply as her initial flinching reticence had.
She laughed at Dean’s jokes, ate everything they fed her, and learned everything they taught her. She loved Dean, and seemed to have a respectful, slightly awed gratitude toward Cas for bringing her to the Bunker, but somehow Sam, awkward and uncertain as he felt, had claimed her heart. It was of him she asked the thousand daily questions a toddler has, and into his lap she crawled every time he sat down. He held her while he read or did research, while he made phone calls, when he was just sitting and talking to Dean-anytime she was awake and not doing something else with one of them. She seemed starved for affection, and, Sam realized, he was too. He felt in a hurry to catch up on it-on being a father. He knew, somehow, that whatever they learned when they summoned Emma’s mother, their time together would be short. Perhaps this wasn’t because of Emma at all-the Darkness might well mean that time was short for the world itself, if he and Dean didn’t succeed in saving it this time.
Sam didn't want to let Emma go, but he and Dean, as usual, were contemplating the impending end of the world, and he had to face the fact that Emma might be safer in Faerie. So after a couple of weeks, while they were having their morning "sky time," Sam asked Emma if she was ready to call her mother.
She was making a chain of her never-fading violets. Solemnly, she reached up to put it around Sam's neck. He bent his head to accept it. She murmured something Sam couldn't understand-as usual, it sounded a little like Gaelic. He looked at her questioningly; finally, she nodded.
"Today," she said, looking up at the climbing sun.
Sam had already looked for the nearest forest that might have oak trees in it. They went inside and he showed Emma pictures of it on his laptop. “Would this be a good place to call your mother?” he asked her. She nodded, and stared at the pictures for a long time, touching the laptop screen gently.
They all piled into the Impala to head toward Red Cloud, Nebraska. Cas was away on business of his own; Dean had the front seat to himself so Sam could sit next to Emma, carefully strapped in and so small on the wide seat.
It took less than half an hour to get to the forest on the Nebraska border. Sam, Dean, and Cas had armed themselves with iron and silver, and of course salt to spill should a distraction be necessary.
Sam had researched a fairy summoning spell, but it turned out not to be necessary. They walked about a quarter mile into the woods from where Dean parked on the last bit of road, Sam carrying Emma. Sam showed Emma the bag of spell ingredients and started to explain, but she gave him a look like she thought he was strange and wriggled out of his arms to stand. "I'll be right back," she said, and ran off the trail into the trees.
Sam was startled-she went so fast and gracefully, like a little fox darting soundlessly through the undergrowth, that she no longer resembled a human child at all. Dean glanced at him and they took off running in pursuit, barely able to keep her in sight.
They came up short as the forest opened up to a glade, shafts of sunlight falling through the canopy as from the high windows of a cathedral, the branches forming stained glass panes of every shade of green. It was as Dean had sometimes described Emma's eyes-too green to be real, and the tree-pillars looped with flowers, the circling butterflies and little birds, and the sudden quiet stopped Sam and Dean in their tracks, frozen as surely as if a spell held them, and maybe it did.
Emma stood in the middle of the glade, speaking softly but clearly in her wind-chime voice, and suddenly, as if she had been there all along, a woman paced out of a shaft of sunlight.
Dean made a choking sound. The woman was naked except for a crown of flowers, and a few trailing vines of glowing-jade leaves. She was inexpressibly, inhumanly beautiful-so blindingly lovely that Sam's eyes watered as he squinted through the light around her, trying to see something he could recognize in her face, until she met his eyes and smiled a little. As she did, the blinding beauty faded little by little into normal human prettiness, and Sam gasped.
He heard Dean half-shout, incredulously, "Patchouli?"
"Sparrow," Sam whispered.
* * *
"My Fèileadh!" Sparrow came forward and put her hand in Emma's hair. "You have grown."
It made sense. Fèileadh. The sparrow's fledgling, and sparrow was the same word in Gaelic and in English, and this fairy had hidden herself among UFO chasers just like the other one, even if she was, Sam hoped, not so evil.
"Mam-Màthair," said Emma, and she wavered. Watching her, Sam thought she looked like a flickering computer screen loading two images at once, a fairy and a sad little girl, and the image resolved into a girl at last, and Emma covered her face and wept.
Sam hurried forward and picked her up, glaring at Sparrow. "You never called," he quipped, taking a leaf out of Dean's book and veiling his confusion with sarcasm. He held Emma tight against his shoulder, glanced at Dean and breathed a little easier when he saw that Dean had his gun out.
"Sam," said Sparrow neutrally. "I see you have your soul back."
Sam said nothing, still glaring. "Where's the human child?" asked Dean. "The one you swapped out for Emma?"
Sam gave a guilty start: he had forgotten that there was another child, and had given no thought to what they would do with her if there was. They certainly couldn't put her with her mother, the woman Cas had taken Emma from, if she was even still alive.
Sparrow's face softened into sorrow. "That little soul spent only hours with me," she said softly. "She was dying the moment the air touched her. She had too much of the poison her mother consumed. I thought in Faerie she might be saved, so I put my Fèileadh in her place. I was coming back for her-"
"When?" said Sam harshly. "She's four years old!"
Sparrow sighed. "I am sorry, Sam. Surely you have heard that time passes differently in Faerie than on Earth. I left her there just the other day…”
"Màthair," Emma interrupted. They all looked at her, silenced. Sam tightened his arms around her, but she laid her hand on his cheek and nodded toward the ground. Reluctantly, he set her down.
She walked up to Sparrow and touched her hand. "Màthair," she said again. "Do you want me?"
Sam felt his heart shatter. Sparrow knelt and touched Emma's face. "Yes, my Fèileadh," she said, her voice quivering. "I want you very much. It was to make you-to bear a child in the human way-that I took human form, and found your father."
"So Sam was just a donor to you?" Dean said furiously. Sam felt oddly touched by his ire.
"I thought he was the perfect choice," said Sparrow. She looked at Sam. "I was... very fond of you, Sam. I knew that humans form strong attachments with those they lie with, but without a soul, I could not break your heart. Most humans who love fairies pine themselves to death when their eldritch lovers are gone."
"Not doing any pining," Sam said, but his heart wasn't in the jibe-he certainly felt in danger, at the moment, of some pretty serious pining over Emma.
"Sam and Dean want me," said Emma. "Mama-the lady you left me with-she didn't. So I don't ever want to live with someone who doesn't want me again."
"We want you. We love you," said Sam.
"Yeah. You're family," said Dean. "But..." He looked at Sam.
"Your world is in danger," said Sparrow. "I can protect our daughter in Faerie. It will take the darkness a long time to reach the sunlit lands, if you fail in your task."
Dean sighed. “Does everybody know bad we screwed up?” he muttered to Sam out of the side of his mouth.
"We won't fail," he added, louder. He went to Emma and crouched down beside her. "Listen, bug," he said, using a nickname she'd earned when she'd hatched a jar full of ladybugs in the Bunker and set them loose. "We love you and we'd always want you around. I don't think your dad can say it-it's too hard for him to give you up. But your mom is right. You'll be safer with her. And she seems all right, for a fairy. "
Sam fought his tears. "Do you even know how to take care of a kid?" he asked Sparrow, desperate for a reason to argue.
"I know as well as any human mother knows, and perhaps better," said Sparrow. "The human guise you met me in? I spent twenty years and more in it, looking for a suitable mate."
"I guess you should be flattered, Sam. She gave you her final rose," said Dean, laying his hand over his heart.
Sam wanted to laugh, but he couldn't. He knelt and hugged Emma tight. She put her arms around his neck and wet it with her tears.
"I'm glad you don't want me to go," she said.
"Do you want to go?" Sam managed, finally.
"Yes. I mean, I want to stay in the Bunker and grow flowers on my hill, and learn more reading with you and play more with Dean," she said. "But I know you have to fight, and... I want to know my mother."
"I promise I will care for her well," said Sparrow. "And Sam. Here. I do indeed have a final bloom for you."
He stood, and Sparrow stepped close. The perfume of her was dizzying, and for a moment she was too beautiful to look at again, and she set a bell-shaped flower on a short, curved stem in his hand. It was a delicate, pale rose-gold, and like flowers that Emma grew, it possessed a soft, unearthly glow. When Sam closed his fingers around it, he found that instead of silky and yielding, it was hard and smooth, and cold against his palm. It tinkled faintly.
"When the danger you and your brother brought to this world has been conquered, think of me and ring the bell three times," Sparrow said. "I will bring your daughter to you then, when it is safe for her here."
"Will she-be grown up by then?" Sam thought the words sounded foolish and too vulnerable, but he could not hold them back.
"She may be an hour older, or centuries. There is no way to know."
Sam nodded. "But she won't die."
"No. Our lands are deathless, and she is immortal, like me."
"And I'll remember you forever," said Emma.
Sam nodded, swallowing his tears. "I'll remember you forever, too."
* * *
Goodbye sat heavy on Sam's heart long after the word was spoken. A storm was rolling in as Dean drove them home, ominous, green-black, and threaded with bright lightning on the dark Midwest horizon. The damp air stung Sam as he rode with the window down, thunder in the distance competing with the thunder of the Impala's engine.
"We got this, Sam," said Dean, raising his voice over the wind after a long silence. "We're gonna win this fight. And then... Emma can move in, and go to school maybe. Grow up to be the second college genius in the family."
He didn't mention the passage of time, or who Emma might be if they ever saw her again, and neither did Sam. He touched his necklace of deathless violets with one hand; his other trailed out the window, fingers twining in the breath of the coming storm.
He let it come.
Recipient: Tammyrenh
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 7,700
Warnings: Child abuse and neglect, drug abuse
Summary: When four-year-old Emma arrives the Bunker, Sam wonders exactly what it is that Cas brought him-what he made without his soul.
Emma was not like other four-year-olds. Indeed, she knew that she was not like anyone else at all. She was too pale, too smart, too tall for her age, and far too strange, even if she did not understand what made her so. She knew it because her short, freckled, thin, angry mother didn’t trust her.
She instantly knew, when she saw the man who wore a long coat even though it was summertime, that he was not like other people either. That was why she spoke to him, even though one of the few things her mother had ever told her, as regarded her safety, was not to talk to strangers.
She walked up to the chain link fence in the yard of dirt, spiky weeds, and half-buried gravel where she was playing, making a necklace of flowers. There hadn’t been any flowers here yesterday; bored, she had wished for some. She imagined them growing to cover the ugly bottom border of the fence, which acted as a net for the trash that blew into their yard from the highway that ran past it, and where broken bottles sprouted from the little border of dirt between the sidewalk outside it and the gravel inside it. She had wished for flowers, and today here they were, a dark vine fluttering against discarded plastic bags, gleaming with pink and purple stars that rested against bleached-white yogurt cups and Dr. Pepper cans.
The man was looking over the fence at her. “Hello,” he said.
“Hello,” she said, and offered him the flower-chain.
He took it, frowning gently at her. “Thank you,” he said solemnly. “Don’t you want to keep your necklace?”
“No, my mama will be mad if she sees it.”
“Why would your mother be angry about a chain of flowers?”
Emma shrugged. The words didn't always come, and no one liked it when they did, especially Mama. Inside her mind she was articulate; she understood everything. Remembered everything, too, from the darkness of the womb to waking in the cradle to her mother’s angry face, which did not look as it had in her mind, and all the hurt and sadness in between, until now, until the fence and the flowers and the man in the long coat.
Finally she just said, “She gets angry about everything.”
The man nodded. “I know someone like that. Do you like it here?”
“No. This is a bad place.”
She wasn’t supposed to say that. When asked this sort of question she was always supposed to lie, but lying was hard for her-very hard, like lifting something that was bigger than she was. Whereas the truth wormed out of her grip like a balloon with a slippery string, floating up beyond her reach where she could never get it back. She would get in big trouble if her mother heard, but her mother would be asleep for some hours yet, she was sure, deep in the sleep she couldn’t be woken from no matter how Emma shouted.
The man nodded again. "It looks bad."
There was a silence while the man studied the yard and Emma picked more flowers. She knew she shouldn't keep them, but she might put them in the shoebox under her bed where her mother wouldn't see them. It would be good to have something alive in the house that felt all the time like dying to her.
She had a lot of questions she wanted to ask the man, but it had never gone well to ask questions of grown-ups. She didn't know why she thought this man could answer if she asked him, instead of "What are you doing here?", "What am I doing here?"
That was what she had always wanted to know.
* * *
"What the hell, Cas?"
"Keep your voice down, Dean. You'll wake her."
"What is she doing here, Cas? This is no place for a kid! What, are you into kidnapping now?"
"It's not kidnapping. Unless it's... kidnapping back. She didn't belong where she was."
"Well, she sure as hell doesn’t belong here!"
"Actually..." Cas stopped speaking. He was eyeing Sam, who had not yet uttered a sound, and was staring at nothing with the look of someone who has just been shot, in the moment before he realizes he should fall down.
Perhaps, Cas reflected, he should have said more earlier.
* * *
"Sam."
Sam pulled himself to consciousness and looked up. Cas stood in the doorway of the Bunker's library where Sam had fallen asleep on the lid of his laptop.
"Hey, Cas." Sam stretched and looked around himself. Dean had gone to bed, which meant it must be really late. Neither of them had slept much lately, with the Darkness loose in the world. "Everything OK?"
Cas stared at him a moment. "No, Sam. Everything is not OK. But there's no immediate danger." Cas came and sat at the table with him. "I'm afraid I must ask you something of a personal nature."
Sam was caught between a frown and a huff of laughter. What personal secrets could he have from Cas? He arched an eyebrow at Cas. "Uh... OK. What?"
"When you were..." Cas frowned down at his hands. His expression was twisted with something Sam recognized all too well: deep, unresolved guilt. Though there were a few things Cas might feel that way about, there was only one way that sentence was likely to end.
"Soulless?" Sam finished for him.
Cas met his eyes briefly and nodded. His guilt looked somewhat eased, but he seemed if anything even more uncomfortable.
There was a short silence. Finally, Cas said, "You had relations with many women."
To his surprise, Sam found there was something he'd prefer not share with Cas, even now. His face heated as he replied, "Uh, that's not something I like to talk about too much."
"But you remember it now, don't you?"
"Yeah. Things get fuzzy, sometimes, because I wasn't... myself. It’s always like remembering something someone else did. But I have most of the... information."
"Do you remember all the women?"
Sam cleared his throat and shifted in his chair. "Cas, um... is this going somewhere? We've kind of got a lot on our plate right now..."
"Yes, I do have an objective in mind, but I'm not yet certain enough to share it." Cas met his eyes in a way that Sam had come to dread without really understanding why. "Did you have relations with anyone who was not human?"
"What? No!" Sam was indignant, but he softened, wincing, as Ruby’s face flashed behind his eyes. He rubbed his neck. He really should stop falling asleep at the table; his neck ached.
“No, not then,” he said, frowning down at an empty coffee cup on the table. “There was no one who… they were just… regular women. They didn’t even know about hunting or monsters, any of that stuff. I don’t think.”
Cas nodded. He was still gazing at Sam, and when Sam finally looked up questioningly, Cas abruptly turned away, walking toward the door.
“Will that be all, Cas?” Sam asked drily.
“Yes. I have an errand to run. I’ll most likely return tomorrow.”
* * *
Emma knew that she should not want to leave her mother, and part of her didn’t. Mama was nice sometimes. Sometimes, not all the time, she hugged Emma when Emma cried, and Mama cried a lot, too, and she would let Emma sit on her lap while she did. She bought popsicles because Emma loved them, even though they were expensive and Mama didn’t eat them. If Mama didn’t wake up to make lunch, Emma could have a popsicle. She liked the green ones best.
Emma looked at her, sprawled on her face on the couch among a tangle of clothes, drooling over the edge of the cushion. Mama was also not nice sometimes. Not nice at all, and neither were the men who visited her. If they came over and Mama hadn’t invited them, Mama made her hide under the bed, and if any of the men knew to ask where Emma was, Mama lied and said she was with her father.
Emma had never met her father. None of the men were him, Mama told her, and once she slapped her for asking and told her to shut up about it.
Emma didn’t want to leave because of the slaps, though, or because a lot of the time Mama slept instead of taking care of her, or because she was hungry often. It wasn't because Mama wanted her to lie and was always mad when she couldn't; it wasn't even because of the men. She would want to stay despite all of that, if it weren’t that her mother didn’t want her.
She just didn’t. Sometimes when she got drunk, or when she was in that strange half-dreaming state Emma had no word for, she said so. She was sorry about it. Mama had said just last night, “I don’t feel like a mama should when I look at you, Emma. There’s something wrong with me. I’m supposed to love you.”
Emma’s chest hurt. She put her hand in Mama’s tangled hair. She petted it for a minute, waiting, but nothing happened. Nothing inside her, except the ache got a little worse, and nothing with Mama, who didn’t stir.
She went to the kitchen. The man was waiting in the doorway as Emma opened the fridge. “Want a popsicle?” she asked.
* * *
Sam was hiding.
There was no other word for it, he finally told himself. He’d faced death and torment more times than he could count, in hell and on earth and at the hands of the devil himself, but he couldn’t face the little girl in the kitchen of the Bunker, swinging her legs on a barstool while Dean made pancakes.
“Well, I guess first thing we do is feed her,” Dean had said, after he finished shouting at Cas for bringing a child to the Bunker. “She looks too skinny.”
“There was no food in the house,” said Cas.
“There were popsicles!” Emma spoke for the first time, in a sweet little chiming voice. Cas had told them her name, and that he had taken her from a bad situation, and that they must help her. She had woken halfway through the conversation and slid out of Cas’s arms. She stood half-hiding behind him, holding his leg, watching wide-eyed while they talked about her, but now she brightened and took the tattered old backpack that Cas held and dug in it. “I ate the last green one,” she said, “but I gave Castiel a red one, and he said there were two brothers where we were going, so I brought another red one and an orange one…”
Sam’s heart pinched as an absolutely tragic look came over her face. He, Dean, and Cas peered into the backpack and saw two flattened popsicle wrappers and sticks, and a sticky mass of syrup stuck to the front of an old, battered coloring book, spilling onto the clothes beneath.
There was a frozen moment. No one spoke. Sam held his breath, and for a moment he hoped everything would be OK, and the hope was shattered by a wail from Emma. It was the most heartrending sound Sam had ever heard. He wasn’t sure he could survive it.
Emma plopped onto her butt in a fountain of tears, hiding her face. Cas and Sam exchanged a hapless glance. Dean glared at each of them in turn, shook his head at Sam, and finally bent to pick Emma up.
“Hey… hey, it’s OK. Who wants popsicles when you can have pancakes? You like pancakes?”
Emma stopped crying and went eerily silent when Dean picked her up. She stared at him; Dean looked uncomfortable in the sudden silence. “I don’t know,” she said. “Is it like cake you make in a pan?”
“Kinda, yeah,” said Dean, relaxing a little and carrying her toward the kitchen. He gave Sam a perfectly clear “follow or I’ll kick your ass” look over Emma’s head.
Sam didn’t follow, though. He waited until Cas wasn’t looking and fled to his room.
He knew Emma was his daughter. Dean probably knew it, too. Cas had given Sam a pointed look when he had said, with what he probably thought was subtle emphasis, “We are…obligated... to help her.”
Sam paced the room, hugging his arms and fighting a sudden, strong urge to take a shower. He thought he probably should before he saw the girl again. Her sweet face and her innocent tears filled him with a feeling he had no name for-filled him so that he felt about to burst, his skin barely holding it all in… it crawled as his mind flashed through all the… encounters that could have led to Emma’s conception. What if she was the result of that time in the gas station bathroom, with a woman whose name he didn’t even know? Really, no matter which liaison she’d come from, it wouldn’t be much better…
Sam stopped his pacing abruptly, and a new dread sank his stomach through his feet. Why had Cas asked if any of the women he’d slept with were not human? What had he brought to them? What had Sam created? He wracked his brain and could remember no one who wasn’t an ordinary human woman… but had he checked each time? He sure hadn’t bothered with holy water at the gas station…
He jumped when there was a knock at his door. He cracked it open nervously.
“Cas?” He peered into the hallway past the angel.
“It’s just me.”
Sam stood back to let him in. “Where’s…” He couldn’t bring himself to say Emma’s name.
“Emma is with Dean in the library. She was upset that her coloring book was ruined by the melted popsicles. It was the only toy she had. So Dean is letting her color some of the Men of Letter’s sketches of monsters from the archives.”
There were several things about Cas’s reply that troubled Sam deeply, but he set them all aside and said, “Cas, who is Emma’s mother? Why did you feel you had to take her from her?”
“I don’t know who her mother is. The woman she was living with seems to believe Emma is her child, but I am sure she is not. This is her. Do you recognize her?”
He showed Sam three pictures on his phone. In one, the woman appeared to be shouting from a cracked porch in a trash-strewn yard, in the other two, she was passed out on a threadbare couch. She looked gaunt, grayish-skinned, grubby and unhealthy. Sam recognized all the physical traits of a junkie and an alcoholic. There was nothing attractive about her, but then, Sam had hardly been particular when he was soulless. He tried to imagine her healthier, but to his relief, her face sparked no recognition at all.
“No,” he answered slowly. “I’m pretty sure I never met her… how did you find Emma? Why…” He cleared his throat and forced himself to finish, “Why do you think I’m her father?”
“All I knew, at first, is that I am fairly certain Emma is a changeling, and not wholly human,” Cas answered. “I felt the usage of power, and I traced it to her home. She made flowers grow out of gravel, and I do not recognize them. I believe they are flowers of Faerie.” He drew something out of the collar of his trench coat. “Look at them,” he said. “She picked them yesterday and made this necklace.”
Sam looked at the chain of flowers blankly for a moment, taking it from Cas. The flowers were fresh, glossy-leaved, and gave off a faint, sweet scent.
“They are not withered at all,” Cas said, speaking Sam’s thought aloud. “They are not normal earthly flowers.”
“So you think her mother is a fairy,” said Sam, “and that’s why you wondered if I slept with anyone not human. But why me? Why do you think I’m her father?”
“I know that you are. You may find this uncomfortable to speak of, but when I… reached inside you to see if your soul was there, and later when I extracted Gadreel’s grace from you, I became… intimately acquainted with the metaphysical structure of you. Your essence, beyond the soul. Between that, and homing in on Dean when I brought him out of hell, I have come to recognize the Winchester color of things better than anything else on Earth.”
“Couldn’t she be Dean’s, then?” Sam asked with a too-brief flare of hope.
“I wondered at first, but no. She is yours, without question. I was sure of it before I even touched her, but after I picked her up to put her in the car, there was no doubt. She has… she is… of you.”
“And not of the woman she was living with. Does she know?”
“That Emma is not hers? Yes, and no. As I said, Emma is a changeling. The parents of these often feel that something is wrong and are unable to bond appropriately with the fairy child who replaced their own offspring. Her mother feels it, but does not know what it is she feels.”
Sam sat down on the bed and put his head in his hands. He said nothing for a long moment. Cas stood silent, waiting.
“It sounds like… she’s not a great mom, anyway,” he said finally.
“She is no kind of mother at all, but even if she were, she is dying.”
* * *
Sam had not yet been able to speak to Emma directly. Forcing himself to face the situation, he had gone to the library and watched her for a moment. Dean had dug up a 50-year-old set of colored pencils to supplement Emma’s sad, half-empty, popsicle-sticky box of crayons, and the girl was coloring monsters contentedly. She was, Sam thought, too good at it for a four-year old.
“She doesn’t talk like a four-year old,” said Dean, echoing Sam’s thought as they walked into the kitchen. Cas had pointedly told them he would stay with Emma so they could talk. “A couple times she whispered something that didn’t sound like English. I asked her what she was saying and she just looked at me with those big green eyes and said, ‘My mama never understood me either.’ Your kid’s kinda creepy, Sam.”
“Cas thinks she’s half-fairy,” Sam said gloomily.
Dean just nodded. “Green eyes run in the family,” he said, pointing at his own, “and her face is kind of shaped like yours, but pointier. But nobody’s eyes are that green. We’ve got blonde genes, too, and I was a tow-headed kid, but her hair is like, white.”
Sam nodded. “Fairy makes sense, I guess.” He relayed all that Cas had told him. “But the only time we ever even met any fairies, they were all either male, or six inches tall. And no,” he said sharply when Dean smirked, “I didn’t sleep with any of them.”
“Well, we’d better figure out what to do with her,” said Dean. He was almost obnoxiously cheerful about the whole thing, Sam thought-maybe because it couldn’t possibly be called his fault. He was carrying a great load of guilt about the Darkness. “Why didn’t Cas just leave her where she was?”
“The woman she was with is a junkie, and maybe a prostitute. Cas says she isn’t going to make it. He already healed her once, a few weeks ago-she had AIDS. But he says he can’t heal what makes her keep doing drugs, and he also says she-well. She doesn’t love Emma, that’s for sure.”
Dean was quiet for a minute. “Ours is no kind of life for a kid, Sam,” he said. “As you ought to remember.”
“I do, but-what else can we do? I… she’s my responsibility. And if she’s not human, that’s even more reason not to put her with a regular family-it’s bound to start showing soon. It already is, like you saw. Normal people wouldn’t know what to do with her-”
“You don’t know what to do with her,” Dean pointed out.
“True…” Sam rubbed his temples. His head ached.
“Well, one thing you gotta do sooner than later. Sack up and go talk to her. Waiting isn’t gonna make it any easier.”
* * *
Sam entered the library like he might enter a house where he and Dean had just broken down the door, except there was no gun in his hand. He nearly fled after opening the door and hearing the sound of weeping.
Cas gave him a frantic look, so Sam, frozen in the doorway, gathered his courage and came in. "I was about to come and find you," said Cas. "She is clearly very tired, but she will not lie down to sleep. She also won't let me pick her up or explain why she's crying."
"No!" Emma shouted just then through her tears, and for some reason, Sam felt relieved. For the first time, she sounded like a toddler.
Sam had almost no experience with children, but as his fear faded and he approached, he felt something he could not explain. Somehow, it was easy to sit down next to Emma and pull her into his lap, and she let him. Looking into her tearful eyes, he felt their kinship. He felt what she was, and he knew, as Cas had said, she was of him.
"Hey," he said. "Emma. I'm Sam." He wondered if he should say he was her father.
She took a great shuddering breath, looking up at him, and tried to stop crying. Sam could feel her trying to find words.
He knew what to ask. "Does something... hurt?"
She nodded. "It's not right here," she said. "It's... too far away."
"Too far away from what?" Sam asked. He knew, somehow, that she didn't mean her old home.
"The... the..." Emma struggled, wiping her eyes with her fists. "The sky," she said finally.
Sam almost laughed with relief. "That's no problem. The sky is up there. Want to go see it?"
She nodded, and he stood up with her in his arms. She felt too light, even for a skinny toddler, as if she were hollow-boned like a bird. He carried her out of the Bunker and climbed up the short, steep hill over the entrance, feet slipping a little in the leaves that plastered damp earth. He sat down on the concrete block above the door, his legs dangling next to the railing, and settled her in his lap.
She sighed as the sun fell on them when he opened the door, and he felt her relief as his own, a lightening of his spirit where he hadn't known it was heavy, except that in this dark life he lived, it was always heavy. The pinch of anxious responsibility he had felt since he met Emma eased, and though there was much he needed to know-so much for them to talk about-watching Emma's face as she looked up at the watery blue Kansas sky, he felt no need for words.
Thin clouds scudded by overhead, and birds rustled and cheeped in the brush behind them. The sound of cars on the distant highway was like a pastel-painted backdrop to a scene in a play, a soft brush-off to reality. Sam looked down at Emma, who sat quietly with a listening look on her face. A crow cawed, and she blinked and smiled. Sam wanted to speak then, but could think of nothing to say. His heart ached.
At length Emma broke the silence. "You're my daddy," she said. It was almost a question.
Sam nodded. "Yeah." He thought of mentioning his doubt on that point, but he found he did not have any. The sky was blue, monsters were real, Emma was his daughter. It just was. He thought of explaining why he hadn't known, but could think of not a single word he could say on the subject to a four-year-old. She felt so light on his lap that he felt a strange flutter of fear that she would slip away on the breeze, up into the sky. He hugged her tight.
He thought she might wriggle away, but she didn't. She snuggled closer to him and laid her head on his chest. "I like it better here," she said.
"Better outside, or better than with your mother?"
"Both. I'm glad Castiel brought me. But Mama wasn't my mother."
Sam winced a little. How much had Castiel told her? He struggled to think of how to prompt her to say more, but she continued without his help.
"I remembered when Castiel came. I remember my real mama from before. I wasn't with her for very long after I came out of her."
Sam thought for a moment and asked, gently, "Do you know why not? Why she didn't..." Keep you, he wanted to say, but it felt immeasurably cruel, and he suddenly felt that he must keep Emma at all costs, and he wondered what Dean would say.
"She thought I needed to be in this place, and that Mama's baby needed to be where she was, so she traded," Emma said slowly. "I don't think it was supposed to be forever. But maybe..." Her voice became more childlike suddenly, and she shivered. "Maybe she forgot about me."
Sam pulled his flannel shirt out from between them and tucked it around her, hugging her tighter. It occurred to him that it was strange, how quickly he'd forgotten that he knew nothing about kids, and how easy it seemed to give Emma what she needed. How suddenly, he knew what that was, and it was right there in his heart for the taking.
Emma cried a little, quietly, and he held her. He wanted to say no one could forget about a wonderful little girl like her, that he was sure her mother remembered and wanted her back, but he had no way of knowing that, and no wish to tell her comforting lies. From what little he knew of fairies, he thought it quite possible that Emma's mother had forgotten her.
Presently he thought of what he could say. "Well, I'll never forget about you. I'm sorry I didn't know before, but I'm glad you're here now." Despite his terrible fear for her safety and his worries about how he could possibly care for a child, it was true.
Emma brightened. "Me too," she said. "My real mama might visit. We could call her, if we go somewhere with trees."
Sam blinked. His surprise was quickly followed by trepidation. "Emma-"
"That's not my real name," she said. She turned in his lap to look up at his face. Her eyes were so green they almost glowed, like the lushest possible grass under the sun. He didn't know how they ever could have passed for human. “Mama always called me that. I told her my real name but she didn’t like it. She slapped me and told me not to say it, and the other words she doesn’t know.”
She hunched in on herself then, shrinking away from Sam, who flinched. Incomparable pain washed over him, but he thought only of easing hers. “I will never, ever slap you,” he said. “And no one else will either, not if I can help it.”
She had climbed out of his lap. Instinctively, he did not draw her back, but waited, not looking directly at her. After a minute, she picked up his hand, turning it over in both of hers, examining it. Sam didn’t ask why. He thought he knew.
Eventually, she nodded, and slipped under Sam’s arm. He hugged her against his side.
"What is your real name?" he asked.
"Fèileadh," she said.
* * *
"It makes sense," Cas said. "I have not made much study of fairies, but an oak forest would be the best place to summon them. And Emma would have instinctive memories, especially if she was born in Faerie. She would remember her real name, and know how to call for her mother."
They were in the library of the Bunker. After spending some time under the sky, Emma had been content to come back underground and had allowed Sam to put her to bed in a room next to his, with the door propped open so he could hear her if she called.
"I looked it up, after I figured out how to spell it," said Sam. "There's no information specifically about it in fairy lore, but I found it in a translation in the archives. It's a Gaelic word that means ‘fledgling’.”
“Did anyone think to ask her what her mother’s name is, if she knows?”
“I did,” said Sam. “She said she couldn’t say it. But I think she does know it. Fairy names have a lot of power, so… she wasn’t sure at first if she should tell me hers.” He looked down, fighting the wave of pain and anger as he recalled the other reason Emma- Fèileadh-had hesitated to say her name. “And maybe she can’t tell me her mother’s.” He paused, eyeing his brother. “Look, Dean. I know a kid in our lives doesn’t really make sense, but-”
“I know. She’s family. Don’t worry; we’ll look out for her. She’ll stay as long as it makes sense.” He patted Sam’s back roughly. “Just-no more knocking up fairies, OK? Or anyone else. I mean, even soulless, you should’ve remembered to use condoms.”
Sam flushed. “I did,” he said.
“Well, we all know it’s not a hundred percent,” Dean said. “I’ve sweated it out a time or two myself.” He was grinning, and even if it was at his expense, Sam was glad to see it. He’d barely smiled once since the Darkness had been released.
“But should we call her mother?" Dean continued. "I don't know about you, but my experience with fairies wasn't so great. We can't trust them."
"Gilda was all right," said Sam. "But Emma's mother did abandon her, so-"
"We'll take measures to protect her and ourselves," said Cas. "I am anxious to find out what happened to the human child Emma’s mother took, as well. That may change how we approach this. But fairies don't think of the exchange of changelings as abandonment, precisely. It is somewhat different since Emma is half-human, but a fairy child can look out for itself."
A sharp crack interrupted the end of Cas’s sentence as Dean shoved a clip into his pistol, which he had been loading with silver bullets as they spoke. “Measures,” he said, nodding at the gun. “We’ll remind her that it’s time for a visitation weekend. And maybe, if we don’t like what we learn, Sam sues for full custody.”
* * *
Sam was simply not ready to summon Emma's mother yet, and she didn't mention it again. After gathering weapons and prodding him a few times, Dean, watching Sam's face when Emma came to him to be picked up, stopped saying they should go soon and get this over with.
Everyone still called her Emma, and she never again corrected it. There was too much weight to the name Fèileadh; when Sam said it, once or twice, he felt alarmed at the wild, almost feral glint in the girl’s eyes at the sound.
The more they treated her like a normal human girl, the more she acted like one. Sam found children’s stories online and read her to sleep from his laptop. She loved stories with animals in them, especially birds. Every morning as the sun was coming up, he took her out to the hill over the Bunker and drank his coffee while she drank her juice and enjoyed the sky for an hour or two. That was the only real sign Sam ever saw that she was not human-the Bunker's entrance now had climbing vines of flowers of all colors over its arch, and the hill above was a carpet of something like violets, but more vivid and alive. Emma talked to them sometimes-shifty, anxious whispers at first, until she saw that Sam didn't mind the words he couldn't understand.
Sam was grateful that Dean seemed to be brought out of his heavy-drinking depression by Emma's presence. He came back from town every day with new toys. Emma barely seemed to know what a toy was at first, but when she learned to play with Dean, who chased her with squirt guns and taught her to use a Nerf grenade-launcher, she was a picture of joy such as Sam had never seen. A church-bell orchestra of child laughter alarmed the stuffy silence of the Bunker. Emma's joy cut into Sam's heart almost as deeply as her initial flinching reticence had.
She laughed at Dean’s jokes, ate everything they fed her, and learned everything they taught her. She loved Dean, and seemed to have a respectful, slightly awed gratitude toward Cas for bringing her to the Bunker, but somehow Sam, awkward and uncertain as he felt, had claimed her heart. It was of him she asked the thousand daily questions a toddler has, and into his lap she crawled every time he sat down. He held her while he read or did research, while he made phone calls, when he was just sitting and talking to Dean-anytime she was awake and not doing something else with one of them. She seemed starved for affection, and, Sam realized, he was too. He felt in a hurry to catch up on it-on being a father. He knew, somehow, that whatever they learned when they summoned Emma’s mother, their time together would be short. Perhaps this wasn’t because of Emma at all-the Darkness might well mean that time was short for the world itself, if he and Dean didn’t succeed in saving it this time.
Sam didn't want to let Emma go, but he and Dean, as usual, were contemplating the impending end of the world, and he had to face the fact that Emma might be safer in Faerie. So after a couple of weeks, while they were having their morning "sky time," Sam asked Emma if she was ready to call her mother.
She was making a chain of her never-fading violets. Solemnly, she reached up to put it around Sam's neck. He bent his head to accept it. She murmured something Sam couldn't understand-as usual, it sounded a little like Gaelic. He looked at her questioningly; finally, she nodded.
"Today," she said, looking up at the climbing sun.
Sam had already looked for the nearest forest that might have oak trees in it. They went inside and he showed Emma pictures of it on his laptop. “Would this be a good place to call your mother?” he asked her. She nodded, and stared at the pictures for a long time, touching the laptop screen gently.
They all piled into the Impala to head toward Red Cloud, Nebraska. Cas was away on business of his own; Dean had the front seat to himself so Sam could sit next to Emma, carefully strapped in and so small on the wide seat.
It took less than half an hour to get to the forest on the Nebraska border. Sam, Dean, and Cas had armed themselves with iron and silver, and of course salt to spill should a distraction be necessary.
Sam had researched a fairy summoning spell, but it turned out not to be necessary. They walked about a quarter mile into the woods from where Dean parked on the last bit of road, Sam carrying Emma. Sam showed Emma the bag of spell ingredients and started to explain, but she gave him a look like she thought he was strange and wriggled out of his arms to stand. "I'll be right back," she said, and ran off the trail into the trees.
Sam was startled-she went so fast and gracefully, like a little fox darting soundlessly through the undergrowth, that she no longer resembled a human child at all. Dean glanced at him and they took off running in pursuit, barely able to keep her in sight.
They came up short as the forest opened up to a glade, shafts of sunlight falling through the canopy as from the high windows of a cathedral, the branches forming stained glass panes of every shade of green. It was as Dean had sometimes described Emma's eyes-too green to be real, and the tree-pillars looped with flowers, the circling butterflies and little birds, and the sudden quiet stopped Sam and Dean in their tracks, frozen as surely as if a spell held them, and maybe it did.
Emma stood in the middle of the glade, speaking softly but clearly in her wind-chime voice, and suddenly, as if she had been there all along, a woman paced out of a shaft of sunlight.
Dean made a choking sound. The woman was naked except for a crown of flowers, and a few trailing vines of glowing-jade leaves. She was inexpressibly, inhumanly beautiful-so blindingly lovely that Sam's eyes watered as he squinted through the light around her, trying to see something he could recognize in her face, until she met his eyes and smiled a little. As she did, the blinding beauty faded little by little into normal human prettiness, and Sam gasped.
He heard Dean half-shout, incredulously, "Patchouli?"
"Sparrow," Sam whispered.
* * *
"My Fèileadh!" Sparrow came forward and put her hand in Emma's hair. "You have grown."
It made sense. Fèileadh. The sparrow's fledgling, and sparrow was the same word in Gaelic and in English, and this fairy had hidden herself among UFO chasers just like the other one, even if she was, Sam hoped, not so evil.
"Mam-Màthair," said Emma, and she wavered. Watching her, Sam thought she looked like a flickering computer screen loading two images at once, a fairy and a sad little girl, and the image resolved into a girl at last, and Emma covered her face and wept.
Sam hurried forward and picked her up, glaring at Sparrow. "You never called," he quipped, taking a leaf out of Dean's book and veiling his confusion with sarcasm. He held Emma tight against his shoulder, glanced at Dean and breathed a little easier when he saw that Dean had his gun out.
"Sam," said Sparrow neutrally. "I see you have your soul back."
Sam said nothing, still glaring. "Where's the human child?" asked Dean. "The one you swapped out for Emma?"
Sam gave a guilty start: he had forgotten that there was another child, and had given no thought to what they would do with her if there was. They certainly couldn't put her with her mother, the woman Cas had taken Emma from, if she was even still alive.
Sparrow's face softened into sorrow. "That little soul spent only hours with me," she said softly. "She was dying the moment the air touched her. She had too much of the poison her mother consumed. I thought in Faerie she might be saved, so I put my Fèileadh in her place. I was coming back for her-"
"When?" said Sam harshly. "She's four years old!"
Sparrow sighed. "I am sorry, Sam. Surely you have heard that time passes differently in Faerie than on Earth. I left her there just the other day…”
"Màthair," Emma interrupted. They all looked at her, silenced. Sam tightened his arms around her, but she laid her hand on his cheek and nodded toward the ground. Reluctantly, he set her down.
She walked up to Sparrow and touched her hand. "Màthair," she said again. "Do you want me?"
Sam felt his heart shatter. Sparrow knelt and touched Emma's face. "Yes, my Fèileadh," she said, her voice quivering. "I want you very much. It was to make you-to bear a child in the human way-that I took human form, and found your father."
"So Sam was just a donor to you?" Dean said furiously. Sam felt oddly touched by his ire.
"I thought he was the perfect choice," said Sparrow. She looked at Sam. "I was... very fond of you, Sam. I knew that humans form strong attachments with those they lie with, but without a soul, I could not break your heart. Most humans who love fairies pine themselves to death when their eldritch lovers are gone."
"Not doing any pining," Sam said, but his heart wasn't in the jibe-he certainly felt in danger, at the moment, of some pretty serious pining over Emma.
"Sam and Dean want me," said Emma. "Mama-the lady you left me with-she didn't. So I don't ever want to live with someone who doesn't want me again."
"We want you. We love you," said Sam.
"Yeah. You're family," said Dean. "But..." He looked at Sam.
"Your world is in danger," said Sparrow. "I can protect our daughter in Faerie. It will take the darkness a long time to reach the sunlit lands, if you fail in your task."
Dean sighed. “Does everybody know bad we screwed up?” he muttered to Sam out of the side of his mouth.
"We won't fail," he added, louder. He went to Emma and crouched down beside her. "Listen, bug," he said, using a nickname she'd earned when she'd hatched a jar full of ladybugs in the Bunker and set them loose. "We love you and we'd always want you around. I don't think your dad can say it-it's too hard for him to give you up. But your mom is right. You'll be safer with her. And she seems all right, for a fairy. "
Sam fought his tears. "Do you even know how to take care of a kid?" he asked Sparrow, desperate for a reason to argue.
"I know as well as any human mother knows, and perhaps better," said Sparrow. "The human guise you met me in? I spent twenty years and more in it, looking for a suitable mate."
"I guess you should be flattered, Sam. She gave you her final rose," said Dean, laying his hand over his heart.
Sam wanted to laugh, but he couldn't. He knelt and hugged Emma tight. She put her arms around his neck and wet it with her tears.
"I'm glad you don't want me to go," she said.
"Do you want to go?" Sam managed, finally.
"Yes. I mean, I want to stay in the Bunker and grow flowers on my hill, and learn more reading with you and play more with Dean," she said. "But I know you have to fight, and... I want to know my mother."
"I promise I will care for her well," said Sparrow. "And Sam. Here. I do indeed have a final bloom for you."
He stood, and Sparrow stepped close. The perfume of her was dizzying, and for a moment she was too beautiful to look at again, and she set a bell-shaped flower on a short, curved stem in his hand. It was a delicate, pale rose-gold, and like flowers that Emma grew, it possessed a soft, unearthly glow. When Sam closed his fingers around it, he found that instead of silky and yielding, it was hard and smooth, and cold against his palm. It tinkled faintly.
"When the danger you and your brother brought to this world has been conquered, think of me and ring the bell three times," Sparrow said. "I will bring your daughter to you then, when it is safe for her here."
"Will she-be grown up by then?" Sam thought the words sounded foolish and too vulnerable, but he could not hold them back.
"She may be an hour older, or centuries. There is no way to know."
Sam nodded. "But she won't die."
"No. Our lands are deathless, and she is immortal, like me."
"And I'll remember you forever," said Emma.
Sam nodded, swallowing his tears. "I'll remember you forever, too."
* * *
Goodbye sat heavy on Sam's heart long after the word was spoken. A storm was rolling in as Dean drove them home, ominous, green-black, and threaded with bright lightning on the dark Midwest horizon. The damp air stung Sam as he rode with the window down, thunder in the distance competing with the thunder of the Impala's engine.
"We got this, Sam," said Dean, raising his voice over the wind after a long silence. "We're gonna win this fight. And then... Emma can move in, and go to school maybe. Grow up to be the second college genius in the family."
He didn't mention the passage of time, or who Emma might be if they ever saw her again, and neither did Sam. He touched his necklace of deathless violets with one hand; his other trailed out the window, fingers twining in the breath of the coming storm.
He let it come.