With A Little Help From My Friends 1/2
Title: With A Little Help From My Friends
Characters: Sam, Dean, Other canon characters
Genre: Gen
Rating: G
Word count: 1819
Written for this prompt: History is littered with stories of brothers. This is one of them. Two brothers set out to save the world. The cost is high and the older brother is lost. It’s said that the younger brother walks the country calling to him. From Maine to Kansas to Oregon he walks. In torment, looking, always looking. There are those that hunt things like him and they try, they do, but there are no bones to burn, no spells that will cast him out, no rituals that will ease his suffering. The only way to put his tormented spirit to rest lies in summoning his brother to take him home. From the ohsam Sam focused H/C meme by the awesome pkwench
The story is an old one, going back sixty years or more now, but I know it because I was there for part of it. Not a big part, mind you, or one that matters to anyone but me and mine, but I knew them before the end and that’s important. There’s other parts to the story and I heard some of them because I came to know others they’d helped. Helped. Hell, that’s a pretty weak word for what they did. Saved would be better, and it wasn’t just us. Before it all went south for them they saved the whole damn world.
When I knew them they were just two brothers working in the family business- the business of saving people, hunting things. They were pretty damned good at it too, if what I saw was any indication, and I learned later that it was. You can’t save everyone, but Sam and Dean had a pretty good win-loss ratio. I never saw them alive again, but if you keep your ear to the ground you hear things and the things I heard said the days of them getting choked and thrown into walls and almost having the life sucked out of them turned out to be the good times.
************************************
Seri saw Sam first, outside her house in Lawrence about five years after the bad times ended. At that point it had been almost ten years since she’d seen him, but she hadn’t forgotten the man who carried her away from the burning figure in her bedroom. He’d asked her if she’d seen his brother- he couldn’t find Dean, he said and she could tell he was desperate. She knew something wasn’t right with him. He was older, but not ten years worth. He was bigger, harder, more solid and yet less substantial at the same time. His clothes were ripped, hanging off him in shreds, blackened in places like they’d been burned but he didn’t seem to notice. She hadn’t seen Dean and she told him so and after he left, fading into the ether halfway down her front walk, Seri did what she always did when faced with something she didn’t understand. She went to Missouri.
A few days after Missouri explained certain things to Seri, I got a phone call that started me down a path the Winchester brothers had been traveling before I was born. Meeting Sam and Dean had saved my life and changed my world view, as much as a kid can have a world view, and a few hours after talking to Seri I was headed for Lawrence.
Missouri wouldn’t explain things again until we were all there. Wasn’t going to go over it individually for everyone, we’d just have to be patient. Patient wasn’t something I was very good at, but as more and more people arrived conversations began and time flew by. Everyone had a story to tell about Sam and Dean and they were all fascinating and terrifying in how many different things there were out there to be saved from. Urban legends, demons, wendigos, restless spirits, Native American curses, hell hounds, pagan gods, demonic viruses and sometime even humans- Sam and Dean had saved all these people from all these different things. There were more, Missouri said, but sometimes people didn’t even know they’d been saved, or couldn’t admit to believing in what they’d been saved from. Finally the last person arrived-a pretty African American journalist from Mississippi- and Missouri said we could finally get started.
She didn’t know the whole story, she told us, no one did but Sam and Dean themselves and there were parts of what she did know that weren’t our business and she’d be keeping to herself. But she’d tell us the story of the Winchesters and what they’d done for the world and what it had gotten them and we could each decide for ourselves what we wanted to do about it. Each and every one of us owed them our lives from when we’d met them and from when we’d survived the dark days when it seemed like the world was about to end. We’d learned from Sam and Dean that things out of stories and legends were real, so when the bad things started happening, we believed and took steps to protect ourselves and our families. Some of us were only teenagers like me and Seri, but we’d known the basics of salt, holy water and iron and it’d been enough to send most things on to easier prey. It was harsh, but that had been a harsh time and we’d lived through it when lots of others hadn’t.
Missouri started with the story of Mary Winchester’s death at the hands of the yellow eyed demon and infant Sam’s dose of demon blood. She took us through John Winchester’s introduction to hunting and his indoctrination of his boys into the life. How Dean had taken to it and Sam had left to try for normal and how badly that had worked out for both of them. John had sacrificed his soul for Dean and Dean had turned around and made the same mistake with Sam. The story of how the brothers had inadvertently broken the first and last seals to begin the apocalypse and their desperate attempt to prevent it from coming to pass. The fact that angels had been just as pro end of the world as demons came as a surprise to us all, but we never doubted Missouri for a moment. The end of the story was one of the mysteries Missouri had mentioned earlier. She hadn’t seen Sam or Dean since that one trip to Lawrence when they had saved Seri and her family, but she had kept track of them mentally. Their essences were as clear to her as anyone right there in the room with her no matter where they were. Sam had power even back then and so did Dean, though no one but her and the angels realized it at the time.
Their last few years had been torture for Missouri to feel, but they had been much worse for the Winchesters themselves. Terror and pain and despair and then Dean was just gone and the blackness inside Sam at the loss of his brother gave Missouri migraines that threatened to split her head in two. Then, suddenly, Dean was back and the darkness in Sam lightened temporarily, but the guilt and terror radiating out of Dean made Sam’s ordeal seem like a walk in the park. Sam and Dean discovered that heaven had a plan for Dean and hell had a plan for Sam and the two of them were all that stood between humanity and the apocalypse that they had inadvertently set in motion. Their last few years were ones of distrust and betrayal. Of fear and pain and hopelessness. At the end though, and here Missouri smiled , at the end they found their strength in love and family, and heaven and hell combined were no match for Winchesters when they stuck together. She couldn’t tell us what happened, exactly. Just that it had happened in Detroit. No one who wasn’t there would ever know and no one who was there was alive to tell the tale. But when it was over, Dean was gone again and Sam was lost. Not alive, but not moving on, just on an endless quest to find his brother. Dean was out of Sam’s reach and Sam was out of Dean’s. There was no peace for Sam without Dean, and for Dean, wherever he was, no real rest without his brother. Missouri sent a serious gaze around the room, meeting each of our eyes before she finished.
You know what those men did for you individually and I just told you what they did for everyone in the world, she told us. There’s something you can do for them if you’re willing. It won’t be easy and it won’t be quick, but it can be done. You all know where you met the Winchesters and when. Sam’ll be back to those places looking for his brother. Not every year in the same place, but he has a pattern he follows and you can go there on the anniversary of your continuing to live and see if you can set up what that pattern is. You don’t have to go alone. It’ll be easier if you all work together, but you all do this however is best for you. Sam and Dean traveled all over this country and there are a lot of places Sam will look that only they know about. But we can check the ones we know about and go from there. There are people who will help us and others who will spit on anything that has to do with the Winchesters. It’s not going to get done tomorrow or even next week, but it will get done. Missouri’s eyes locked on me here for a moment and then moved on.
Missouri gave us names and references and lists of books- ancient and modern- and sent us off on our mission. When the time came for us to revisit out worst nightmares, none of us went alone. We traveled to the deep woods of Colorado, and to dying towns on a dried up lake and by a burned out orchard. To an abandoned housing development, and one full of children running around, to a creepy, run down house with cages in the barn and into the sewers of St Louis. We went to an antique shop and to a small town in Mississippi and to formerly haunted houses and crypts and cemeteries. We went everywhere any of us had known the Winchesters to be and sometimes Sam would come, but when we couldn’t tell him where Dean was, he’d always leave again. Eventually, and this took a hell of a lot of years, we got his pattern down. We knew where he’d be and when he’d be there. Our research was paying off in other areas too. We’d found a spell that would call Dean from where ever he was. It would only last a short time, but we hoped it would be enough.
Missouri had warned us at the beginning that this was to help Sam and Dean, not to martyr ourselves and that we should never let our mission consume us the way theirs had. We’d listened. We all had lives, had families. Some of us hunted, most of us just led normal existences, as much as tracking a spirit and working on a spell to bring back his dead brother could be called normal. The years passed and the children grew up and most that had started this quest were not there to see the end. But all of us contributed and that’s what counts.
Part 2