(no subject)
Title: Who's afraid of the dark?
Pairing: Dean/Sam
Rating: NC-17
Summary: It should have been just another birthday, but it wasn't. When Sam disappears mysteriously, John, Dean and Bobby team up to start a desperate search for him. Meanwhile, Sam wakes up in a strange, cold room, where no one talks to him, although he knows he's being watched. He's just a boy, and when things go terribly wrong, can Dean help him survive the darkness that creeps through his skin and nestles in his bones? This is a story of great darkness and pain, but also of great love and comfort.
Warnings and A/N: Top!Dean, bottom!Sam, not for the faint of heart, graphic violence/torture and maybe more. Read at your own risk. Wee!cest, pre-series.
Previous Chapters
Chapter 3
“What do you mean Sammy’s gone?” John frowned. He stepped forward and his eyes pierced Dean’s for answers.
“I went to pick him up after school, but he never showed up. I searched everywhere around school, then I came home, then I called you,” Dean said. “I tried calling you three times.”
John’s breath grew faster as he tried to process the information Dean gave him.
“I… I got so wrapped up in research I couldn’t really check for any calls this afternoon,” John said slowly. “But that isn’t possible, Dean. Are you sure he isn’t at a classmates’ house? Maybe he didn’t go to class, maybe he thought he would do something different for his birthday?” Even to his own ears John’s voice sounded full of doubt.
“Dad, I’ve been through all these options, alright? I don’t think Sam would’ve gone anywhere without checking with you or telling me first. He was looking forward to tonight. I can’t believe he would have simply made other plans.”
John frowned and ran a hand through his hair. His heart started to pick up speed as he tried to come up with some rational and logical explanation.
“Have you talked to someone at school?”
“No. By the time I realized he was really gone the school was closed. I was outside looking for him.”
“We should talk to someone at school,” John said.
“Do you have the principal’s number? His teacher’s?” Dean asked.
John thought for a minute. “I might have it…somewhere… I’m sure they gave me a number when I enrolled him…”
Dean followed John upstairs and watched, frustrated, as his father went through drawer after drawer for someone’s number who could give him information.
“Dammit. I only have the school number,” John concluded after twenty minutes and many sheets of paper all over the floor. “It’ll be closed now.”
Dean’s heart seemed to shrink and tighten with every lost hope of finding Sam. He had a terribly bad feeling about the whole thing, and it was difficult as hell trying to think of something intelligent to do.
“We can go to his school first thing tomorrow morning. Meanwhile, what do you think we should do?” Dean asked.
John looked into his son’s worried, edgy eyes and knew he had to keep calm and think. “I’ll go outside and search for him.”
“Okay. I’ll go with you.”
“No,” John put a hand on Dean’s arm. “Somebody needs to stay home in case he shows up.”
“You can stay, I need to go there again. I won’t be able to sit here waiting,” Dean said, and in his green eyes John saw his unspoken fear.
“Dean… You’ve been outside until just now. It’s my turn now. I need to do this,” John stressed. “Besides, I bet you haven’t eaten anything all day, so stay home, eat something and rest. We’ll need all the strength we can get to see through this.”
Dean shook his head a little and thought of saying something, but John was right. He doubted he would be able to eat, let alone rest, but he figured his father would be unable to stand still right now, and he was right in that someone did need to stay home in case Sam came back.
“Dad…” Dean looked at his father’s bed and all the sheets of paper on it and on the floor. He looked at John when he started moving towards his locked wardrobe and opened it up to look at his weapons. “Do you think… do you think this might have something to do with our job? I don’t know, with the things we hunt?”
John put a few weapons on the bed and studied them. Dean’s question forced him to look inside a room whose door he dreaded opening.
“I hope not, son.”
~ * ~
Sam didn’t know how much time had passed, but he knew he didn’t like that place one bit. The silence in the room was just maddening, that and the aseptic look of everything in it. By now Sam had expected that someone would have come talk to him, to explain what was going on, what they wanted. Maybe then he would be able to fight his way out of that place, or gather some information that might help him plan his escape.
Inside that room, Sam would soon learn, there was no time. There was no day or night, and he only knew that hours had passed since he had been brought there because he was hungry and needed to pee.
Sam started eyeing the toilet with more sympathy than anger, and eventually, when he felt his bladder would get the best of him, he stood up and used it. When he was done he turned to the sink and stared at it for a while. He hated not knowing what was going on. Why couldn’t he go back in time and never go to school that day?
Sam tried the faucet and water came out of it, so he washed his hands with a small bar of soap and drank some water before closing it. He got on his knees and picked up one of the white rags. It looked clean and soft. He dried his hands with it and put it back on the pile.
Who the fuck would go to the trouble of putting him in such a place? How long was he expected to be there? What had they done to his clothes?
Sam started walking around the room again, maybe he had missed some important detail about the place.
He tried to sharpen his ears but there was no sound except for a faint, indistinct humming of technology running. He placed his hands flat against the white walls and looked for cracks or anything. He was pretty desperate, he knew that. But for now he tried to keep his shit together.
“What the fuck are these?” Sam approached his face to look at some small metal rings on the wall, a little above his head. They were painted white, same as the wall, and that was probably the reason why Sam hadn’t noticed them before. He hooked a finger on those rings and tried pulling. He didn’t know what he had expected would happen, but nothing in the room moved or changed in the slightest when he did that.
He looked down at the white floor and saw the same metal rings existed on the wall, just above his feet. He crouched in order to inspect the things more carefully. He once again tried pulling, twisting, pushing… Nothing happened.
“Hey!” Sam got up and screamed. “Where the hell am I? Won’t you even tell me?” He looked at the camera on the ceiling and talked angrily to it, as if it could talk back. “I’m not staying in this sick weird place, you hear that?! You can’t keep me here!” He yelled.
“Fuck you!” He gave the finger to the camera and felt himself on the verge of tears.
It took him a moment of stillness to regain his self control before anything happened. He would not cry, no matter what. He wouldn’t give those perverts watching him the satisfaction.
Boiling with raging anger and confusion, Sam went back to the bed. His stomach complained loudly, demanding food. It could not understand what had happened, why wasn’t it being fed like it should?
Eventually, though, his hunger turned into some sort of sickness, and he felt that he wouldn’t be able to eat a thing, ever again. Why couldn’t they have let him keep his fucking watch? It was not like he could have used that to escape, Sam thought bitterly. He really wanted to know how long he had been there, and if his dad and Dean were any close to finding him now.
With these thoughts filling his mind and his empty stomach resigned to being ignored, the bright lights of the room started to matter less and less, and eventually weariness and fear mingled and defeated him.
Sam fell asleep alone, in a strange and hostile place, in a day he could only think of as the worst birthday ever.
~ * ~
It was two in the morning when Dean heard the noise of someone coming in. He was sat on the sofa, a lamp lit by his side, the rest of the living room was dark, almost like the night outside.
John entered and shut the door behind himself. Dean didn’t have to ask anything. His father was alone.
For a moment Dean thought he would lose his shit. He stood up and sucked in his breath, and his eyes felt hot and moist.
John swallowed his own fear and walked up to Dean.
“Nothing?” Dean asked, and his throat hurt when he spoke, because he was trying hard not to cry.
John put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. “We’ll take it up tomorrow.”
“No, dad! Sam’s out there! We need to go back now! He might be hungry or cold or scared! We can’t just stay here not knowing where he is!” Dean had sat in that living room for hours, and he was unwilling to keep doing that until morning.
“Dean… Dean, listen to me!” John squeezed his son’s shoulders. There were tears welling up in Dean’s eyes, but he was so angry that John doubted he had even realized that. “We need to get some rest, okay? We need to sleep three, four hours if we can, because we’re gonna have to be ready to look for Sam all day tomorrow. Going back outside now is useless. You know that.”
Dean blinked and felt fat tears roll down his face. He wiped them angrily and straightened himself.
“I can’t sleep.”
“You have to. You and I. We’re gonna eat something, take a shower and get some sleep. And then tomorrow, first thing we’ll go to Sam’s school and find out what we can. Alright?”
“Dad-“
“These are orders, Dean. Go get yourself clean and eat something. I expect you to be in bed in an hour.”
John’s voice was firm and commanding. He was scared shitless inside, but he needed to be strong. He needed to think clearly, and clearly, there was nothing productive they could still do that night.
Dean swallowed back the lump in his throat, nodded curtly and left.
John sighed and watched his son disappear upstairs. He raked his fingers through his hair and sat down heavily on the couch.
“Where are you, boy?” John whispered, his heart tight and heavy with worry.
Dean did as he was told - or at least he tried to. He showered quickly and made himself a sandwich, which he pretty much swallowed down without any pleasure. When he was done, however, and it was time for the rest part of his orders, Dean didn’t think it would be that easy.
He lay in bed and stared at the ceiling in the dark. They were supposed to be having fun tonight. First the movie and the junk food, then, as Dean had imagined would happen, Sam and him would break his father’s rule for sleeping before midnight and would have stayed awake, talking and laughing quietly probably until sunrise.
They didn’t always have a perfect relationship, far from that. More often than not Sam would be pissed at him for overdoing his teasing, or for - as Sam would say - learning to be as bossy as their dad. But that wouldn’t have happened tonight. Tonight it was Sam’s birthday, and it was supposed to have been fun.
The more he tried not to think of anything, the more the thoughts vomited themselves in his brain and made it impossible to find sleep.
Eventually, a little before sunrise, Dean Winchester could shut his eyes and sleep for a couple of hours.
~ * ~
The moment the school opened its doors, before the first student had arrived, John and Dean were there. They were led inside by the caretaker, who had opened the school doors, and were taken to the principal’s office, where they needed to wait for another fifteen excruciating minutes.
“Oh, hello,” a well dressed woman met them there and sat across her table from them. She wore glasses and her hair was up, which gave her a serious, busy look. “Mr. Winchester, the caretaker told me. Is that right, sir?”
“Yes. This is my oldest son. My youngest is-“
“Sam Winchester, I know,” she smiled. “How can I be of any help?”
“Well, yesterday my son Dean was supposed to pick Sam up after school, but Sam was not among the students who left the place. Since then he and I have looked everywhere for him but we’ve had no success. We would like to know if something unusual happened yesterday. Did Sam not come to class? Dean tells me he saw him getting into the bus.”
The woman frowned, deciding the situation was indeed grave. “Well, if you give me a minute, I’ll ask one of his teachers to come here.”
John nodded and they waited a bit more as the woman talked on a phone and asked someone else to join them.
“Mr. Winchester, this is Mrs. Sanders, Sam’s biology teacher. She was teaching the last period yesterday.”
“Hello, Mrs. Sanders.”
“Can you tell us if Sam was in class yesterday?” The principal asked.
“Well, yes… He was in class, and I don’t understand why you ask.”
“His father says he hasn’t been home since yesterday.”
“Why don’t you ask the other one?” She nodded towards Dean, who frowned.
“What do you mean?” The principal seemed confused.
“You are his brother, aren’t you?”
“Yes?” Dean looked lost.
“I know, because Sam said so. You picked him up earlier yesterday, remember? You said you were going to do something, because it was his birthday, so I let him go.”
For a moment no one said anything in the room. Dean’s heart felt cold and seemed to drop in his chest. John’s brain worked furiously with the new piece of information. He looked at his older son and saw the confusion all over Dean’s face.
“Are you sure, ma’am?” John asked. “Are you saying that you saw this young man right here walk out with Sam yesterday?”
“Of course I’m sure,” and then she eyed Dean with a frown. “Do you not remember?”
Dean’s lips parted, but no one would ever know what he was about to say. By then John had already started moving. He pulled Dean up from the chair where he was seated and started dragging him out of there.
“I’m sorry, ladies. I’ll talk to my son outside. Hopefully this has been nothing but a misunderstanding.” John smiled hurriedly and pulled Dean out right behind him, despite the puzzled looks of the two women who probably had more questions.
Once they were safely outdoors, John and Dean stared at each other.
“Dad, I swear I didn’t come close to this school before the bell rang! She must be going crazy, I didn’t-“
“I know, Dean,” John cut him off.
“You know?” Dean frowned.
“Yes,” John swallowed hard.
“So what do you think happened there?”
John looked his son in the eyes. Things were getting more complicated and definitely more scary by the hour.
“You know the things I hunt?”
“Yes…” Dean’s heart raced.
“Have you read about shapeshifters?”
It took Dean a while to process what his father was saying. “They….they can change into anyone… Anyone at all. If it was shapeshifter who picked Sam up he wouldn’t have been able to tell it wasn’t me.”
“The thing is, shapeshifters need to touch someone in order to be able to copy them. Have you met someone these last few days? Someone weird?”
Dean searched his mind.
“What were you doing last morning?”
“I… I was with a girl,” Dean confessed. “I don’t recall talking to anyone out of the ordinary…”
“Anything, Dean. Even a casual bump on the street would be enough for a shifter to copy your DNA.”
Dean’s chest went cold.
“What? What is it?” John asked, seeing the way a thought seemed to have clouded Dean’s green eyes.
“Yesterday morning, when I was leaving home, I did bump into someone on the street. I remember apologizing but the guy never even turned around. I called him asshole in my mind and kept going. I didn’t think…” Dean started to panic. “Dad, I never thought-“
“Of course you didn’t,” John soothed him. “How could you?”
“So what? Does that mean a shifter’s got Sam? Why would he do that? Are you working on something related to shifters?”
“No!” John said quickly. “No, not remotely.”
Dean’s breath was coming in short, rushed gasps. He rubbed his palms against his tired face and shook his head.
“So Sam’s disappearance has something to do with monsters. Great!” Dean felt once again that familiar feeling of fear and desperation threatening to take over.
“Dean, calm down. We have our first clue. We need to keep our heads focused, alright?”
“So what do we do now?” Dean wanted to know.
John licked his dry lips and pondered for a while.
“C’mon. We’re going home. I need to make a phone call.”
“What?” Dean’s forehead wrinkled as his father tugged at him to move along. “Wait, why? Who are you gonna call?” Dean fretted.
“Someone who will do everything to help us.”
Dean thought for a moment before he nodded slowly.
“Are you calling uncle Bobby?”
“You're damn right I am, kid.
--------------------------------------------------
tbc...
Pairing: Dean/Sam
Rating: NC-17
Summary: It should have been just another birthday, but it wasn't. When Sam disappears mysteriously, John, Dean and Bobby team up to start a desperate search for him. Meanwhile, Sam wakes up in a strange, cold room, where no one talks to him, although he knows he's being watched. He's just a boy, and when things go terribly wrong, can Dean help him survive the darkness that creeps through his skin and nestles in his bones? This is a story of great darkness and pain, but also of great love and comfort.
Warnings and A/N: Top!Dean, bottom!Sam, not for the faint of heart, graphic violence/torture and maybe more. Read at your own risk. Wee!cest, pre-series.
Previous Chapters
Chapter 3
“What do you mean Sammy’s gone?” John frowned. He stepped forward and his eyes pierced Dean’s for answers.
“I went to pick him up after school, but he never showed up. I searched everywhere around school, then I came home, then I called you,” Dean said. “I tried calling you three times.”
John’s breath grew faster as he tried to process the information Dean gave him.
“I… I got so wrapped up in research I couldn’t really check for any calls this afternoon,” John said slowly. “But that isn’t possible, Dean. Are you sure he isn’t at a classmates’ house? Maybe he didn’t go to class, maybe he thought he would do something different for his birthday?” Even to his own ears John’s voice sounded full of doubt.
“Dad, I’ve been through all these options, alright? I don’t think Sam would’ve gone anywhere without checking with you or telling me first. He was looking forward to tonight. I can’t believe he would have simply made other plans.”
John frowned and ran a hand through his hair. His heart started to pick up speed as he tried to come up with some rational and logical explanation.
“Have you talked to someone at school?”
“No. By the time I realized he was really gone the school was closed. I was outside looking for him.”
“We should talk to someone at school,” John said.
“Do you have the principal’s number? His teacher’s?” Dean asked.
John thought for a minute. “I might have it…somewhere… I’m sure they gave me a number when I enrolled him…”
Dean followed John upstairs and watched, frustrated, as his father went through drawer after drawer for someone’s number who could give him information.
“Dammit. I only have the school number,” John concluded after twenty minutes and many sheets of paper all over the floor. “It’ll be closed now.”
Dean’s heart seemed to shrink and tighten with every lost hope of finding Sam. He had a terribly bad feeling about the whole thing, and it was difficult as hell trying to think of something intelligent to do.
“We can go to his school first thing tomorrow morning. Meanwhile, what do you think we should do?” Dean asked.
John looked into his son’s worried, edgy eyes and knew he had to keep calm and think. “I’ll go outside and search for him.”
“Okay. I’ll go with you.”
“No,” John put a hand on Dean’s arm. “Somebody needs to stay home in case he shows up.”
“You can stay, I need to go there again. I won’t be able to sit here waiting,” Dean said, and in his green eyes John saw his unspoken fear.
“Dean… You’ve been outside until just now. It’s my turn now. I need to do this,” John stressed. “Besides, I bet you haven’t eaten anything all day, so stay home, eat something and rest. We’ll need all the strength we can get to see through this.”
Dean shook his head a little and thought of saying something, but John was right. He doubted he would be able to eat, let alone rest, but he figured his father would be unable to stand still right now, and he was right in that someone did need to stay home in case Sam came back.
“Dad…” Dean looked at his father’s bed and all the sheets of paper on it and on the floor. He looked at John when he started moving towards his locked wardrobe and opened it up to look at his weapons. “Do you think… do you think this might have something to do with our job? I don’t know, with the things we hunt?”
John put a few weapons on the bed and studied them. Dean’s question forced him to look inside a room whose door he dreaded opening.
“I hope not, son.”
~ * ~
Sam didn’t know how much time had passed, but he knew he didn’t like that place one bit. The silence in the room was just maddening, that and the aseptic look of everything in it. By now Sam had expected that someone would have come talk to him, to explain what was going on, what they wanted. Maybe then he would be able to fight his way out of that place, or gather some information that might help him plan his escape.
Inside that room, Sam would soon learn, there was no time. There was no day or night, and he only knew that hours had passed since he had been brought there because he was hungry and needed to pee.
Sam started eyeing the toilet with more sympathy than anger, and eventually, when he felt his bladder would get the best of him, he stood up and used it. When he was done he turned to the sink and stared at it for a while. He hated not knowing what was going on. Why couldn’t he go back in time and never go to school that day?
Sam tried the faucet and water came out of it, so he washed his hands with a small bar of soap and drank some water before closing it. He got on his knees and picked up one of the white rags. It looked clean and soft. He dried his hands with it and put it back on the pile.
Who the fuck would go to the trouble of putting him in such a place? How long was he expected to be there? What had they done to his clothes?
Sam started walking around the room again, maybe he had missed some important detail about the place.
He tried to sharpen his ears but there was no sound except for a faint, indistinct humming of technology running. He placed his hands flat against the white walls and looked for cracks or anything. He was pretty desperate, he knew that. But for now he tried to keep his shit together.
“What the fuck are these?” Sam approached his face to look at some small metal rings on the wall, a little above his head. They were painted white, same as the wall, and that was probably the reason why Sam hadn’t noticed them before. He hooked a finger on those rings and tried pulling. He didn’t know what he had expected would happen, but nothing in the room moved or changed in the slightest when he did that.
He looked down at the white floor and saw the same metal rings existed on the wall, just above his feet. He crouched in order to inspect the things more carefully. He once again tried pulling, twisting, pushing… Nothing happened.
“Hey!” Sam got up and screamed. “Where the hell am I? Won’t you even tell me?” He looked at the camera on the ceiling and talked angrily to it, as if it could talk back. “I’m not staying in this sick weird place, you hear that?! You can’t keep me here!” He yelled.
“Fuck you!” He gave the finger to the camera and felt himself on the verge of tears.
It took him a moment of stillness to regain his self control before anything happened. He would not cry, no matter what. He wouldn’t give those perverts watching him the satisfaction.
Boiling with raging anger and confusion, Sam went back to the bed. His stomach complained loudly, demanding food. It could not understand what had happened, why wasn’t it being fed like it should?
Eventually, though, his hunger turned into some sort of sickness, and he felt that he wouldn’t be able to eat a thing, ever again. Why couldn’t they have let him keep his fucking watch? It was not like he could have used that to escape, Sam thought bitterly. He really wanted to know how long he had been there, and if his dad and Dean were any close to finding him now.
With these thoughts filling his mind and his empty stomach resigned to being ignored, the bright lights of the room started to matter less and less, and eventually weariness and fear mingled and defeated him.
Sam fell asleep alone, in a strange and hostile place, in a day he could only think of as the worst birthday ever.
~ * ~
It was two in the morning when Dean heard the noise of someone coming in. He was sat on the sofa, a lamp lit by his side, the rest of the living room was dark, almost like the night outside.
John entered and shut the door behind himself. Dean didn’t have to ask anything. His father was alone.
For a moment Dean thought he would lose his shit. He stood up and sucked in his breath, and his eyes felt hot and moist.
John swallowed his own fear and walked up to Dean.
“Nothing?” Dean asked, and his throat hurt when he spoke, because he was trying hard not to cry.
John put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. “We’ll take it up tomorrow.”
“No, dad! Sam’s out there! We need to go back now! He might be hungry or cold or scared! We can’t just stay here not knowing where he is!” Dean had sat in that living room for hours, and he was unwilling to keep doing that until morning.
“Dean… Dean, listen to me!” John squeezed his son’s shoulders. There were tears welling up in Dean’s eyes, but he was so angry that John doubted he had even realized that. “We need to get some rest, okay? We need to sleep three, four hours if we can, because we’re gonna have to be ready to look for Sam all day tomorrow. Going back outside now is useless. You know that.”
Dean blinked and felt fat tears roll down his face. He wiped them angrily and straightened himself.
“I can’t sleep.”
“You have to. You and I. We’re gonna eat something, take a shower and get some sleep. And then tomorrow, first thing we’ll go to Sam’s school and find out what we can. Alright?”
“Dad-“
“These are orders, Dean. Go get yourself clean and eat something. I expect you to be in bed in an hour.”
John’s voice was firm and commanding. He was scared shitless inside, but he needed to be strong. He needed to think clearly, and clearly, there was nothing productive they could still do that night.
Dean swallowed back the lump in his throat, nodded curtly and left.
John sighed and watched his son disappear upstairs. He raked his fingers through his hair and sat down heavily on the couch.
“Where are you, boy?” John whispered, his heart tight and heavy with worry.
Dean did as he was told - or at least he tried to. He showered quickly and made himself a sandwich, which he pretty much swallowed down without any pleasure. When he was done, however, and it was time for the rest part of his orders, Dean didn’t think it would be that easy.
He lay in bed and stared at the ceiling in the dark. They were supposed to be having fun tonight. First the movie and the junk food, then, as Dean had imagined would happen, Sam and him would break his father’s rule for sleeping before midnight and would have stayed awake, talking and laughing quietly probably until sunrise.
They didn’t always have a perfect relationship, far from that. More often than not Sam would be pissed at him for overdoing his teasing, or for - as Sam would say - learning to be as bossy as their dad. But that wouldn’t have happened tonight. Tonight it was Sam’s birthday, and it was supposed to have been fun.
The more he tried not to think of anything, the more the thoughts vomited themselves in his brain and made it impossible to find sleep.
Eventually, a little before sunrise, Dean Winchester could shut his eyes and sleep for a couple of hours.
~ * ~
The moment the school opened its doors, before the first student had arrived, John and Dean were there. They were led inside by the caretaker, who had opened the school doors, and were taken to the principal’s office, where they needed to wait for another fifteen excruciating minutes.
“Oh, hello,” a well dressed woman met them there and sat across her table from them. She wore glasses and her hair was up, which gave her a serious, busy look. “Mr. Winchester, the caretaker told me. Is that right, sir?”
“Yes. This is my oldest son. My youngest is-“
“Sam Winchester, I know,” she smiled. “How can I be of any help?”
“Well, yesterday my son Dean was supposed to pick Sam up after school, but Sam was not among the students who left the place. Since then he and I have looked everywhere for him but we’ve had no success. We would like to know if something unusual happened yesterday. Did Sam not come to class? Dean tells me he saw him getting into the bus.”
The woman frowned, deciding the situation was indeed grave. “Well, if you give me a minute, I’ll ask one of his teachers to come here.”
John nodded and they waited a bit more as the woman talked on a phone and asked someone else to join them.
“Mr. Winchester, this is Mrs. Sanders, Sam’s biology teacher. She was teaching the last period yesterday.”
“Hello, Mrs. Sanders.”
“Can you tell us if Sam was in class yesterday?” The principal asked.
“Well, yes… He was in class, and I don’t understand why you ask.”
“His father says he hasn’t been home since yesterday.”
“Why don’t you ask the other one?” She nodded towards Dean, who frowned.
“What do you mean?” The principal seemed confused.
“You are his brother, aren’t you?”
“Yes?” Dean looked lost.
“I know, because Sam said so. You picked him up earlier yesterday, remember? You said you were going to do something, because it was his birthday, so I let him go.”
For a moment no one said anything in the room. Dean’s heart felt cold and seemed to drop in his chest. John’s brain worked furiously with the new piece of information. He looked at his older son and saw the confusion all over Dean’s face.
“Are you sure, ma’am?” John asked. “Are you saying that you saw this young man right here walk out with Sam yesterday?”
“Of course I’m sure,” and then she eyed Dean with a frown. “Do you not remember?”
Dean’s lips parted, but no one would ever know what he was about to say. By then John had already started moving. He pulled Dean up from the chair where he was seated and started dragging him out of there.
“I’m sorry, ladies. I’ll talk to my son outside. Hopefully this has been nothing but a misunderstanding.” John smiled hurriedly and pulled Dean out right behind him, despite the puzzled looks of the two women who probably had more questions.
Once they were safely outdoors, John and Dean stared at each other.
“Dad, I swear I didn’t come close to this school before the bell rang! She must be going crazy, I didn’t-“
“I know, Dean,” John cut him off.
“You know?” Dean frowned.
“Yes,” John swallowed hard.
“So what do you think happened there?”
John looked his son in the eyes. Things were getting more complicated and definitely more scary by the hour.
“You know the things I hunt?”
“Yes…” Dean’s heart raced.
“Have you read about shapeshifters?”
It took Dean a while to process what his father was saying. “They….they can change into anyone… Anyone at all. If it was shapeshifter who picked Sam up he wouldn’t have been able to tell it wasn’t me.”
“The thing is, shapeshifters need to touch someone in order to be able to copy them. Have you met someone these last few days? Someone weird?”
Dean searched his mind.
“What were you doing last morning?”
“I… I was with a girl,” Dean confessed. “I don’t recall talking to anyone out of the ordinary…”
“Anything, Dean. Even a casual bump on the street would be enough for a shifter to copy your DNA.”
Dean’s chest went cold.
“What? What is it?” John asked, seeing the way a thought seemed to have clouded Dean’s green eyes.
“Yesterday morning, when I was leaving home, I did bump into someone on the street. I remember apologizing but the guy never even turned around. I called him asshole in my mind and kept going. I didn’t think…” Dean started to panic. “Dad, I never thought-“
“Of course you didn’t,” John soothed him. “How could you?”
“So what? Does that mean a shifter’s got Sam? Why would he do that? Are you working on something related to shifters?”
“No!” John said quickly. “No, not remotely.”
Dean’s breath was coming in short, rushed gasps. He rubbed his palms against his tired face and shook his head.
“So Sam’s disappearance has something to do with monsters. Great!” Dean felt once again that familiar feeling of fear and desperation threatening to take over.
“Dean, calm down. We have our first clue. We need to keep our heads focused, alright?”
“So what do we do now?” Dean wanted to know.
John licked his dry lips and pondered for a while.
“C’mon. We’re going home. I need to make a phone call.”
“What?” Dean’s forehead wrinkled as his father tugged at him to move along. “Wait, why? Who are you gonna call?” Dean fretted.
“Someone who will do everything to help us.”
Dean thought for a moment before he nodded slowly.
“Are you calling uncle Bobby?”
“You're damn right I am, kid.
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tbc...