Chapter One – Treacherous
It was pouring rain outside. The water fell from in Stanford that night as if the sky was afraid time wouldn't be enough for all the rain to come down. It was as if a thousand angels had decided to grief the death of a brother that same night and accursed the world for it.
The storm had started with one shooting star in a clear sky. Clouds didn't take more than ten minutes to cover the moon and send a thunder through the air. Immediately after that, it started to rain.
But as time flew by outside, for one young man it seemed the clocks had stopped counting the seconds. He held a brush, between his right fingers, used to spread ink very carefully but passionately on the once white canvas that stood in front of him.
His hands were covered in the colors the palette held, the colors that he used to paint the world just as he saw it. Once he had heard you should pain love and hope and light, but maybe he was better left off painting the darkness that came only at night for it must have been afraid of the sun.
You could find him, very often, painting his own nightmares, the ones that seemed to be sent from another dimension right into his mind. He once dreamt he had been to Hell and back; the result was the most hauntingly beautiful, yet disturbing, work of art.
Samuel Winchester had been born on the second of May, 1983, into a family of loving people, in Lawrence, Kansas. His mother was named Mary and his father John, owner of an auto shop in town where he and his older son, born four years before Sam, Dean, were mechanics.
Dean's green eyes had always been colored by his love for his family and his loyalty towards them, but especially by his instinct of protecting his little brother who was now not that little at all – after all, Sam was taller than Dean. He had helped his mother raising Sam for in the mechanic's shop early years John was a very busy man that left to work early and came home late.
Now, a student at Stanford University, aiming for a Bachelor degree in English so he could go to Law School, with secret dreams of becoming an artist, Sam stood in his room almost every night trying to paint something that would help him catch the attention of the world. He basically lived alone in his Mirrielee apartment on Stanford Campus for his roommate spent every night at his new girlfriend's house outside campus.
He put the brush down when he heard a knock on the door. He walked across the small studio he was staying in while he studied at Stanford, and when he opened he could not help but smile.
Her black long hair was strapped in a pony tail which meant she had either been studying or doing yoga; by the skinny jeans, the first option was the correct one. Her skin was almost as white as the knitted oversized jumper that covered half of her tiny and elegant body and her eyes, painted in the same silver shade as the moon and framed by thick long eyelashes, looked at him showing the same smile her lips, redder than blood itself, had drew. She was 5 feet 2 inches so she had to look up to find Samuel's face and he found that immensely adorable.
God damn, every time he looked at her he could swear she was the master piece of some unknown yet extremely talented artist. How Sam wished he could paint something even slightly close to her beauty!
She had moved there the beginning of the semester and they had become sort of friends. They usually studied together at least twice a week and, from time to time at an irregular basis, she'd show up at his door with cookies or candy. This time, she brought with a pound bag full of gummy worms.
"Hello, good sir. I come carrying the food of Gods. Are you busy?"
"For candy? Never."
Riley entered the studio and sat on Sam's couch. He sat next to her and stole the candy from her hands while she turned on the TV and tuned it to one of her favorite channels. It was only when the bag of gummies was half empty that Riley saw the paint on his hands and the canvas in the middle of the room; a vision of a sea and the tip of a cliff had been portrait; the waves looked violent and deadly but the grass that covered the cliff was greener than the idea of green itself.
It was an odd painting, but captivating. Riley could picture herself on the end of that cliff; the painting was realistic at that point. If she closed her eyes really hard, she could feel the breeze, the perfume of the ocean and the wet grass under her naked feet.
"That's some beautiful art, Sam." Said Riley, with her southern accent that was only noticeable sometimes. She walked towards the shelves that were filled with Sam's paintings and looked them through.
When she found the painting Sam created when he had his worst nightmare, Riley was dazzled. She stood very still and in silence while her eyes stared at the ink that had been spread with care on the canvas. He did not recognize the look on her face, was she frighten of his demoniacal visions?
But the truth was that look was the expression of someone who just saw perfection painted by what must have been the hand of an angel. It was a terrifying image, yet beautiful. While the surroundings where the worst place anyone could ever be in, the man that stood there, with his soul crushed by what seemed to be anyone's nightmare, still had hope. You could see it in his eyes. Although he had been torn to shreds, he seemed to believe it was just a dream, one that he would wake up from at anytime.
"God damn you Samuel, if that ain't the most hauntingly beautiful painting I've ever seen."
Sam got up and walked towards her to see the painting she was looking at: it was one of his best, in his opinion, but he didn't think that much of it.
"You think so?"
"Yes I do. I mean… It's a total nightmare but… I don't know, there's something about the man's eyes… They look like your eyes, beautiful and full of light and hope."
He stared into her eyes and she could feel the perfume of his skin as well the smell of the paint in his hands. His tall figure casted a shadow over her and made her feel weak. She felt the warmth of his skin and felt as if the floor went from safe to treacherous, as if it could give in at any second making her fall for the artist just a door away from hers, if she wasn't already.
"Did you just call my eyes beautiful?" Their bodies were just a few inches away, and that was just like holding a burn match next to a tank of gasoline and hope it doesn't burn; but as Sam said that, and in a fraction of a second, they heard someone knocking on Riley's studio door. The sound was audible in the entire floor.
"Riley Mae!" Yelled a man outside, with a strong southern accent, making Riley close her eyes and taking a deep breath.
"Please tell me I'm hallucinating and hearing voices."
"I don't know about that, but he is outside." Said Sam, taking a step back as she opened her eyes. She drew a bitter smile that indicated she had to leave. "You have to go don't you?"
"Before he breaks the door down."
"Riley Mae, I know you're in there! " He yelled once more.
"You know, there's this new Italian restaurant just outside campus…"
"You wanna buy me dinner?" She finished, with a provocative yet innocent smile. The man called out for her again and she replied in the same tone. "God damn it, Raylan, I heard you already."
"Yeah. Tomorrow?"
"Yeah. Just, you know, knock on my door. Now I gotta go sober up a drunken cowboy before my roommate wakes up."
"I'll see you tomorrow then, around seven thirty."
"Riley Mae! For goodness sake..."
"Oh, just shut up Raylan!" She yelled towards the door and then smiled and looked at Sam. "Okay. See you tomorrow. Sleep tight."
She walked out the door and closed it behind her. Sam stared at the place where she disappeared for a while while Riley Mae Colt entered her apartment and served her best friend a cup of coffee – he'd be out of her house in less than two hours.
Sam smiled towards nothing and looked down. The clock pointed ten o'clock but he didn't have much to do already. He took a quick shower and then ate a sandwich before brushing his teeth and hitting the sack. That night, no nightmare would haunt him; Sam would dream about how when he was a kid his mother would hum 'Jude' by The Beatles until both of her boys would fall asleep.
