White noise

Chapter 1

There are the things you're meant to see, and the things you're not supposed to see.

Admittedly, Dean Winchester didn't give a damn.

He followed the figure from his dreams and caught up to him just outside of Denver. His breath was fogging as he pulled over and stepped out of the car to the field empty, with the exception of the man in his trench coat. The first two steps were a bit wobbly but the determination pumping through his veins made it impossible to turn back. Besides, when had Dean ever run away? When had he not? He shrugged to himself as he walked, hands in his pockets and stared at the man.

The guy didn't move, he didn't even inch—hell, even his coat didn't sway in the wind, which was freaky. He was like an odd statue of some… creeper. Who would want a statue of a guy that looked like he was gonna flash you, Dean didn't know. He was close enough now to make out the details of his clothes and see the way dark browns and black and maybe a hint of gray swirled in the man's hair, though the colors were mudded by the dim light.

"Hey," he called out, realizing that now that he was here, he had no idea what to say. So he said the first thing that came to his mind.

"A bit chilly, don't—"

Luckily or not, he didn't get to finish the sentence.

"Why are you really here?"

His voice was low, gruff, slow… Dean's mind was suddenly flooded with different adjectives describing it. He hadn't ever heard it before, he'd only been guessing; guessing and guessing until there was nothing left to guess and yet never had he been right. After everything, a dream could not compare to reality, which came suddenly crashing down straight to Dean's face. He sucked in a shocked breath. There was a million things to answer, some sarcastic some funny and others not so much.

"I wanna know," he said sincerely and willed away all instincts to run or play-pretend, "what is it that you want?"

The man then turned around and gave him a half-smile as a reply. Dean's eyes widened for in that flash of moonlight he swore he caught a glimpse of white feathers spreading from his back.

"I want," he said very carefully as if tasting the words, "you."

-x-

For as long as he remembered, Dean had had these dreams… where 'dream' was the wrong word entirely, because he sure as hell didn't wish to see them and mostly he wasn't even asleep. But that's what he would call them, that's what he would say to his parents when they caught him acting a little weird and they would believe him, because he wasn't weird like Sam and having a few odd dreams was okay compared to that. The Sam standard of weird was having demons whispering to your ears as you walk down the street and seeing things happen before they happened etcetera, while the Dean standard of weird was… actually not very far from that, and in truth the Dean standard of normal, but nobody besides him had to know that.

Except for Sammy, as it turned out to be one day when he was nine years old, and his younger brother was five.

He was walking down from school, alone as he usually was. It wasn't that he couldn't get friends—people liked him and he liked people, but there was just something…something telling him it was wise to keep others away. Maybe it was the fact that he could see things like, y'know, dead people's spirits in crowds or that he sometimes would catch something dark and evil and horrible in the corner of his eyes. But hey, you could never know, it could've just as well been that he didn't want to introduce others to his baby brother, right? The baby brother he absolutely treasured above all else in the world? Yes?

No—he always had a faint fear in his mind: if he could see these things, who was to say that they couldn't see him, sense him seeing them as well? Nobody, that's who, and so he kept on edge, held his distance and kept close to those important to him, his family.

That particular day had been tiring, but normal in a way that made you want to lull yourself to sleep in a false sense of security. Dean kicked the pebbles on the sidewalk counting in his mind how many days left until summer vacation and wondering what was for dinner. He was not expecting to be swept off ground by strong arms appearing out of nowhere. Other thing he was not expecting to hear was Sam's surprised shriek just two seconds after as he was unceremoniously dropped onto his little brother's bed. Inside his house.

"Dean," Sammy's eyes were wide and his nostrils were flaring in a way that would long into the future become the first hint to Dean that his brother was not okay. "Dean."

Apparently, the little guy was in a state of shock—who wouldn't be—that made him repeat Dean's name and gape like a fish. Dean rubbed his back, which now stung because of the fall.

"Yeah, I hear ya Sammy."

Sam hopped on the bed and poked his side, probably to make sure he was really there.

"You dropped from the sky… I thought it wouldn't happen. I didn't believe him when he said you would."

"Believe me, I didn't eit," he paused suddenly mid-word as the meaning of what Sam had just said caught up with him. "Who said I would what?"

"The trickster," Sam said like it was the most reasonable explanation in the world. "I've met him before too, but only when I'm sleeping. This time was different."

"Okay."

Dean looked at Sam, Sam looked at Dean. The universe held its breath for a while.

"I think we're screwed," Dean stated seriously.

Sam's face fell.

"Oh."

-x-

By the time Dean was fifteen, Sam, the little nerd, had thought up a theory for what was happening in their lives. He was eleven. Sometimes Dean felt his brother was far older than his years, but mostly not… mostly he was just that snot-nosed kid brother of his that he had to watch out for.

"So let's say there're two planes in existence," Sam started out of the blue looking up from his homework assignment at a puzzled Dean, who was holding a kettle. Their parents were out for the night. "Or there could be millions but we're looking at two. There's the plane reality's on…"

"We talking 'bout what kind of planes now? Jumbo jets?" Dean couldn't help himself.

His brother stuck out his tongue like the mature eleven year old he was—which was kind of relieving in some twisted way. "And anyway, then there's the plane where are the things that come from imagination. Like, the imaginary-plane."

Dean filled the kettle with water and listened to the continuing lecture.

"People see only the things on reality-plane but they can sort of feel the things on imaginary-plane, because they are there, even if they can't see them." Sam held a pause while he watched the older boy place the kettle on the stove, digging up instant noodles from a drawer. "And these two planes are overlapping, and on the edges it's—fuzzy."

Dean raised his eyebrows in a way he'd picked up from his father. "Fuzzy?"

"Like white noise, but you see it; if you took every imaginable plane that human eye can see and combined them you have the edges. That's what we're seeing, the edge, the dead people and the things that to others are only creations of imagination, but to us, it's real. In theory it should work the other way too." Sam had a pondering expression on as he stared at the paper in front of him; no doubt that it was the last thing in his mind. His brother sighed.

"Okay smart-pants, any idea why do we see the white… crap?" He tried to come up with something, really. Sam threw him a look. "Can't call it noise, can you…oh well. Just answer."

"I don't know, maybe we are the edges?"

"Plausible, definitely," Dean said voice very dry.

"Well you come up with something," Sam pouted slightly. "It's not that we're special or anything and I know you don't believe in destiny, so I'm not going to suggest it."

"Fuck destiny," Dean said merrily and dropped noodles in the kettle.

-x-

After that they hadn't talked about what or why for years. It just had been—they could see things others couldn't, and that was that. What they had talked about, though, had been how to kill stuff, because if you got a gift, you have to use it somehow, or that's what Sam thought at least. Dean for his part hadn't been that keen on the idea of hunting down the more dangerous, more evil things they saw. You shouldn't try to poke the tiger with a stick when it was angry, but ultimately Sam would be the end of him and he couldn't say no to the boy. If he wasn't there, there would be nobody saving Sam's sorry ass when he attempted to try something on his own.

So monster hunting, huh… he could deal with that.

They only did it when the opportunity hit them in the face, like when Sam stumbled upon a wraith or whatever it was on his very first day of junior high or the time when Dean's prom night turned from awful to… well, worse. It was something to do other than school and actually when you got used to the idea, Dean thought it was sort of fun. It was helping people, whether they knew it or not, as in this case, and that made him maybe a bit proud. He was doing a good thing—their dad had always taught them to be good.

Speaking of their dad, the thing didn't go as well with their parents as it went between the brothers. As far as John and Mary Winchester knew, they had one odd son (Sammy) who had since forever said he saw things before they happened and when he had been a child they'd even gone as far as took him to some counselling, because he had claimed that the lady next-doors was a demon. But that had been before, and now things were pretty normal with Sam, who still sometimes had that look on him, like he was seeing something different from what they saw, but was otherwise a great son. And they had Dean, who whilst not ever having been that weird, was difficult. Like, really.

To be honest, it wasn't his fault. He just didn't fit in well. Anywhere. Ever. He didn't make friends. Sure, he had people to hang out with but nobody he could really trust, because he didn't let anyone that close. He got into fights and he didn't like school all that much. But hey, he cared for his family and that was important? At least Dean thought it was. So he kept on to that thought and struggled with high school while fighting monsters in the dark.

The good thing about the creatures they could see was that they really could see them. They were physically there, though they could often vanish into thin air. What Dean didn't like, were the dreams, the things he saw when he went to bed and closed his eyes for the night.

Sam had always had weird dreams, things about the next day that would come true, or the trickster that had first been only in his head and who then had grabbed Dean that one day. To this day, Sam told him that he hadn't actually ever seen the guy; he could never remember what he looked like when he woke up, only his voice. From what Sam told, the trickster liked showing him nightmares that involved Dean getting killed over and over again for no apparent reason. Dean told him that if the jerk ever decided to show up, he would be the honorary first on his good riddance-list.

Dean's dreams were different, though, and he never told Sam about them either. It was something he kept to himself, mainly because they felt private and it somehow would've been awkward to tell everything about them, so if he couldn't show Sam the whole picture, he'd rather show him no picture at all. His dreams all had the same man, dark hair, blue eyes and a trench coat, always the same stupid trench coat. And all his life, all the nights, all the hours he had been asleep, he had been following this man. Never speaking, always running after him in a goose chase. He had tried stopping, he had gone through that in his dreams and while awake too, but it had been useless—the guy standing there, looming over his dreams had been even more unbearable than walking with him through what Dean had always thought as an endless sea of memories. Whose memories they were, he didn't know. He only knew that if he could ever catch the trench coat-man, he would have the answers.

-x-

It figured that it would all go wrong on a Saturday.

It was May and Sam had just turned fourteen, Dean was graduating in a month and everything should've been a little stressed but overall more excited than anything else. That was when Dean met the mystery man from his dreams for the first time.

Okay, maybe saying 'met' was a little exaggerating, seeing as the real situation went like this: Dean and Sam were walking towards the library, looking for leads on the ghost they'd seen a few days previous. It was all like usual, except that in the traffic lights the older suddenly had his breath taken from him as he watched a very familiar man stop right across the street, staring at him almost expectantly. He spurred into movement, ignoring Sam's near-panicked yell and almost getting hit by a car, but by the time he had crossed the street, the man was gone. And Sam punched him.

"What the hell Dean?" His voice was angry, but it couldn't cover the worry in his eyes, the scare. "Were you trying to get yourself killed?"

Dean ignored it for the sake of his question. "Tell me you saw that man?"

"What man?"

"The man in the trench coat! The man who just waltzed here and then poof he was gone!"

Sam looked confused. "Um, no?"

"Oh for the love of…" Dean rolled his eyes and then took his most serious face. "Look, there's this guy in a trench coat…"

"Yeah, I get that."

He pretended not to hear the sarcasm. "I've been seeing him in my… damn, in my dreams since forever. He's always making me follow him and now he was right there," he wailed with his hands. "I'm not nuts, I know he was there. I just don't know what it means…"

"Woah, woah, slow down." As far as Dean could read his expressions, Sam looked pissed. "You've been seeing him in your dreams? For how long?"

The older half-sighed. "For years, but—"

"Years?" It was a high pitched shriek when it left Sam's mouth, but nobody would ever tell him. "And it didn't occur to you to tell me?"

"C'mon Sammy, it isn't important..."

"Yeah? Are my dreams not important?"

Dean gave him a stern look. "I thought it was just a normal dream, not like yours."

"So now I'm different... what makes you anymore normal than me?" Sam was almost full-out shouting. "What gives you the right to... to not tell me when I've told you everything? Because I'm some weirdo, I see things in my dreams and I'm always thinking that it must be about me, and now you tell me you—" He opened and closed his mouth trying to get the words out, before stopping to swallow anymore words to that sentence and turning away. "Forget it. Guess I'm not gonna tell you either."

"About what?"

Sam was silent. Dean kicked a pebble

"Okay then..." his voice was strained. "I'm damn sorry."

"Like hell you are."

"Watch it."

A trespasser gave them an odd look. Birds chirped.

They had fought a million times, over trivial things, over big things, but for the first time Dean felt like he would be better off alone. Sam had for a long time now tried to be normal. Yeah, he had been the one who came up with the white noise-theory and he had been the one to suggest killing monsters, but under the surface he longed to be like everyone else. He worked hard to fit in. Maybe if Dean was gone from the picture, Sam would have a chance to try that for real.

An old basset hound barked with a hollow voice and Dean swallowed.

"I'm leaving Sammy."

He turned and nobody tried to stop him.

-x-

Hello, hello to all readers and thank you very much for reading the first chapter of White noise!

This is my first fic from Supernatural, and first published fic in ages, so I can't imagine what possessed me to write the longest fic I've ever written. Well, it's not that long when compared to the fics some (more amazing than me) people write, but all I've ever done before have been one shots. So, I'd like to thank my lovely Mikomiko for all the support and checking my mistakes and correcting Dean's name so very many times. I'm nothing without you, dear~

This story will be 10 chapters long (though some chapters will be shorter) and I'll try to update weekly.

Um, if you spot any mistakes please tell me and if you enjoy the story, don't hesitate to leave a comment. They make a writer's day. :)

Love, Endles