Heroes are strong, selfless, unwavering, unchanging, and as unending as eternity. Heroes are not perfect, but they wish they were.
The sight of a strange, large man looming in the dark doorway is bone chilling; the smile on his shadowed face, blood curdling.
"A beautiful morsel left unattended! Must be my lucky night." The man shrouded in shadowed darkness hisses gleefully. His hungry eyes roaming over the body of a young boy wrapped in thread bare, moth eaten sheets.
The boy frozen in fear could only do one thing pinned to the bed by the mysterious man's eyes. He could wish. He prayed for his father, his brother, anybody.
Some powerful creature must have been listening because the crack of a gun's hammer resounded through the small motel room. A bright flashed filled the empty space and an ear splitting shot sliced through the silence a shrewd, man-made mockery of thunder and lightning.
The warmth of a comforting embrace surrounded the scared young boy. Only the name of his savior – hero – was on the young boy's lips. The name escapes with a soft sigh of contentment at the warm, safe embrace,
"Dean."
The blood seeping through the older boy's shirt, the wince betraying a minimum of one broken rib, and a deep wound in his psyche goes unnoticed.
These wound mar the older boy's flesh in his adult life – angry, red, thin, and surgical, crossed by familiar ones faded by time from fighting monsters in the dark and protecting countless innocent, naïve people. The physical wounds pale in comparison to the mental scares that persist from a traumatic childhood. These scares run deep through the man's broken psyche.
The broken man stands tall with the weight of the world balanced precariously on his shoulders with a familiar ease. One mantra on the man's mind:
"Watch out for Sammy."