Windmills of the Mind

Characters/Pairing: Gen - Ben and Lisa Braeden
Word count: 1028
Warnings: Season 7 spoilers if you know what to look for.
Summary: Ben is having strange dreams he can't remember, and finds himself compelled to do odd things that he can't explain, even to himself.

Ben awoke with a start, heart pounding. He lay for a moment struggling with that initial confusion that suggested he was still caught up in the dreaming, and even as he absorbed the fact that he was definitely no longer sleeping, as always, the last rag-tag tails of the dream slipped away before he could grasp them.

Frustrated, he sat up, checked the glowing green digits of his alarm clock and sighed. 04:47. Still over two hours before he'd have to get up and face school again. He had another appointment with his shrink after soccer practice, which would just about put the pretty pink bow onto what he anticipated would be yet another perfect day. He ignored the voice at the back of his mind that was telling him he knew exactly how to deal with those dick-for-brains bullies in his class, because the Voice was just another symptom of the emptiness he knew existed in his life, and that had gotten him into this whole situation where his Mom felt it necessary to refer him to a child psychiatrist in the first place.

So. Ignoring you, Voice.

Ben sighed again. He knew his defiance of the Voice was as hollow as the hole in his life. It was hard to pretend even to himself that whatever it said wasn't real when he'd spent an hour last night (as he did every night) after Mom had gone to bed following its instructions to lay the salt lines, Ben, and make sure you check the Devil's trap under the door mat, and don't forget to slip that iron knife under your pillow before you go to sleep…

He might not be able to remember his dreams, he might not have a clue who or what the Voice was, or what it meant that he was hearing it at all, but he did know, with a certainty that no psychiatrist could shake, that it was important – no – essential – to safeguard his house and his Mom by taking these precautions, however crazy that made him seem.

Sometimes he hated the Voice. Sometimes he loved it and ached for it in a way he didn't understand, and it didn't feel wrong or dirty, which seemed to be the direction the shrink wanted to push him. Not that he'd told her about the Voice, not as such. He didn't want her to think he was totally insane, after all. Ben might be cracking at the seams but he wasn't stupid.

Ben pushed back the covers and swung his bare feet out of bed. As he clearly wasn't going to get back to sleep, maybe he should just double-check the protections, just in case. One time he'd gotten up in the morning to find Mom had left a window open overnight, and one of the salt lines had broken when the curtain had moved in the night breezes. After that incident he had started thinking about better ways to work these essential guards into the fabric of the house. He reckoned he could score a channel into each wooden window sill and then seal the salt in, fill in the holes with putty afterwards so no one would notice, but his Mom never went out for long enough for him to put that idea into effect.

He slipped silently down the stairs, careful to avoid the creaky second to last step. He didn't want to wake his Mom for lots of reasons, not least because she'd been looking so tired lately. In fact, she'd been tense and irritable ever since CNN had shown that cctv footage of guy in the trench-coat slaughtering all those people a couple of weeks ago. Images that were burned into Ben's brain, together with a disturbed sense of impossible familiarity left by the face of the perpetrator when the man had stared up at the camera and smiled. Impossible because Ben was certain he had never seen the guy before.

Ben shook off an involuntary shiver at the memory of those cold blue eyes, though he didn't stop to question how he knew they were blue, given that the footage had been grainy black and white.

He stopped with his hand on the door handle of the living room, momentarily frozen in place. Then he heard it again, the unmistakable sound of movement behind the closed door.

Something had penetrated his wards.

His heart sped up and he couldn't help a despairing glance over his shoulder, looking back up the stairs as he regretted not having brought the knife down with him. Be careful, Ben, the Voice whispered. Yeah, like he needed patronising at a time like this. It's not like there was anyone else here to defend his family. Remember, there's salt in the kitchen… Ben went rapidly from irritated to grateful for the reminder.

He ran into the kitchen and grabbed the fancy sea salt. He spread a thick line of the expensive condiment along the threshold of the living room door and when he was satisfied with his work he boldly threw open the door, holding the half empty container at the ready. Whoever (whatever) this invader was, it was going to get a faceful of fugly-dissolving salt as soon as it…

"Ben?"

"Mom!"

"What are you doing out of bed?"

"What are you doing, Mom?"

"You first, kiddo." Lisa Braeden said, her dark gaze fixed on the salt container still gripped tight in Ben's hand. For a second, Ben considered spinning her a line about hearing a noise and coming down to investigate, but the Voice told him to be honest with her, and something deep inside Ben agreed. It felt right.

"I couldn't sleep and I wanted to check everything was…," he hesitated as Lisa touched a finger to the almost invisible white grains along the white painted windowsill and very carefully didn't break the line. She finished the sentence for him. "Everything was secure. I know."

She gave him a look that was full of emotions, most of which Ben couldn't name – regret, remorse, remembrance.

"Me too, Ben. Me too."

A/N I was just struck by the thought - what if Castiel's passing (wherever he went) resulted in a loosening of the bindings he put on the Braedens' minds? So that memories and odd snippets of information that Cas wiped from their minds along with Dean started finding their way back through...