'Soaking up the sun' by Tomorrows Dust
For one so small, you seem so strong
'You're not my real mom, are you?' the boy asked calmly, eyes so gentle that they burned all her layers away. It wasn't a question. 'No,' she whispered, unable to tell him anything but the truth. 'I'm not.'
'Okay', he said simply. He stared at her a moment longer; smiled knowingly at whatever it was he saw in her face and got back to playing with his little plastic cars. He almost looked like a child there. Diane trembled. He was five years old, but he wasn't young.
My arms will hold you, keep you safe and warm
Harold didn't really believe his wife. The kid was being perfectly ... child-like, he thought. The boy was a little odd sometimes, like when he read the dictionary and the encyclopedia in one day, but in the end, he was just a little boy with some quirks. Normal.
But Harold couldn't deny that this boy seemed to understand more than he let on, saw more than Harold had ever been able to phantom. 'Your head hurts,' the boy quietly remarked one sweet scented Sunday afternoon. Harold startled. He hadn't heard the child come up.
This bond between us can't be broken
I will be here, don't you cry
Harold pushed the paper aside slightly as the boy stretched out his arms, waiting to be picked up. From Harold's' lap, the child relocated himself to the table. It could've been a picture from a storybook, soft light touching and carving lines in both their figures, making them out to be a perfect painting. The boy touched both his hands to Harold's forehead and looked deeply into his eyes. His face grew sympathetically sad for a moment.
'Don't worry so much. I already know.' Certainty and truth. Felt suspiciously like a sledgehammer to the gut to Harold. He scared so badly that he nearly dislodged the boy from his place on the tabletop. Cold sweat broke out all over his skin and he couldn't remember how to breathe.
But the child smiled kindly and with such deep and profound understanding that Harold felt a chill going down his spine. The boy was anything but normal. Harold trembled just as his wife had. The boy motioned for him to lean forward again, and he put his tiny hands under the man's chin, framing his face, clearly enunciating the message he was trying to convey: 'I don't hate you for what you did. Things were meant to be this way.'
Coz you'll be in my heart. Yes, you'll be in my heart.
From this day on, now and forever more.
He touched his palms to Harold's forehead again - making a sweeping motion - and it was only when the boy had left the room, that Harold realised his headache was gone; together with some of the weight that he'd been carrying around on his shoulders for a few years now. He doesn't resent me for what we've done. The sigh in his mind felt like it came from deep inside his bones. Relief.
'I still have a family out there, don't I?' Another statement. Never questions. The boy never seemed to just ask questions. How the child got the information, Diane and Harold couldn't begin to imagine. They nodded silently, quietly uneasy and perhaps a little ashamed. Dinner was well prepared, but it tasted like ashes in their mouths. The only one oblivious to Diane and Harold's emotional struggle was the boy; munching away contentedly on the vegetables he'd arranged in odd patterns, humming to himself while chewing. Maybe he really didn't notice. Diane and Harold both had the oddest feeling he did though.
The first time that Diane had seen the boy less than fully accepting of the situation as it was right now, presented itself on a sunny Tuesday morning. The boy got home halfway through the day, apparently having ditched school, which was very unlike him.
Why can't they understand the way we feel
They just don't trust what they can't explain
His eyes were slightly wild and he was agitated. 'I have a brother,' he whispered over and over again, awed and with a certain sense of desperation. 'I have a brother. And he's looking for me.' There was so much feeling behind that faint echo, Diane felt as if the breath was throttled out of her.
She wept. 'I swear I didn't know. Oh God, what have we done?!' The boy didn't comfort her. Not this time. He had just turned six, but he looked very old.
Life went on as it always had. Sometimes it almost seemed like they were just another family. A handsome man and a pretty wife in the suburbs, circle complete with their cute and intelligent son. Pretending, that's what they were good at.
Don't listen to them, coz what do they know
We need each other, to have, to hold.
They'll see in time, I know
Harold grew more uneasy with every month that passed. His white fence and carefully cut grass seemed confining to him. Uncomfortable. He felt out of place in his own habitat. Later he'd say he had felt the change coming like an incoming storm.
The boy did too. The first weeks after he'd somehow come to understand that he had a brother, the child had paced the neighborhood like a predator in a cage, but the more days passed, the more calm he became. Diane described him as serene. Yeah, Harold thought. That was exactly it. The boy must feel the change coming too, only it didn't make him uneasy.
He was never a child of many words. Only spoke when he had something useful to say, so without preamble or twisting around the point, he announced on a Saturday at exactly 8.32 AM: 'He's coming for me. He'll be here this afternoon.' Neither Diane nor Harold had to ask who he meant.
Diane just covered her heart with her hand. They were going to lose their boy. They'd known it for a while now, but somehow, no matter how much time you spent preparing, it's always too soon; there's never enough to time. She wasn't ready. She didn't think she'd ever be. Diane loved him like a son. She bent her head and cried softly. The child was suddenly before her, wiping her despair away with her tears. His small hands were comfortably warm. 'It's okay. It's time for me to go. You've been good to me, but I need to go home.'
The words did make her feel marginally better. He didn't blame them and perhaps that had to be enough.
When destiny calls you, you must be strong
I may not be with you, but you have to hold on
The boy knew. He knew that he had a brother who was coming to find him. He knew about his brothers destiny and even if he would never have any words to be able to explain the concept to another human being, he knew about his own. He knew why he was here, why life had sent him on such a twisting and winding road. If he was frightened, he never showed it. He didn't possess hesitation. He just knew it, understood it, and he was okay with it.
The boy had seen this bright ribbon flowing from his own heart every time he had closed his eyes, to someone else out there and once he'd been able to follow it to the end, he'd simply known who was on the other side. Brother. My brother, his heart whispered with many joyful voices of exuberance.
The boy had tugged on the bond, trying to connect with this person. The one on the other side was bright like the sun, but sluggish to react to the boys prodding. The child understood quickly enough that the Sun - as he'd quickly named his brother - didn't get the whole idea as he himself did. The Sun couldn't reach out like the boy had. But they didn't have to communicate. There was a feeling present, so powerful and all encompassing, that the boy knew nothing would be able to damage that.
Dean arrived in the afternoon. His dad had parked the car half a mile down the road and they walked the last bit. Needed to clear their heads. Sammy would've turned seven only a few days ago. Four years since they'd last seen him. Would it really be him this time? So many disappointments already. Hardly dared to hope anymore. And if it were him, would he even remember his real family? Dad was worried.
Dean had been too. Just until a couple months back, when he'd suddenly been overwhelmed by the inexplicable notion that Sam was safe, and knew exactly what was going on. With all his eleven year old wisdom he'd tried to explain it to Dad, but after receiving a widespread range of blank stares, Dean stopped trying.
Half a mile seemed like forever. Impatience gnawed at Dean's already thin self-restraint.
Come stop crying, it'll be alright
Just take my hand, hold it tight
They didn't even need to ring the doorbell. Dad and Dean had hardly managed to reach the door when it was opened and a little boy with floppy hair and glowing hazel eyes appeared. Dean couldn't move as the child searched his face and cracked a blinding smile. 'You are my brother,' he stated with an authoritative certainty. Dean just nodded. He felt it too.
The world didn't exist outside of them. Not Diane, not Harold, not even Dad. Little Sammy stepped forward and took Dean by the hand. Completeness, that's what the feeling was. Something was found that had been missing for such a long time that it had felt like forever to
Dean.
Sam led Dean to the soft couch in the den and gently sat him down with so much tenderness, so much care, that it looked as if he thought Dean might break at any possible moment. And Dean thought that perhaps he might. All flesh on the outside and all fragile cracked glass on the inside.
Sam let Dean bury his face in his shirt and get snot and tears all over it. Maybe Sam cried a little too. Great heaving sobs Dean let out, because they were finally whole again. The big aching hole in Dean's chest that had grown and grown and grown and eaten so much of him was suddenly soothed. It didn't burn so badly anymore. Just like that.
Diane and Harold were very accommodating. It probably kept John from burning their house to the ground. Even Dean had to grudgingly admit they were actually pretty nice people, if not for the fact that they'd stolen his little brother. But they hadn't known for sure Sam had any family left and they'd yearned for a child so badly that they'd pushed their guilty conscience and uneasy suspicions aside a bit too eagerly.
The child had been alone when they found him on their holiday, abandoned in the middle of some lonely woods. Scratched, the boy had been, dressed in torn rags. Red face exhausted from screaming and crying and big, soulful eyes. It was easy to convince themselves that the child had been left there on purpose, that such parents didn't deserve to have such a beautiful child, that Diane and Harold would take better care of it themselves.
They cried a lot when they told the story. Apologised too. Stammered and wept. They looked haggard, worn thin of all the worrying they'd done and all the guilt-trips they'd been on. Dean didn't know what to do with it. Brother-kidnappers that he'd hated for longer than he cared to remember suddenly showed themselves to be human. Not a spirit to pump full of rock-salt, or a demon that needed to be exorcised. Just two faulty humans.
They couldn't have known the Winchester's cabin had been attacked by werewolves. They couldn't have known Sam had been dragged out into the woods. They couldn't have known that Dad hadn't been in any condition to search for his son because he'd been in a coma for three weeks in some local grubby hospital. They didn't know how Dean had felt when the doctors had told him his Dad might be dying while he was still adjusting to the horrible crippling fact that a vital part of his own heart had gone missing in the woods.
Dean didn't want to explain to Diane and Harold how he had grieved, how he had hurt, how he had singlehandedly combed out the entire forest and called his brothers name until his throat bled and he slept where he stood.
Sam knew like he had known everything else. He touched his brothers shoulder to pull Dean from his melancholy musings and smiled. 'I heard you. I heard you call for me then and I've heard it every day since.'
Everything Dean had ever been insecure about, that ever had him wide awake in the middle of the night with cold sweat dancing it's way down his spine was wiped out, just like that. Clean slate. Every thing's okay now. You didn't fail me. You've been with me all along and I know of all your struggles. You did enough. You are enough. Home. You are my home.
Dean didn't know if he imagined the faint comforting whispers tickling at the back of his mind that sounded so much like his little brother, but he allowed for them to wrap around him like a warm blanket. He gruffly pulled Sam to his side, putting an arm around his small shoulders in an act of both protectiveness and possessiveness. 'Home,' Dean breathed contentedly.
John smiled at them in a way that lit up his tired dead eyes. If they were a little more red than usual or if there were salty tracks down his cheeks, nobody commented on it. 'Home,' Sam confirmed and smiled back.
Yes, I'll be with you. Cause I'll be there for you always.
Just look over your shoulder, I'll be there, always.
Author's notes: Sam was three years old when he 'got lost' and he was seven when his family came to take him home, for if anyone was confused.
This story has been disturbing all my other thought-processes for quite a while now. I thought it might be interesting to have a completely different take on the boys, their relationship and Sam's gifts. Children can be really intuitive and I really liked working with this special Sammy
While revising this, I heard that song from Phil Collins on the radio and I felt it fit in real well. Or is it too sappy?
Thank you for reading, please let me know what you think of the story whenever you can find the time! I long to discover whether you liked it or not,
huggels, TD