This is a disclaimer.
AN: Written as a b'day fic for nonniemous. Inspired by Neil, once again. HAIL GAIMAN.
And all to dance the Macabray
Dean is beginning to believe he's taken a wrong turn. He doesn't remember passing a graveyard on the way to school when he's walked there and back with Dad.
It's a big graveyard, and an old one. It's overgrown and messy. Dean stands with his face almost pressed to the heavy iron bars of the old gate and stares through them. He doesn't like graveyards much. People had said that Mom was in one now, but Dean knows better; he heard the men in orange talking to Dad. If Mom didn't want to go there, they couldn't be nice places.
But Dad never seems to mind them, and neither does Pastor Jim or Caleb or any of Dad's other friends, so maybe they're OK. Dean isn't sure. It's hard to make your mind up about graveyards when you're ten years old and you've heard at least sixteen different accounts of them and all you're really sure of is that your Mom isn't in one. Stuff like that confuses you.
There's a path through the graveyard. Maybe it was gravel once, but it's mostly just a line in the grass now. Thick clumps of brambles and heather and all sorts of plants Dean doesn't know the name of hang over it, trail alongside it, wrap themselves around it. Further on, near that big mausoleum, there are trees, big old oaks and elms and birches. There aren't all that many, but they're taller than the mausoleum and their branches rest on its roof, making them look like old men resting against a standing stone. Dean can't see beyond them.
He can, however, make out the gravestones. Here and there and everywhere, they squat in the messy undergrowth, beneath bushes, in the middle of bramble patches. They're grey and green and brown and broken, and Dean, quite suddenly, wants to know who they belong to.
His hands wrap around the bars of the gate, and he fits a foot onto one of the strips of iron that curl its way across the gate horizontally in patterns that look like ivy. Poison Ivy, probably, Dean thinks. But he's stronger and nimbler and far braver than most boys his age, and he reaches the arched top of the gates without much difficulty. Deciding how best to climb over them takes a minute - this way first, or the other? Change his hands around before he puts a leg over? Drop his schoolbag to the ground to make it easier?
It makes a dull, irritated thud when it hits the ground after dropping from such a great height, but there's nothing breakable in it. Dean's books might be a bit bent out of shape, but that doesn't matter. He'll still be able to read them. He scrabbles down the inside of the gates like a monkey descending a tree, and drops lightly down the last three feet. Dad would be proud of that climb, he thinks.
The graveyard smells like wet grass and trees and old, old stone. Dean picks his way over to the nearest headstone, quiet as a mouse. It's not the sort of place to be loud in, this. His ratty black Chucks make no noise on the ground. His jeans are trailing again, soaking up the wet. He slips and slides in the wet leaves that coat the little path. Now that he's in the graveyard, Dean can see that the path branches out into three different ways up near the mausoleum, and he thinks there's another building off to his right, hidden behind bushes, draped in ivy. Maybe it's a chapel.
A mournful wind sweeps the graveyard, rustling bushes, dancing with the grasses. It's so completely cliché that Dean grins to himself; he might only be ten, but he's seen a horror movie or two, usually without Dad knowing about it. Mournful winds in graveyards are not scary, and that's that. He feels a lot more comfortable now – enough to run a little, to jump over a tangle of tree-roots and struggle through a bramble-patch pretending that he's on a mission, a quest, a hunt in the wilderness, on his way to save the world.
Tomorrow, he'll bring Sammy, and they'll climb and duck and play at hide-and-seek and Indiana Jones until it gets dark, and they have to go home or Dad will worry. That'll be great fun.
By the time he's stopped being Mowgli exploring the ruins of the monkey city deep in the jungle, Dean's a little lost. He went past that tree – there was a path behind it – beyond that gravestone was the hazel tree he climbed to taunt the Red Dogs, so the gate is in that – no, the other –
Oh, damn.
Dean is vaguely aware that this is the point where most kids would start to cry, or panic, but Dean is not most kids. He's a Winchester, and Winchesters panic about as often as they lose, which is never. Dad says so.
So Dean drops his canvas sack full of stolen rubies (it transforms back into a schoolbag once it hits the ground), and does a 360 turn, taking in the whole view. Gravestones and mausoleums and trees and bushes and winding little fake pathways and brambles and the top of a grey, gloomy wall glimpsed through dead branches.
OK then. That answers that question. All he has to do is make it to the wall, and then walk along it. He'll come to the gate sooner or later if he does. No walls last forever. No graveyards are boundless.
He's Hansel now, following imaginary breadcrumbs through the undergrowth. Of course, he's missing a Gretel; but Sammy would probably complain about being called a girl even if he were here.
Wuss. But then, he's only six. That's why Dean needs to get back and look after him.
It's getting darker as the gloomy grey day draws to an end, and Dean thinks maybe the graveyard is a little scary after all. He shivers in his thin denim jacket when the wind comes back, harsher than before. More insistent. But the last straw doesn't come till he catches his foot on a tussock of earth hidden in the gloom, and falls face-down in the mud and brambles.
Dean scrambles up, running through his extensive compilation of Caleb's favourite cuss-words. His jeans are torn, his hands are scratched, blood is running down his legs and staining his trousers red from the inside out, under the grass-stains and the mud. He's shaking, he thinks disgustedly. What a dumb thing to do, start shaking like a girl.
He looks up, and finds himself more or less face-to-face with the creepiest grave he's ever seen in his life.
Actually, it would look quite normal if it weren't for the angel roosting on the top, wings outstretched. It's old, cracked and green with moss, like a thousand others. But that angel, perched on the stone staring down at the little boy who's just fallen to sprawl at her feet like an offering, a sacrifice to her god –
Dean jumps up. He's Dean Winchester, and he doesn't sprawl in front of anyone. Especially not creepy-ass stone angels with indistinct faces and broken fingers, outstretched as if in supplication, in pleading.
All the same, he's ten years old, lost in a graveyard, and it's getting dark, so he takes a step back on still-trembling legs, and promptly trips again, over his forgotten schoolbag this time, landing on his backside with a pained hiss.
This, in all probability, is what saves his life.
There's a crash and a yell in the bushes on the other side of the creepy gravestone, voices shouting, the sound of someone – a girl? – crying. Dean, flat on the ground as he is, can't be seen from the people over the other side, and he scrambles for a hiding-place without really thinking about it, leaving smears of blood on the ground but hopefully they won't notice that, and then there's another crash as a bush is trampled on, and that's when Dean realises that the newcomers aren't people.
Three of them in all, and they look like people, true; but they look like people in the way that raisins look like grapes, shrivelled-up and dried out. They're small and brown and wrinkled, they're ragged and spindly. They're loud and boisterous and cackling, and they're dragging a small girl in a blue coat and pink mittens.
"No," she sobs, "no, no, lemme go, don't wanna, Mommy, please, no, don't..."
The things cackle louder than ever, tear at her jacket, pull at her hair. Two of them have a hold of her sleeves, while the third skips ahead of them. Everyone's talking at once, a din of harsh creaky voices and high-pitched laughter.
"Come on, come on! You'll like it, you will. Sights unseen by mortal man! Now, now, come along! We'll show you adventure. We'll show you fun! Come on!"
One of the three leaps up to the creepy grave as the others hang back, and bows before the supplicating angel, a ridiculous gesture so low that it nearly makes him overbalance and fall on his nose. Dean stifles an inadvertent (and probably a little hysterical) giggle. This is a hunt, he thinks. This is a job. Maybe it's the job we came to town for in the first place, but Dad's picking up Sammy from school and I said I'd be home an hour ago so he has no idea where I am and I have to stop them taking that girl anywhere. Dad would stop them.
Dad's not here. Dean draws a breath and shifts around in his hiding place till he's ready to spring to his feet and run at a moment's notice. His right hand is clenched tight around the sharpest, heaviest stick he could reach, which isn't very impressive but it will do, and then the thing that bowed to the angel straightens up and lifts up skinny, stick-like arms to the sky in a melodramatic gesture that makes Dean want to snicker again.
"Skagh! Thegh! Khavagah!" it shouts, or something that sounds very much like that, and Dean gasps involuntarily, for the stone covering the grave over which the angel stoops slides back and swings away like a trapdoor, and underneath it is nothing but darkness.
The little girl bursts into tears, and one of the things that has a hold of her arm gives it a shake.
"Now, now, girlie. You wait! It's dark and gloomy now, but the beauty we'll show you! The things you'll see! The places you'll go, where no other human has ever been – "
It's tugging her closer and closer to the hole in the ground, the doorway, the entrance, whatever, as it speaks, and Dean decides enough is enough. He jumps up and yells, "Hey!" in what he hopes is a suitably defiant voice, but his dramatic appearance is drowned out by a gunshot, the impact of which blows the thing that opened the grave into that same chasm, shrieking all the way.
From the echoes, it's a very long way.
Dean lunges for the girl and grabs her, dragging her down to the ground to sprawl in the mud for the third time that day, and no sooner are they down than more gunshots boom through the graveyard. Dean raises his head a fraction of an inch and understands that the bullets aren't actually killing the things. Nor are they meant to; Dad's driving them back, shot after shot, towards the grave and the gateway into darkness, and they both fall, shrieking and yelling in angerpainfear.
The stone swings up and shut with a groan of ancient, maltreated stone. Dean sits up and stares in fascination.
"Dean, what the Hell are you doing here?" Dad yells, loud as the gunshots, and Dean jumps to his feet (and then staggers, because his legs are still shaky), about to apologise, but the next moment he's got his face pressed in into a leather jacket, and Dad's holding him so tight he can barely breathe.
Behind them, the girl in the pink mittens starts to howl.
*********
"They were funny," she says in the car. Sam's sitting in the back next to her, eyes wide but not really understanding a thing that's going on. Dad will probably just tell him it was bad men who tried to take her away.
Dean, in the passenger seat (and feeling extremely grow-up because of it), snorts. "That's a good excuse for going with them to an empty graveyard in the middle of nowhere. You saw what they looked like, didn't you?"
She glares at him. "Just because you think you know everything. My Mom and Dad are getting divorced, you know!"
"I never noticed when that became an excuse for acting like an idiot," Dad mutters under his breath.
"Yeah, well," Dean says. "My Mom's dead. You don't see me going into empty graveyards with raisin-people who worship stone angels."
Dad turns a little and gives him a Look.
"I wanna see the raisin-people!" Sammy calls out from the back. "Dad, can I see the raisin-people?"
*********
Once they've got rid of the girl with the pink mittens, had dinner and put Sammy to bed, Dean sits next to Dad on the ratty old couch in their apartment and kicks at the unstable-looking coffee-table. Any minute now, the lecture will start.
"It was a ghoul-gate," Dad says at last, looking down at him. "An entrance into – well, no one knows. The only people who've been dumb enough to go down there don't usually come back. A lot of old cemeteries have one: a grave that becomes a portal into some kind of underworld."
"Like Hell?" Dean asks.
"Maybe, yeah. Like I said, no one really knows."
Dean sighed. "It was creepy."
"It was," Dad agreed. "And you did real good, getting that girl out of the way. But what were you doing in that cemetery in the first place?" There's an edge to his voice, a bite of anger and worry that never fails to make Dean flinch despite the praise.
"It wasn't a graveyard," he admits. "I mean, it was, but it... it was the ruined city in the jungle, and I was looking for the white cobra."
For a moment, Dad stares, not understanding. Then he snorts. "Were you now."
Dean nods, miserably.
Dad groans. "You know, Dean... ah, Hell. I can't even yell at you, you saved that girl." He sounds... almost amused now. Almost.
Dean makes a face. Dad can still yell at him. He's sure of it. But Dad doesn't; instead, he finishes his glass of beer and puts it down on the coffee table. Then he says, "I trust you, you know. I trust you to be smart. And to look after yourself. Which is part of the reason I'm not yelling, I guess. And it's not like you knew what was going on. But as Bagheera doubtless said to Mowgli, no more ruined cities, OK? There are safer places to play."
Dean nods again, feeling a lot happier, and Dad tousles his hair and pulls him close.