Chapter 2: Not-so-Happy Halloween

October 31, 2005

Palo Alto, California

It is cold and raining in California, and Ellie Winchester doesn't really know why. She had been brushing up on the state through the brochures she snagged at the last gas station stop. The pictures depicted California as sunny, hot, and containing people who were always smiling for some reason – Ellie guessed she would be too if she could be a movie star in Hollywood – and the girl was finally beginning to understand why Sam ditched Dad, Dean, and her for the place. But when Dean pulled up to Sam's apartment in the middle of the night, the air flow was being mean and bitter towards Ellie, and for some reason it had begun to drizzle. She missed the warm rumble of the Impala the second Dean pulled the key out of the ignition, and then she missed her eldest brother when he pushed his body into the building's unknown darkness – it's dark everywhere, but at least outside and the car is known darkness – after he had admonished Ellie to stay put because he'd be right back. She hopes he hurries up because the streetlight above flickers every twelve seconds – she counted – and the soft patter of raindrops against the vehicle Dean refers to as Baby are a weak distraction.

Ellie swings her legs back and forth on the passenger seat, the tips of her sneakers barely reaching the floor mat. It's Halloween night and she wanted to go out, but Dean said not this year because they have work to do, as always. Besides, once when her brown eyes caught sight of some of the costumes that she had actually seen in real life, Ellie decided that she didn't really want to go trick-or-treating anyway.

Two years have passed since Sam left for college, and Ellie has not seen or heard from her makeshift brother since the uproar his departure created. Ellie spent over a year with the three Winchesters after John had taken her in, becoming her legal guardian and new father figure. His sons, therefore, acquired the role as older brothers, although they remained reluctant and distant for at least the first month or so. John informed Ellie that the two would come around, and when they did, Ellie, who was seven-years-old at the time, gravitated more towards the younger of the two, Sam. Sam Winchester helped Ellie with homework, colored with the girl because they both liked to draw, and watched The Little Mermaid until he practically knew the whole transcript. So when he disappeared and never called, or even as much wrote, Ellie did feel a little hurt.

Ellie is closer with Dean now because she realized his music wasn't all that bad, even if the lyrics don't make sense sometimes, and he sneaks her sweets on occasion. Things were beginning to level out without Sam, until Dad didn't come home from a hunt, and everything got dark again. Ellie doesn't know what she is going to say to Sam when Dean brings him out into the cold air, and the thought of the family reunion causes her leg movement to still, and she grips the seatbelt that is securely fastened across her chest.

The girl listens to the rain, uses a finger to follow the race of two raindrops on the glass of Baby's window. The left raindrop wins, if she would've bet she would have lost. It's really late, she thinks; like 2 AM or something. Ellie should be asleep because there are a lot of stars in the sky, but she's not tired enough. The streetlight overhead blinks off, on, and then stays dead. She misses Dean again.

The clouds decide to stop crying, leaving tears on Baby's frame, and Ellie twitches when she hears the sound of the door bang open. The thud of boots on hard concrete follows; there's a voice, distant, but still there. She can't really hear it, and her heartrate picks up for no particular reason because the thoughts in her head aren't real. Everything is coming closer, and the Impala is parked in a way so she can't quite see what is going on, but she doesn't turn because sometimes things are less scary that way.

"So, what are you gonna do?" Dean's voice cuts through the static tension and Ellie can breathe again. "Are you just gonna live some normal, apple-pie life?" Ellie picks up on a different voice than her brother's in response to the question. The voice is recognizable, but carries a different tone. It says that the life they're living is not normal, just safe. And somehow Ellie is seven-years-old again and learning her multiplication table because "you gotta learn it, bug", and she thinks she wants to be safe when she reaches back to unbuckle her seatbelt.

Ellie pops Baby's door open and slides out of the leather that with all of the smells combined, give off an aroma of what she guesses a person's living soul would smell like if there was such a scent. Dean, Sam, and Ellie were all raised within the Impala's interior, parts of them remaining within. Static runs up Ellie's legs when she makes a touchdown on wet pavement, and she wiggles her toes to bring feeling back into the limbs. The passenger side door closes, bouncing off of the brick buildings surrounding, and the two Winchester brothers angle their bodies to look at the young girl.

Sam. Sam Winchester appears to Ellie like something she swears she read in a book once but cannot remember – familiar. Sometimes, Ellie reads words backwards; though, and that's okay because if people can walk backwards and think backwards, why not live backwards? Sam is backwards, and different, and has longer hair, and less tired eyes, and a changed voice. Ellie almost wishes to hug him, but Sam left and got all bent out of the shape she used to view him as, and when everything is backwards hugging is equivalent to pushing someone away.

Sam watches the girl for a moment longer before she sees him swallow, shifting with the beat of his heart, "Dean, she's nine-years-old – she – Ellie shouldn't be sitting up front . . ." His voice is soft on Ellie's ears and doesn't sound anything at all like being scolded. It floats away, such as his breath under the moonlight in this not-how-California-was-supposed-to-be temperature. "Her feet can't even touch the floor – "

"How would you even know," Dean interrupts Sam's gentle train of thought. It goes as quiet as it should be at two in the morning. Ellie blinks – she does all the time but she remembers this one – and she thinks it might start raining so there at least can be something, but it doesn't, and then she's trying to figure out why Sam never said 'hi'. She brushes her hand through the raindrops covering the Impala like spots, and it is merely water, but it feels as if it is different water; smells like metal.

"I got taller, Sammy." Ellie says, absentminded yet sure, as the child lets a raindrop roll down the length of her index finger. Besides, didn't Sam go away so that Ellie could sit shotgun while Dean drove? So that he could smile and become a movie star in gloomy California?

Dean asks why Sam ran away in the first place. Ellie is sure he knows the answer; though, but it's just an adult thing, ask questions you know the answer to.

Sam answers as if no argument occurred when he got caught trying to sneak out – but like a kind of sneaking out you don't come back from – in Wisconsin beyond the purple walls of a motel room, "I was just going to college. It was Dad who said if I was gonna go, I should stay gone." Dad. Dad is the reason Dean took Ellie cross country to have some sucky family reunion in an alley, smashed between a cold front and the aftermath of a slight drizzle. "And that's what I'm doin'."

Dean pulls a face Ellie pinpoints as him listening to Sam, but overall not quite caring. There are bigger problems. "Yeah, well, Dad's in real trouble right now, if he's not dead already. I can feel it."

It's all off, more so than usual. Ellie steps closer to Sam, yanking the sleeves of her jacket over the palms of her hands while her foot toes in a puddle. "He ran away, too; or something . . ."

Dean grips Ellie's shoulder to address the two of them as a unit. He squeezes some and Ellie focuses on feeling it. She keeps her head down at the puddle by her feet, at the reflection she can't see because it's too dark and the streetlight burnt out. "Listen, Sam, El and I . . . we can't do this alone."

Ellie raises her head to search for a reaction from the older brother that her eyes have not flicked over in two years.

He's shaking his head. "Yes, you can."

Dean sighs and Ellie realizes his hand slipped off her shoulder. "Yeah," he admits. "Well, we don't want to." Dean is putting words in Ellie's mouth, which she guesses is okay because he claims that what he says goes due to his age merit. Just like she guesses Sam left for a legitimate reason besides to only get away. Like she guesses John Winchester is a father to her, even if he's absent more often than not, because she can't remember the sound of her own father's voice besides a blurry recording in backwards world.

It's then that Sam asks what Dad was hunting, and the world "hello" leaves his lips, directed towards nine-year-old Ellie, who acts more like a teenager than anything at all.

The arsenal nestled under the bottom compartment in the Impala's trunk is no surprise, at least in the universe of hunters. If anything, it is more of a code of conduct. The three Winchesters crowd around the open trunk while Dean rifles through its contents; his hands wade through various types of weaponry and bags of salt like they are household items. Ellie cranes her head to look up at the velvet sky, the action making her feel light and tired. She blows into the air, catching more oxygen on the next inhale.

"So, when Dad left, why didn't you guys go with him?" Sam asks and Ellie stops moving around in the sleepy cold. His voice is freshly resurrected in her brain and she wants nothing more than to weave herself into the octaves. She knows that cannot happen; though, because this is just one case, one case out of the hundreds, and come some morning Sam's voice will be lost to the wind again. And for Ellie, it will return to watching the back of John's pickup for hours on the road, hushed whispers when Dean and John believe she is asleep, papers pinned to the walls – all because a demon with yellow eyes ruined everything with a thought.

It's only when Dean replies does Ellie recall what the question was in the first place. "We were doing other things, working a gig . . ." Ellie remembers that they were down in Louisiana when John got a call about some other case. He said that it was important, that he had to go. He told Dean and Ellie to finish up what was started – was very adamant about the whole situation – and he would return eventually. But John never did.

Ellie tunes into her oldest brother's voice once more, it's spaced out from him searching through all the stuff in the trunk, " . . . this voodoo thing down in New Orleans – Ellie, did you move the files?"

The girl walks forward because her body was drifting further away from the two than she liked. She shakes her head, but once she realizes Dean isn't looking at her, she says, "No."

She doesn't like to read stuff like that. Besides, the words can get all scrambled at times and it hurts.

Sam looks amused at this point and Ellie doesn't know why. He leans on the car. "Dad let you go on a hunting trip by yourselves?"

Dean pauses. "I'm twenty-six, dude." He jerks his head Ellie's way. "She's got Baby to keep her safe. We're fine."

The expression plastered across Sam's face remains the same, entitlement radiating from his skin. The age gap between the two boys is four years, and Ellie cannot seem to comprehend why Sam is talking older, standing older, acting older – Things change, people morph into other beings, but birthdays? Birthdays don't.

Dean finds the case file tucked under a bag of something that Ellie thought she already saw him look under. He lifts it up, makes some kind of "ahh", singing noise. Sam rolls his eyes, Ellie smiles. Dean starts breaking the case down for Sam, but Ellie has heard it all before. Jericho, California, two lane road, slab of concrete – a guy disappeared, police found his car, no trace of the victim, though.

Instead of listening, Ellie eyes the manila folder in Dean's hands. She thinks about how the material is rough and loves giving paper cuts; exhibit A being the little line on her left pinkie finger that she winced at when hand sanitizer seeped into it earlier that day. The girl also hates the word: manila. It sounds alien; something she just made up in her own head to compensate for all of the backwards sentences in books, like an imaginary friend she had at one time.

The sound of Sam speaking captures Ellie and puts her back into the conversation. "So, maybe he was kidnapped," Sam shrugs, gripping one of the many papers in the file.

"That's what we thought, too," Dean hands him another paper, "until we dug a little deeper. Here's another one in April, another one in December '04, '03, '98, '92 . . . ten of them over the past twenty years." With each year, Dean presses another paper down into Sam's hands until he has a pile. All different people with different lives, and personalities, and likes, and dislikes – but still the same case, nonetheless. Ellie steps up to the Impala, turning around to lean into the steady surface. The car is still damp from rain, but she doesn't mind getting her jacket wet. Her hands bury themselves deep into pockets.

Dean goes on about the eerie disappearances, packing up as he goes along so he doesn't leave anything behind in the back alley of some apartment complex positioned in the heart of Palo Alto, California. Ellie closes her eyes and hangs her head, still following his voice. He talks about how it started happening more and more, Dad left to go check it out, and then he vanished, too. After that – as if it isn't already bad enough – Dean received a voicemail yesterday, which was enough for him to yank a sleepy and very grumpy nine-year-old girl out of bed and book it to California.

He presses play on the recording. "Dean . . . something is . . . starting to happen. I think it's serious. I need to try to figure out what's going on. It may be . . . Be very careful, Dean. Keep Ellie close. We're all in danger."

Ellie breathes roughly. Sam states, evenly, "You know, there's EVP on that,"

"Not bad, Sammy. Kind of like ridin' a bike, isn't it?"

About a year ago, a case ran overtime and they stayed in a nice neighborhood in Washington for two months. Everyday Ellie rode bikes with a messy-haired kid named Dustin. Dean knew about it and would keep an eye on the two from the window. The both of them wouldn't talk about home, but rather hobbies or what good shows were on television. And just when Ellie started to gain hope that perhaps things would level out and they could stay, John showed up, said to pack their bags, and yelled at Ellie to return the bike to the rack she stole it from weeks prior. She didn't get to say goodbye because they left in the middle of the night, but Dustin might have saw through the slits in his blinds because he was a light sleeper.

The cleaned up version of the voicemail is played:

"I can never go home."

The voice is barely there, like fog; visible yet untouchable.

Ellie opens her eyes when the trunk shuts. Dean motions for her to scoot over and he leans on the Impala next to her. The car sinks into his weight in a comforting manner. "You know, in almost two years, I've never bothered you, never asked you for a thing." It's true, Ellie knows, but it was more of a "don't-bother-Sammy-he-left-us-and-doesn't-care-anymore" kind of deal. It was walking on thin ice, they were scared of what could happen if they did come knocking at his door after the nasty retreat to Stanford, so they didn't. Until now, until Halloween of 2005, and Ellie is still afraid, so she doesn't say anything unless asked to.

She hears Sam sigh, visible and airy. He claims that he will help them find Dad. Ellie curls her mouth into a smile, she feels less alone; no one observes this action.

"But I have to get back first thing Monday," bargains Sam. Ellie shifts, palms braced flat against the sticky Impala. That's it. That's the day she will lose him. "Just wait here."

"What's first thing Monday?" asks Dean when Sam turns to head back inside his apartment Ellie never saw.

"I have an interview."

"What – a job interview? Skip it."

"It's a law school interview," Sam corrects, matter-of-factly, "and it's my whole future on a plate."

Dean bumps Ellie, mouths, "Law school . . ."

Sam huffs. "So we got a deal or not?"

Ellie doesn't think that she should have to bargain to be able to spend time with her brother, nor does she particularly like the sound of hearing about the future: law school . . . but still Sammy-less.