Chapter 10.
All is quiet. All is still. The bunker is silent, its air undisturbed, the clocks ticking away as usual. Everything is as it should be, it's clean and kept, a bit dusty but in the old antique way, not in a gross way. The halls are calm and cool, small rooms tucked away waiting to be someone's own private corner.
There is everything here for one to make a home out of. And there is proof all around that someone has done just that. There's pillows and blankets in the stuffed, leather chairs in the library. There's coffee, and flavored creamer in the fridge, there's cheap beer and expensive liquor. There is scented shampoo and Egyptian cotton towels in the bathrooms with mouthwash and floss.
In the chest of drawers there's old worn, cotton tees, somebody's long time favorites. In the closets there's coats and suits hung up...keepsake boxes shoved into their dark recesses, the owners even trying to deny their existence. There's cologne and razors on the desks beside hunter's journals, and stubs of pencils left discarded on sheets of drawing paper covered in sigils sketched by memory.
And there are pictures. Old photographs that reflect the old, deep things etched on the hearts of the residents. Better times, not so good times...pictures left folded in books, behind a lamp or radio...the bunker is finally a home. For the first time someone has come and made themselves belong. It had taken some coaxing but it had become a warm, safe, comfortable place. The Winchester's home.
It's a big building, the silence and the air can be stuffy and overwhelming sometimes. Like now. The whole place is holding its breath and the sacred silence is nearly crushing. Sam Winchester holds his fallen sibling close and his broken sobs are the only sound breaking the stillness around the two brothers.
When things happen somewhere...it changes the place. Maybe it's just in people's heads; or maybe the very land, the very wood and plaster that shapes a house feel the wrongness, the sorrow of what happens within its walls. If the bunker was alive it would have trembled for its children.
As it is, the only home either boys have ever known cradles them gently. Is silently present in this earth shattering moment. It holds its breath for them, is still in respect for them. Until Sam Winchester screams.
Screams against this reality, screams against the unfairness, the injustices of the world outside the bunker. Screams with the death like pain in his heart, screams as a piece of his soul withers and dies...screams into his brother's shoulder, muffled and terrifying, over and over and over again.
Then the bunker trembles right down to its foundation.
...tbc
(((Wrote this and it left me with some violent feels, so I thought maybe it should stand alone before the next chapter.)))